New Zealand’s Parliament will debate suspending Māori lawmakers who performed a protest haka

Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, right, and her colleagues from Te Pāti Māori, talk to reporters following a protest inside Parliament in Wellington, New Zealand, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Charlotte Graham-McLay, File)

WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A New Zealand parliamentary committee has recommended the unprecedented suspensions of three Māori lawmakers for performing a protest haka in the debating chamber last year.

The haka is a chanting dance of challenge of great cultural importance in New Zealand, and the three lawmakers from Te Pāti Māori, the Māori party, performed one to oppose a controversial bill that would have redefined the country’s founding document.

A committee Wednesday recommended record suspensions and severe censure — the harshest penalties ever assigned to New Zealand parliamentarians — after finding the trio in contempt of Parliament.

Government bloc lawmakers, who hold the majority, are expected to endorse the penalties in a vote Tuesday. But Parliament’s Speaker Gerry Brownlee took the unusual step Thursday of saying he would first allow unlimited debate before the vote due to the severity of the proposed punishments.

The recommendations were the latest twist in the fraught saga over the bill, now defeated, that opponents said would have provoked constitutional havoc and reversed decades of progress for Māori, New Zealand’s Indigenous people.

Why were the Māori lawmakers suspended?

Video of the legislators in full cry drew global attention last November. The bill they opposed was vanquished at a second vote in April.

However, some lawmakers from the center-right government objected to the Māori Party legislators’ protest during the first vote and complained to parliament’s speaker. At issue was the way the trio walked across the floor of the debating chamber towards their opponents while they performed the haka.

“It is not acceptable to physically approach another member on the floor of the debating chamber,” Wednesday’s report said, adding that the behavior could be considered intimidating. The committee denied the legislators were being punished for the haka, which is a beloved and sacred cultural institution in New Zealand life, but “the time at and manner in which it was performed” during a vote, according to the findings.

The committee deciding the fate of the lawmakers has members from all political parties. The government’s opponents disagreed with parts or all of the decision but were overruled.

“This was a very serious incident, and the likes of which I have never seen before in my 23 years in the debating chamber,” said the committee’s chair, Judith Collins.

How did the suspended legislators respond?

The three legislators didn’t appear before the committee when summoned in April because they said Parliament doesn’t respect Māori cultural protocol and they wouldn’t get a fair hearing.

“The process was grossly unjust, unfair, and unwarranted, resulting in an extreme sanction,” Māori party spokesperson and lawmaker Mariameno Kapa-Kingi said in a statement. “This was not about process, this became personal.”

The report recommended that Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, who at 22 is New Zealand’s youngest lawmaker, be suspended from Parliament for seven days. The co-leaders of her political party, Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer, face 21-day bans.

Three days is the longest a lawmaker has been barred from the House before. Suspended legislators are not paid during their bans.

Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer, the leaders of the party that advocates Māori rights and holds six of Parliament’s 123 seats, have lambasted the committee’s process as intolerant of Māori principles and identity.

The pair received more severe sanctions than Maipi-Clarke because the younger lawmaker had written a letter of “contrition” to the committee, the report said.

Why did a proposed law provoke the protest?

The Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill sought to redefine New Zealand’s founding document, the 1840 pact between the British Crown and Māori leaders signed during New Zealand’s colonization.

The English and Māori language versions of the treaty differed, and the Crown immediately began to breach both, resulting in mass land thefts and generations of disenfranchisement for Māori, who remain disadvantaged on almost every metric. But in recent decades, Māori protest movements have wrought growing recognition of the Treaty’s promises in New Zealand’s law, politics and public life.

That produced billion-dollar land settlements with tribes and strategies to advance Indigenous language and culture. Such policies were the target of the bill, drawn up by a minor libertarian party who denounced what they said was special treatment for Māori as they tried to rewrite the treaty’s promises.

Charlotte Graham-mclay, The Associated Press