Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Te Pāti Māori and Greens have scored the campaign's first own goal

I think we might have the first significant own goal of the election campaign. It's the Mongrel Mob photos.

If you haven't caught up on this yet, you should take a look. It's blown up online. Photos have emerged showing a group of Māori Party and Green Party MPs and candidates meeting the Mongrel Mob at one of their gang pads.

In the photos, you've got Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke of the Māori Party posing with her arms around a couple of Mongrel Mob members, one of whom is, of course, Harry Tam. Māori Party co-leader Rawiri Waititi is pulling a pūkana alongside members of the gang. 

There's another photo of Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke giving a thumbs-up next to gang members. Green Party candidate Michael Moore Jones is also giving a thumbs-up, while Green MP Hūhana Lyndon is smiling for the camera as well.

And guess how we got these photos? Rawiri Waititi put them up on his Instagram account. So he obviously doesn't understand what he's just done. I mean, talk about scoring an own goal.

Now, none of this is completely surprising from these parties. The Green Party is the party of Tamatha Paul, who has publicly said she finds police threatening. And the Māori Party, even in the minor party leaders' debate, stood by its policy of shutting down all prisons in this country within the next 15 years.

So I don't think anyone will be shocked to learn that these parties may be a little more sympathetic to criminals than the average New Zealander.

But the problem with these photos is that they take policies buried deep inside a manifesto that most people would never read and turn them into something people can immediately see and understand: politicians posing with members of the Mongrel Mob.

These photos are probably not as much of a problem for the Māori Party and the Greens as they are for the Labour Party. Labour is more likely to attract a higher proportion of middle New Zealand voters, many of whom will hate the sight of this. The prospect of Labour forming some sort of soft-on-crime, give-money-to-the-gangs coalition will alarm them.

In an election this close, and we know it is this close because the polls keep telling us so, this was a mistake the Greens and the Māori Party did not need to make.

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