New Zealand Maori Lawmakers Give World Best Political Moment Of 2024

Bask in it.

MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke tears a copy of the offending bill apart as she chants a haka in protest. Video screenshot, The Print on YouTube.

Maori lawmakers in New Zealand’s Parliament disrupted proceedings in the best possible way Thursday, in protest of a bill that sought to fundamentally undermine indigenous rights that Maori people have spent decades fighting to have recognized. During a routine roll call, MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was asked how her Te Pāti Māori party would vote on the bill, she began singing a haka, a traditional Maori challenge chant, and tore up a copy of the bill. Other Maori MPs joined in, as did spectators in the gallery while other lawmakers stood in support. (That particular haka is not performed by non-indigenous people.) It was freaking beautiful.

By bringing the session’s business to a raucous, joyfully defiant halt, the protest resulted in a brief suspension of Parliament, a one-day suspension for Maipi-Clarke, and worldwide attention to the attempt to roll back progress in a nation that has become a model for taking indigenous rights seriously.

Here’s video of the best breach of protocol since three Tennessee Democrats briefly interrupted that state’s House last year with a call to protect kids from gun violence in schools. We like the part where Speaker Gerry Brownlee sits there looking all doughy and frumpy before calling a recess.

Somewhere on the cosmic plane, the spirit of John Lewis smiled and said “That’s good trouble.”

The protest in Parliament was only part of a wave of opposition to a move by a fringe rightwing party to impose new restrictions on how the country’s founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, is interpreted. The treaty’s language formally recognized Maori people as equal partners in the nation, but for most of the country’s history that was largely ignored by British colonizers and the white-dominated governments that followed.

The indigenous rights movement of the 1970s brought new attention to what the treaty actually said, and led to reforms that have improved Maori political representation and land reforms, including guaranteed representation in Parliament, local Maori governments following traditional practices for resolving disputes, measures to preserve the Maori language and include it in official documents and place names, and the 1975 creation of a national Waitangi Tribunal that issues advisory opinions on national matters, although those opinions aren’t binding on the national government.

Such changes have even resulted in the recognition of a river and a forest as having the same rights as people under the law, but thanks to systemic discrimination and structural inequality, Maori people still live shorter lives, have more health problems, and are more likely to be incarcerated than non-Maori New Zealanders. (See this excellent piece for an in-depth discussion of just how completely the modern vision of the Treaty of Waitangi has affected New Zealand culture and politics — for the better, including for non-Maori citizens.)

But you just can’t seem to get away from rightwing revanchism these days, so of course there’s a far-Right party, ACT New Zealand, that wants to undo progress in the name of “equality.” That's why ACT leader David Seymour, who’s Maori himself, says he introduced the bill to impose a standard, limited framework for interpreting the Treaty of Waitangi much more narrowly. Seymour offered a familiar rightwing whine to the Associated Press, complaining that “What all of these principles have in common is that they afford Māori different rights from other New Zealanders.”

That sort of “color blind” — sorry, “colour blind” — bullshit has won the favour of rightwingers, including the conservative National Party, which allied with ACT and other small parties to create a center-right majority in Parliament after last year’s elections. The new government has rolled back what it calls “race-based policies” it doesn’t like, such as

a law giving Māori a say on environmental questions and is set to repeal another designed to help Māori children in state care stay connected to their culture and family.

Māori language in the public service has been wound back and the Māori Health Authority has been abolished.

However, even the National Party has distanced itself from ACT’s bill, insisting that it had only agreed to hold Thursday’s “first reading” of the measure because that was part of the deal to get ACT into the coalition, and pledging to vote it down in the next stage of consideration, as The New York Times explains (gift link):

“You do not go and negate, with a single stroke of a pen, 184 years of debate and discussion with a bill that I think is very simplistic,” Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told reporters on Thursday ahead of the first reading.

Mr. Luxon, who belongs to the National Party, said he wanted the bill to be voted down in the second reading.

Even so, the AP reports, conservative lawmakers were jeered by the opposition in Parliament when they gave speeches explaining they opposed the bill but had to support it because that was the deal, nothing personal. Luxon himself didn’t have to deal with the mess because he’d already left for an APEC summit in Lima, Peru, before the vote, leaving behind his party colleagues to take the much-deserved heat.

“Shame! Shame! Shame on you, David Seymour,” roared Willie Jackson, a veteran Māori lawmaker. “Shame on you for what you’re trying to do to this nation.”

Jackson was thrown out of the debating chamber by Speaker Gerry Brownlee for calling Seymour a liar.

“You are complicit in the harm and the division that this presents,” said Rawiri Waititi, a lawmaker from Te Pāti Māori, an Indigenous group, speaking to all who advanced the bill.

The debate was followed by the roll call — by party, not by individual MP — and Maipi-Clarke’s protest, and hey let’s enjoy another video of that, which includes more views of Brownlee rolling his eyes and looking like a stuffy sack of cake flour:

This is wonderful, but we also would warn American Democratic lawmakers to please not attempt to emulate it exactly, not only because it’d be cultural appropriation but mostly because it would look silly for an American. But please, let us all seek to be disruptive in our own vernacular instead, whether it be deadpan humor or the glorious shade thrown by Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas).

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Enjoy National Treasure Jasmine Crockett Dragging Project 2025ers For Filth

Well Sheeeit Y'all, House Oversight Committee Got In A Actual Jasmine Crockett-And-AOC-On-Marjorie Taylor Greene Catfight!

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[AP / NYT (gift link) / World Politics Review / ABC News (the Australian one) ]

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