full text
New Zealand parliament suspends Maori MPs who performed protest haka
Published On 5 Jun 2025
New Zealand legislators have voted to suspend three MPs who performed a Maori haka in the House to protest against a controversial bill.
The MPs from Te Pati Maori – the Maori Party – were handed the toughest sanctions ever imposed on legislators by New Zealand’s parliament on Thursday.
Te Pati Maori co-leaders Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer were both suspended from parliament for 21 days.
Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, New Zealand’s youngest legislator, 22, was suspended for seven days.
The length of the bans was recommended by parliament’s privileges committee, which advised the trio should be suspended for acting in “a manner that could have the effect of intimidating a member of the House”.
It recommended Maipi-Clarke be given a shorter sanction because she had written a letter of “contrition” to the parliament.
Previously, the longest suspension imposed on an MP had been a three-day ban.
Prior to Thursday’s vote, Maipi-Clarke told legislators that the suspension was an effort to stop Maori from making themselves heard in parliament. Advertisement
“Are our voices too loud for this house? Is that the reason why we are being silenced?” she said. “We will never be silenced and we will never be lost.”
The legislators had performed the haka in parliament in November. Their protest interrupted voting during the first reading of a proposed bill to legally define the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi, the 1840 pact between the British Crown and Indigenous Maori leaders signed during New Zealand’s colonisation.
The proposed law prompted widespread protests amid concerns it would erode Maori rights. It was later scrapped.
Maipi-Clarke had begun the protest by ripping a copy of the legislation, before she and fellow MPs approached the leader of the right-wing party that had backed the proposed law.
Their actions prompted complaints from fellow MPs to the parliament’s speaker that their protest was disorderly, and the matter was sent to parliament’s privileges committee, prompting months of debate.
A report from the privileges committee said that while both haka and Maori ceremonial dance and song are not uncommon in parliament, members were aware that permission was needed from the speaker beforehand.
It’s going to be incredibly unlikely that Maori win this one within the liberal system. Waitangi has no real juice over any other treaty that has been ignored and broken. Waitangi was also seemingly written in bad faith where the interpretation of the remaining English and Maori sections differs significantly. The Maori didn’t have an understanding of Western legalistc concepts of governorship and sovereignty at the time.
The reality is that there’s a real legalistic argument that Waitangi is inadmissible/non-binding on the NZ government. Waitangi isn’t even popular in New Zealand, it’s currently polling around 38%. The Waitangi Tribunal is politically on its last legs because it effectively is a highly visible political organization that opposes capital, it also has no actual binding powers so it’s up to the good libs of New Zealand in reality, which is what happened when the Waitangi Tribunal found that Maori own the rights to the shores and seabeds of NZ. The libs just said nah.
I should’ve made it more clear I’m talking about the near future, in 10 years time this stranglehold the libs have will either be broken or weakened and 10 more years after that the entire liberal order on the planet will start to dissolve
Unless New Zealand libs want to go full Israel, it’s inevitable
“grassroots organising and militancy” doesn’t really sound like an endorsement of trying to “win this one within the liberal system” to me tbh but I could be wrong;)
The Maori aren’t organizing a revolution they’re organizing politically within the system. They also have an advantage of sorts with Maori electorates. However these are consistently at risk of being reformed out of the NZ electoral system. Maori participation in parliament has consistently been growing, but they’re 26% of Parliament and 17% of the population, so in terms of representative population mix, they’re over-represented arguably.
Fair.
yeah a big problem right now is that a lot of Maori parties are in a no-win political situation because the lib system was always going to defeat them, in the same way it unfairly defeated other indigenous movements. Essentially the passing of a practical Treaty Principles Bill is going to be a loss, because the Treaty is interpreted in a way that says Maori have sovereignty, which is impractical for a parliamentary government, same way the shore issue was impractical for a capitalist propertarian system.