Parliament voted to impose record suspensions on the trio of legislators for their protest haka.
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.
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“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.