The New Zealand Parliament has voted to impose record suspensions on three lawmakers who did a Maori haka as a protest. The incident took place last November during a debate on a law on Indigenous rights.
New Zealand’s parliament on Thursday agreed to lengthy suspensions for three lawmakers who disrupted the reading of a controversial bill last year by performing a haka, a traditional Maori dance.
Two parliamentarians — Te Pati Maori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi — were suspended for 21 days and one — Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, from the same party — for seven days.
Before now, the longest suspension of a parliamentarian in New Zealand was three days.
But that same procedure ended up defeating the bill? I’m not sure the protest really achieved much.
You can fight a bill like this in a 100 ways within parliamentary procedure. If they had announced the protest it would be allowed too I believe.
Protest is for when the procedure fails. But it worked just fine here.
Also, arguments about the protest aside, my main point was that it’s not racist to punish an unannounced disruptive protest, just because that protest happened to be a Haka.