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.
Even if all Maori voted for them, they only would have 19%. That means they would still not be able to have political power.
The system is rigged, giving the huge number of colonizers an advantage over the native population. Australia has a similar problem.
As far as I can see 26% of New Zealand’s politicians identify as Maori, including the man who was Deputy Prime Minister during this haka.
Indigenous people are not monolithic.
New Zealand also has a carve out of Maori seats which is meaningful because it has proportional representation. This is what Australia could have eventually done with Indigenous Voice but there is no political appetite for it in Australia, plus the Aboriginal and Torres Straits people make up a far smaller percentage.
Regretfully, democracy can be viewed as a dictature of majority over minority. I don’t think that there can be any clear cut answer to it. As for colonizers vs colonized, how far back do you consider this should go? As in any person of european descent forever in the future will be considered colonizer instead of people born on this land?
I think as long as the colonizers maintain an economically superior position, and keep the political power, there can be no real integration.
A good democracy has checks and balances to protect minorities from mob rule /tyrrany of the majority.
That is actually what this protest is about - the ruling party wants to remove some of those legal safeguards.
New Zealand’s political system has proportional representation. Maori will most likely be in partial control after their next election.
No. If you had even the most basic theoretical background on the subject you’d know how wrong this statement is. Yet people like you dangerously believe this surface level third grade understanding of democratic systems somehow makes them an expert.
This is an extremely vague statement that focuses on me instead of showing me and people like me where exactly we are wrong. Majority rule absolutely is common denominator in most democratic systems, so show me how it isn’t.
It’s 2025, I’m not your middle school teacher, I’m not going to “show you” anything. Go learn the subject yourself, or don’t and keep repeating nonsense as if it were some deep insight, either way I’m fine.
Of course you won’t. 🤡
Thats not true at all. 19% is plenty of political power. You dont need 50% of the votes to get political power in our system. If you have 1 seat you have political power.
Well, until you conveniently get the longest suspension in history right as parliament is about to decide the budget, anyway.
Maori people arent only a single party. This is 3 MPs from a single party being temp suspended. Maori are 27% of parliament and have MPs in all majority parties. They will still be represented.
The problem is that even 27% couldn’t stop the colonizers from further destroying the nature.
I’m not sure what you are getting at with that comment.