By Angela Beswick
Mana Party leader Hone Harawira is confident he will have no trouble getting noticed, despite holding just one seat in Parliament.
Speaking on TV3’s The Nation this morning, Mr Harawira faced questioning over how he will make sure his voice is heard, particularly in a Parliament where charismatic NZ First leader Winston Peters and his party hold eight seats.
“You don’t seriously believe I’m going to have a problem with visibility do you?” Mr Harawira said. “Winston is no competition.”
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But Mr Harawira would not rule out an alliance with Peters, who this morning described the National Party as “dripping with money”.
“I think he too [Winston] doesn’t believe that focussing on putting a whole lot of money into the hands of a very small minority is an intelligent option,” he said.
“I think there is room for us to work on some common ideas.”
Mr Harawira’s Mana Party took just 1 percent of the vote in Saturday’s election, taking the same number of seats as United Future and ACT.
He said he is “never satisfied” but is “okay” with how his party performed in the polls.
“We didn’t have any money, so we just went as hard as we could and came out with what we came out with.
“I’m comfortable with where things went and how we did.”
Mr Harawira, who quit the Maori Party to form Mana earlier this year, has some advice for his former co-leaders Pita Sharples and Tariana Turia.
“They should be sticking with where their people are at. Eighty percent of our people live in the 60 percent at the bottom of the economy – I don’t think we’ve got anybody at the top,” he said.
“Hanging out with the people who are going to make the 1 percenters even more rich is probably not what Maori people want them to be doing.”
Mr Harawira wants to use the next three years to “wage a war on poverty and to get as many people in this country thinking about how we do that”.
“Poverty is probably the biggest [issue] for us right now – child poverty in particular. We address that, we send a signal to the world that we are a society that actually recognises its primary obligations.”
3 News