What a circus this whole Maori Party fandango has become. That said, you don't have to like Hone Harawira, admire his inflammatory rhetoric or agree with a single thing he says to acknowledge that he and others like him play an essential part in our parliamentary democracy.

And perhaps the sooner people get their heads around that contention, the sooner we can dispense with the overheated indignation, the squawking of bruised egos, the caterwauling of the prophets of political doom and the nakedly partial pundits who rise up on their hind legs, beat their chests and greet the rebel MP's every utterance as if he were the devil incarnate.

Let's pursue that line of thought for a moment: the overheated indignation et cetera. For starters, what on earth did they all expect? Hone Harawira has been an outspoken orator and activist for disaffected Maori since the year dot.

Was he supposed to enter Parliament and change his spots overnight? Despite his intemperate language and swagger, he is at least flinging mud from inside the system rather than fomenting resentment, ugly protest and even leading potentially violent clashes at the head of mobs of radical young Maori from without.

He has remained true to his views - and, incidentally, so it appears, those of the electorate Te Tai Tokerau that sent him to Wellington - but has simply directed those through the channels of our formal political apparatus.

To paraphrase Voltaire, we may not like what he says, but we should defend his right to say it. He is an elected member of Parliament. He has a genuine constituency. He is an embodiment of a diverse, inclusive secular democracy in action.

So why all the upset?

Well it - Hone's shtick - is all just so inconvenient. For one thing, it could be said he is a constant reminder to his colleagues in the Maori Party of just how far the party has strayed from former core values in supporting the coalition Government of which it is a part: it sits at the table of government and sups from the cup of power at the expense, for instance, of Maori arguably further disadvantaged by the various pieces of antisocial legislation it has supported.

Mr Harawira, in this election year, is also an unwelcome embodiment of the inherent instability of the National Government's critical coalition partner - and thus, despite the enduring popularity of leader John Key - of the potential fragility of its widely touted second term.

In some respects, too, National's own compromises in accommodating those concessions it has made to the Maori Party have alienated some of its own supporters. The Marine and Coastal Areas Bill, for example, sticks in the craw of many National supporters who now find themselves having common cause over this issue with Mr Harawira - albeit for entirely different reasons.

There has been much talk about the last, best chance for a Maori Party, threatened as it is with implosion by the suspension and potential expulsion of one of its own: talk of ill-discipline and failure to toe the party line, refusal to adhere to the usual position of collective responsibility and so on, but just how much of it really comes down to matters of ego and mana rather than irresolvable issues?

Arguably, it was mana that instigated the irreparable schism between Tariana Turia and the Labour Party. of which she had been a member when it passed the Foreshore and Seabed Act.

It was mana that took Mrs Turia and Pita Sharples to the governing table with Mr Key: being listened to, treated with the respect that perhaps they felt they hadn't had elsewhere, and promised genuine influence. Some of that has undoubtedly come to pass - whanau ora social delivery programmes, for example - but at what cost?

And it is mana that is now perpetuating a rift within the Maori Party.

If Mr Harawira has a certain way with words, much of it he doubtless learnt at the feet of his mother, Titewhai.

At the weekend, she poured gasoline on to the pyre by labelling Dr Sharples a "gutless dog" and "spineless". Neither was she short of contempt for Mrs Turia. None of it helps in any way other than to deepen the rifts.

But to come back to Mr Harawira: he is the safety valve in the pressure cooker of our political life. By expressing the viewpoints of a disaffected minority, he defuses potentially more radical and dangerous responses.

And if, in the end, the cost of that is a little rearrangement in the Maori Party, or even the precise make-up of government, isn't that exactly what a democracy is supposed to be about?

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