Wellington: New Zealand legislators voted Thursday to enact record suspensions from Parliament for three lawmakers who performed a Maori haka to protest a proposed law.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke received a seven-day ban and the leaders of her political party, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, were barred for 21 days. Three days had been the longest ban for a lawmaker from New Zealand’s Parliament before.
The lawmakers from Te Pati Maori, the Maori Party, performed the haka, a chanting dance of challenge, in November to oppose a widely unpopular bill, now defeated, that they said would reverse Indigenous rights. The protest drew global headlines and provoked months of fraught debate among lawmakers about what the consequences for the lawmakers’ actions should be and the place of Maori culture in Parliament.
A committee of the lawmakers’ peers in April recommended the lengthy bans. It said the lawmakers were not being punished for the haka, but for striding across the floor of the debating chamber toward their opponents while doing it.
Judith Collins, the committee chair, said the lawmakers’ behaviour was egregious, disruptive and potentially intimidating.
Maipi-Clarke, 22, rejected that description Thursday, citing other instances when legislators have left their seats and approached opponents without sanction. The suspended legislators said they are being treated more harshly than others because they are Maori.
“I came into this house to give a voice to the voiceless. Is that the real issue here?” Maipi-Clarke asked Parliament. “Is that the real intimidation here? Are our voices too loud for this house?”