A week ago, Judith Collins made an epic mistake live on RNZ Morning Report.
Although interviewer Corin Dann seemed to sense something was wrong, he didn’t correct her.
Collins is the chair of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee, the one currently demanding the suspension of three MPs who protested the Treaty Principles Bill by performing a haka in the House. The usual penalty for behaviour like this is an apology, the punishment received by Labour MP Peeni Henare for the same haka.
In an unusually polarised decision, Privileges Committee coalition MPs voted for Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke to be suspended for seven days – her second punishment for the same protest. The co-leaders of Te Pāti Māori, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, were each hit with 21-day suspensions. These three proposed penalties are by some stretch the harshest for ‘contempt’ in New Zealand parliamentary history.
If adopted by the House, Te Pāti Māori co-leaders will lose more than $8k each, says legal blogger Graeme Edgeler. They would also lose the right to represent their vast constituency for one of the most important events of the parliamentary year – the budget debate.
“Were the decision unanimous, or at least accompanied by support from opposition parties other than Te Pāti Māori, it might more closely resemble a consensus about how to punish rule-breaking,” writes Marc Daalder in Newsroom. “Instead, it looks vindictive and – with the timing before Budget Day – opportunistic.”
Another word also springs to mind.
During his RNZ interview, Dann asked Collins: “… you are saying that a key factor here was that… their actions were trying to prevent MPs from voting?”
Collins: “Well, they did… after Te Pāti Māori had exercised their right to vote, they then stopped the ACT Party from exercising theirs.”
It was left to another RNZ journalist to reveal Collins’ jaw-dropping error. Phil Smith, editor of RNZ’s The House, is a specialist with a deep understanding of the debating chamber.
By the time the MPs were performing their haka, Smith explained, ACT had already voted.
“Every party had voted before Te Pāti Māori did. As the smallest party in Parliament, Te Pāti Māori is always the last to be called on for their vote”.
With 23 years in the debating chamber, it isn’t credible that Collins didn’t know that.
In other words, the chair of the Parliamentary Privileges Committee inadvertently revealed a shocking mistake: the most punitive penalties for contempt in the history of New Zealand’s Parliament were based on events which never took place.
“The committee report now appears partisan, indefensible and open to attacks of racism,” says RNZ’s Smith.
In his ever-fascinating blog Edgelered, legal eagle Edgeler suggests that government MPs on the committee were provoked by tikanga.
“The actions of the Te Pati Māori co-leaders here suggest they consider their actions not merely justified by, but perhaps even compelled by tikanga. This implies – in a way distinctly different from previous matters before the Privileges Committee – that specific deterrence is called for.”
Ironically, Maipi-Clarke, Ngarewa-Packer and Waititi are being punished for their passionate commitment to the bedrock of New Zealand law, the Treaty of Waitangi.
Professor Alex Frame, author of a textbook on Māori customary law, describes the importance of Te Tiriti to New Zealand this way: “What the Crown acquired from the Treaty of Waitangi was a sovereignty qualified and limited by the treaty itself.” Article 2 of the treaty specifically protects Māori rangatiratanga: chiefly authority and self-determination rooted in tikanga.
The MPs were protesting a brazen attack on Māori rights condemned by two former Prime Ministers and hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders. The beauty of Maipi-Clarke’s haka in the debating chamber was admired by millions around the globe and watched more than 700 million times. A month after her protest, she was included on the BBC’s 100 Women list.
The protestors use of the distinctive choreography of tikanga Māori is what made its message so clear to New Zealanders – in fact, to any primary-age New Zealand child.
But not, apparently, to the government majority on the Parliamentary Privileges Committee, who saw nothing but ‘a lack of civility’. Requests by Te Pāti Māori to remedy this by allowing an expert to explain the protest’s use of tikanga, or for legal counsel to make arguments on tikanga, were denied.
During the RNZ interview, Collins insisted to Dann that “this is not about haka, this is not about tikanga”.
Of course this case is ‘about’ tikanga.
It was the very language of a protest to uphold the nation’s right to cherish and use tikanga. The protest was ‘about tikanga’ in every conceivable sense.
Calling this haka ‘intimidatory’ is not only ridiculously offensive, it mocks Article 2 of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, displaying a profound ignorance of the very document the coalition government says it understands enough to destroy. • Jenny Nicholls
