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.
What!? But that haka was awesome! How can you not enjoy that?
There are many enjoyable things that are not appropriate to do in parliament.
While I personally don’t see how performing haka is constructive to include in a debate about the bill, I think it’s unrelated to the discussion about what is or is not appropriate in the debating chamber.
A vote was suspended and two lawmakers were ejected after the lawmakers performed a haka ceremonial dance in the parliament. The people in the gallery joined in, and the shouting drowned out the voices of others in the chamber.
Seems like it functioned exactly as intended. Power to the People.
Burning down the houses of parliament would also suspend voting on the bill. Do the ends justify the means?
The bill is now suspended; is the strategy to keep performing hakas to continuously silence members of parliament? The risk is that the next time, when the opposition wants to influence a bill, they also create a circus in the debate chamber. That is not a democratic process.
I acknowledge the downvotes without any discourse. If you’d like to see how this actually unfolded, here’s some context.
I’m curious to see how proponents of this behaviour would support the other side of the aisle perform similar theatrics.