Cook Islands News columnist Thomas Tarurongo Wynne.
Tangiia and Karika came as rivals and chose to share Rarotonga. Centuries later, Teariki Heather and George “Maggie” Angene have ended a decade-long feud to share an Opposition bench, writes Thomas Tarurongo Wynne.
Long before parties, manifestos or a Parliament of 24 seats, Rarotonga learned what it means for rivals to share a shore.
Our tupuna tell the story of Tangiia and Karika. In many accounts, Tangiia left Tahiti after a bitter break with Tutapu, while Karika came from Manu’a in Samoa. The two navigators met as strangers, and some say as adversaries. Yet rather than fight to the last over Rarotonga, they came to an understanding and fought together, and their descendants are woven through the vaka of Takitumu and Te Au o Tonga to this day. Some tellings say Tutapu’s pursuit of Tangiia ended on Rarotonga; others say Karika later returned to Manu’a. What many agree on is that necessity, more than affection, first brought these men to the same side.
Then, such contests were settled with vaka and weapons of war. Today they are settled with words, votes and political allegiance. The lesson has not changed.
Last Thursday in Nikao, that old lesson sat down in two chairs. Cook Islands United Party leader Teariki Heather and Independent Manihiki MP George “Maggie” Angene, men who had not seen eye to eye for almost a decade, sat side by side and shared a laugh at the opening of the interim Office of the Leader of the Opposition. Cook Islands News reported the feud as over.
For the people of Manihiki, who petitioned the Prime Minister to keep their newly elected member in Cabinet, and for every voter on Rarotonga who has watched these two men trade blows over the years, the picture raises an old question. When rivals become allies, how long will this relationship of political convenience last?
The Opposition now works from an interim office on Heather’s own Nikao property, rented by Parliament after a conflict of interest was declared. It is a small house for a crowded room. Two vaka, long apart, have drawn up on the same beach.
Our political history reads like a long voyage in which crews change vaka mid-ocean. Where the understanding between Tangiia and Karika is remembered across generations, many of the alliances that followed lasted barely a season.
Angene’s own journey traces the pattern: elected for the Cook Islands Party in 2010, expelled in 2014, returned to its Cabinet in 2018, re-elected under its banner in 2022, and expelled again this year. Convenience, it seems, is not the property of any one side of the House, and few of these vaka stayed lashed together for long.
If one man embodies that change and allegiances, it is Norman George. A lawyer and former police officer from Atiu, he entered Parliament for the Democrats in 1983 and, over the next three decades, quit, founded and rejoined parties repeatedly over leadership and Cabinet disputes. His journey through many coalitions shows that convenience can build a long and dutiful political career.
Few people know how to sail these currents better than Atiu Warrior Norman George, former speaker, deputy prime minister and cabinet minister, and a man who has himself sailed under several party flags. Before August’s election he argued that independents were replacing the traditional parties. “Political parties are not eaten up, but ignored, written off or completely abandoned,” he said. Heather disagreed at the time, saying independents posed no threat to United.
The results gave both men something to point to. The Democratic Party was shut out of Parliament for the first time in its 54-year history, independents won in several electorates, and several of them then chose a party to sit with. Earlier, a Democratic Party president had told this paper that people were fed up with coalitions and party hopping. Parties have tried loyalty pledges and lawmakers have talked of anti-hopping legislation, yet the practice endures.
Perhaps that is because, in a Parliament of 24 seats, a single member can decide who governs. Is our system built for parties at all, or for people and the deals they make?
Reconciliation is no small thing, and our tupuna knew it when two vaka chose one island. In our culture, the putting down of old grievances between two leaders, face to face, carries weight, and the people of Rarotonga and Manihiki may well welcome the sight of these two men laughing together.
But the precedents invite questions every voter is entitled to ask. Because Karika did not stay. He sailed home to Manu’a, and the island he had shared went on without him.
If our political history is any guide, the alliances made in our Parliament have more often been marriages of convenience than a weaving of hearts and minds, and convenience has a way of ending when the tide turns.