Parliament votes to enact punishment after hours of fraught debate including attitudes towards Māori culture

New Zealand legislators have voted to enact record parliamentary suspensions for three MPs who performed a Māori haka to protest against a controversial proposed law.

Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke received a seven-day ban and the leaders of her political party, Te Pāti Māori (the Māori party), Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, were barred for 21 days. Three days had previously been the longest ban for a New Zealand MP.

The Te Pāti Māori MPs performed the haka, a chanting dance of challenge, last November to oppose a widely unpopular bill, now defeated, that they said would reverse Indigenous rights.

The protest drew global headlines and ignited months of fraught debate among lawmakers about what the consequences should be and whether New Zealand’s parliament valued Māori culture or felt threatened by it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/05/new-zealand-mps-who-performed-haka-in-parliament-given-record-suspensions

Posted by Naurgul

6 comments

  1. As soon as I saw the videos of this haka going viral my immediate thoughts were among the lines of ‘okay that’s cool if you want to go viral and trend, but not so much for making a point during a debate in parliament amid elected officials’.

  2. If parliament actually had decorum and didn’t just boil down to shouting and behaving like children this might have reason but Haka is more noble and honorable than most of what is said/done there anyway.

  3. It’s apparent that not a single person commenting in this thread knows anything about NZ politics, or Maori culture. The bills didn’t pass, it was never going to pass, which means NZ’s indigenous population will continue to enjoy privileges bestowed upon them by judges interpreting a 180yo document.

  4. >goes into parliament
    >yells a bunch and makes a disturbance
    >gets kicked out

    How is this surprising to anyone? If I can’t do that neither can she, seems like a nothingburger news story other then it’s kinda funny

  5. I thought what she did was great. She is full of spirit and stands for her people. She made an excellent point of her people’s sovereignty and should not be censured. This is white supremacy.

  6. Lots of people missing the point due to lack of context. And to be clear, Parliament and the Government are two very different institutions. Parliament is an apolitical institution. Its role is not a weapon for the Government of the day. In this instance, the current Government has weaponised a politically neutral institution to hand a record ban to Te Pāti MāorI MPs for something that simply has never historically merited this extreme of a punishment.

    The current Deputy Prime Minister drove a fucking Range Rover onto the steps of Parliament *despite being told explicitly not to beforehand*, and received absolutely no punishment from Parliament, and Police decided not to charge him with an actual crime.

    They had a *3 hour debate* over a 3 week suspension, and in it, the Acting Prime Minister referred to their face tattoos as “face scribbles”. Language like “savage” was deployed repeatedly during the debate. The Speaker of the House noted that this punishment is unprecedented before the debate.

    This was never about the haka. This is about this current Government weaponising our democratic processes in bad faith to go after their political opponents in a way that’s nakedly racist.

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