In November 2024, three Te Pati Maori party legislators staged a protest haka in parliament against a controversial treaty bill. A New Zealand government committee has suggested that three Indigenous lawmakers be suspended from parliament for a short time for staging a protest haka last year.
The Privileges Committee suggested on Wednesday night that Te Pati Maori party co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi be suspended for 21 days. She was also urged that young representative Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, 22-year-old New Zealand’s youngest legislator, should be suspended for seven days for being “in a way likely to have the effect of intimidating a member of the House.”
But Maipi-Clarke, in the view of the committee report, received the lighter penalty as she wrote to the parliament with a letter of “contrition”. Though both Maori ceremonial dance and song, as well as haka, are not unusual in parliament, members knew that advance permission was required from the speaker beforehand, the report stated.
Last November, Maipi-Clarke disrupted parliament when she tore up a copy of a controversial race relations bill using a protest haka. Party co-leaders Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer accompanied her and marched onto the chamber floor.
The Maori party were demonstrating against the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, an attempt to redefine New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 agreement between the British Crown and Indigenous Maori leaders signed during New Zealand’s colonisation.
The bill’s critics regarded it as an effort to take away the special rights accorded to the country’s Maori people. The bill was overwhelmingly voted down last month. But the Maori party has labelled the suggestion the toughest punishment issued in the parliament of the nation, with three days the maximum amount of time a legislator has ever been excluded from the House.
“When Indigenous people push back, colonial governments reach for the maximum sentence,” the party stated, continuing, “This is a warning shot to all of us to get in line.” But Judith Collins, a governing MP who chairs the Privileges Committee and is attorney general, said it was extremely chaotic for members to disrupt a vote while it was being taken.
The right to vote without hindrance is at the very essence of being a member of parliament. It is not permissible to physically approach another member on the floor of the debating chamber,” Collins said at a news conference on Wednesday.
