New Zealand legislators suspended three members from Parliament on Thursday for performing a Māori haka in protest of a planned law.
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, the leaders of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s political party, were banned for 21 days, while Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke was banned for seven days.
The previous longest ban for a member of the New Zealand Parliament was three days.
The Māori Party’s Te Pāti Māori legislators opposed a hugely unpopular bill that they claimed would erase Indigenous rights last November by performing the haka, a chanting dance of challenge. The bill has since been rejected.
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But the protest drew global headlines and provoked months of fraught debate among lawmakers about what the consequences for the lawmakers’ actions should be and whether New Zealand’s Parliament welcomed or valued Māori culture — or felt threatened by it.
A committee of the lawmakers’ peers in April recommended the lengthy punishments in a report that said the lawmakers were not being punished for the haka itself, but for striding across the floor of the debating chamber towards their opponents while they did it.
It was expected that the suspensions would be approved, because government parties have more seats in Parliament than the opposition and had the necessary votes to affirm them.
But the punishment was so severe that Parliament Speaker Gerry Brownlee in April ordered a free-ranging debate among lawmakers and urged them to attempt to reach a consensus on what repercussions were appropriate.
No such agreement was achieved Thursday. During hours of sometimes passionate remarks, government lawmakers rejected opposition suggestions for easing sanctions.
There were rumors that opposition politicians might prolong the debate for days or even weeks with filibuster-style remarks, but with the outcome already known and no one’s mind changed, all lawmakers agreed that the debate should finish.
