Dear Editor, The Mana Movement speaks today not on behalf of any party, any candidate, or any political interest. We speak on behalf of the ordinary people of these islands, the fishermen and farmers, the nurses and teachers, the families in the Pa Enua and the households of Rarotonga who go to the poll’s election after election with genuine hope, and who deserve better than what they are being offered in 2026. The post Letter: A call for change appeared first on Cook Islands News .
#### Dear Editor, The Mana Movement speaks today not on behalf of any party, any candidate, or any political interest. We speak on behalf of the ordinary people of these islands, the fishermen and farmers, the nurses and teachers, the families in the Pa Enua and the households of Rarotonga who go to the poll’s election after election with genuine hope, and who deserve better than what they are being offered in 2026. We say this plainly: the Cook Islands Party may not deserve another term, but the failure of those who should have made its removal possible means our people will likely give it one anyway. Not out of faith or out of a deep sense of satisfaction. But because they have been left with no credible alternative, and that is a betrayal of our democracy as serious as any act of misgovernance. Sixteen years is a long time in any democracy. Long enough for the habits of power to calcify into something uglier: the assumption that governing and owning are the same thing. The Cook Islands Party has not been in government long enough to have forgotten what opposition felt like, it has been in government long enough to treat our peoples voice, and the opposition as an inconvenience rather than anything legitimate. Our people feel this. They feel it in the water tariffs imposed on households paying for water quality that has not improved. They feel it in the pattern of project spending that follows political geography rather than genuine need. They feel it in the conversations that happen in every community across these islands. The quiet understanding that access to government, to contracts, to decisions, flows more easily to those who are known, who are connected, who voted the right way. They feel it in the same Cook Islands Party stalwarts getting jobs, roles, contract and postings internally and externally. That is what nepotism looks like in a small island democracy. Not always dramatic. Not always provable in a court of law. But present, and felt, and corroding the trust that democratic governance depends on. And exposed when two government officials and a Minister are given jail terms. Endemic of the rot, we all see but have not been able to speak on. And endemic of an opposition so bereft of courage our fortitude, it seems to agree with the government more than opposes it. The Mana Movement does not make these accusations lightly. We make them because we have listened. Because our people have spoken to us in Rarotonga, in Aitutaki, in Atiu, in Mangaia, in the Northern Group and the same words come back: we are tired of being governed by people who have stopped listening. We are tired of a government that mistakes longevity for legitimacy. We are equally direct about the Democratic Party. This movement has no loyalty to any party, and we will not soften our words here out of misplaced solidarity with a party that once claimed to speak for our people as a credible alternative. The Democratic Party was built by our tupuna for one purpose: to give the people of the Cook Islands a choice. Dick Brown the first voice and leader of an opposition and grandfather to our current PM, was not a Cook Islands Party supporter. In 1971 they had Tom Davis and those who stood with him created something from nothing, a voice, a vehicle, an alternative. For decades it honoured that purpose. It gave us Prime Ministers, Cabinet Ministers, and women of the calibre of Ngamau Munokoa, who rose to become the first female Deputy Prime Minister of this country and who carried the Nikao-Panama seat for her people through four elections before the party around her collapsed so completely it could no longer protect even her. What happened to that party? It turned inward. It prioritised its own feuds over its people’s interests. It imploded in 2009 and 2010 in a cabinet implosion so destructive that senior MPs, former leaders, former presidents refused to stand under its banner. It arrived at the 2018 election having won 11 seats, the largest single party, and still it could not form a government instead fighting amongst themselves while the Cook Islands Party negotiated the numbers to govern. And under Tina Browne it has gone from 11 seats to five, while the parliamentary expense records show her in the top five highest-spending traveller in Parliament outside of the Prime Minister himself. The Mana Movement asks: what has that travel produced? What policy has been shaped, what coalition has been built, what vision for the Cook Islands has been articulated that has moved a single vote in Rarotonga? The results speak for themselves. One Rarotonga seat in 2022. One. On the Island that was once the Democratic heartland. Now, as candidates drain toward the United Party, drawn by its energy, its Rarotonga credibility, and the arrival of figures like Elizabeth Iro, the former WHO Chief Nursing Officer who returns from Geneva to contest Titikaveka with more international standing than the Democratic Party can collectively muster. Dr Teina Rongo departing the Democratic seat of RAPPA also for the United Party. The party is losing not just seats but the people who might have filled them. That is not decline. That is dissolution. _A group of Cook Islands professionals, researchers, former politicians, policy advisors, lawyers, doctors, mammas, papas, and community leaders_
