Last Updated: June 05, 2025, 15:34 IST
Inside and outside Parliament, the haka has increasingly been welcomed as an important part of New Zealand life. New Zealand legislators voted Thursday to enact record suspensions from Parliament for three lawmakers. (Image: AP)
New Zealand legislators voted Thursday to enact record suspensions from Parliament for three lawmakers who performed a Māori haka to protest a proposed law.
Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke received a seven-day ban and the leaders of her political party, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi, were barred for 21 days. Three days had been the longest ban for a lawmaker from New Zealand’s Parliament before.
Recommended Stories The lawmakers from Te Pāti Māori, the Māori Party, performed the haka, a chanting dance of challenge, in November to oppose a widely unpopular bill, now defeated, that they said would reverse Indigenous rights.
The protest drew global headlines and provoked months of fraught debate among lawmakers about what the consequences for the lawmakers’ actions should be and the place of Māori culture in Parliament.
A committee of the lawmakers’ peers in April recommended the lengthy bans. It said the lawmakers were not being punished for the haka, but for striding across the floor of the debating chamber toward their opponents while doing it.
Judith Collins, the committee chair, said the lawmakers’ behavior was egregious, disruptive and potentially intimidating.
Maipi-Clarke, 22, rejected that description Thursday, citing other instances when legislators have left their seats and approached opponents without sanction. The suspended legislators said they are being treated more harshly than others because they are Māori.
“I came into this house to give a voice to the voiceless. Is that the real issue here?” Maipi-Clarke asked Parliament. “Is that the real intimidation here? Are our voices too loud for this house?”
Inside and outside Parliament, the haka has increasingly been welcomed as an important part of New Zealand life. The sacred chant can be a challenge to the viewer but is not violent.
As Māori language and culture have become part of mainstream New Zealand in recent years, haka appear in a range of cultural, somber and celebratory settings. They also have rung out in Parliament to welcome the passage of high-profile laws.
Some who decried the protest haka in Parliament cited its timing, with Maipi-Clarke beginning the chant as votes were being tallied and causing a brief suspension of proceedings. She has privately apologized for the disruption to Parliament’s Speaker, she said Thursday.
A few lawmak
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