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.
Yeah, and it’s pretty well established that protest has a cost for it’s participants.
I agree. That’s why it’s called “having the courage of one’s convictions”. The people who are protesting are willing to accept the consequences of their actions in order to shake up the system.
But when the system makes up and applies consequences retroactively, it starts a very slippery dilemma where a person can’t protest for fear of “hypothetical” repercussions.
You can’t have the courage of your convictions if you don’t know what the consequences of those convictions are going to be. And you can’t know what the consequences of your actions will be if they’re just made up ex post facto and applied punitively in order to stifle debate rather than following an already established protocol.
As far as I know, this is pretty standard for that level of disruption and (by the design of a haka) invective towards another member of the house. If they had been suspended for more than a few weeks it’d be fishy, but they will be back. And hopefully it’s a political victory for them and not the closet racists they were responding to.
That looks like it was for the content of a statement Robert Muldoon delivered alone in 1987, though. It’s not really the same thing.
(I did miss that bit of context, though. Oops, sorry)