Te Pāti Māori MPs Rawiri Waititi, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer. (Photo: RNZ Mark Papali’i)

Parliament’s decision last week to confirm the unprecedented punishments handed out to Te Pāti Māori MPs for performing a haka in protest at the Treaty principles bill, underscores the need for a different way of making decisions, writes Professor Dominic O’Sullivan, including that we should avoid making decisions until we understand one another.

When parliament’s Privileges Committee recommended suspending three Te Pāti Māori members over their haka performance, the Speaker, Gerry Brownlee, told the House that the length of the suspensions would be unprecedented — a warning to be cautious and to raise the issue above party politics. There were bigger issues at play than the haka, which are regularly performed in parliament, and are a legitimate form of political expression.

Parliament ignored the warning and suspended the party’s co-leaders for 21 days.

Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, who had already been suspended for 24 hours immediately after leading the haka as the vote was taken to refer the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill to a select committee, was suspended for a further seven days. Before this, the longest suspension was for three days for undermining the authority of the Speaker.

About 280,000 submissions were made against the bill. Their consistent argument was that the bill undermined Te Tiriti o Waitangi and was intended to make the agreement as close to irrelevant as possible.

It came alongside numerous government measures to limit Māori cultural expression and distinctiveness in public life. For example, measures to restrict the use of the Māori language in the public service, to limit Māori organisations’ responsibility for the care and protection of Māori children taken from their parents, responsibility for making decisions about the allocation of primary health resources to Māori people, and, at the most trivial level, a ban on bilingual road signs.

Te Pāti Māori was the last to cast its vote. After recording it, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke led the haka, as a passionate and direct form of political expression. She and her colleagues left their seats and approached the ACT Party benches. The privileges committee said this was intimidatory, especially co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer apparently pointing her finger at the ACT party MPs like a gun.

The “finger gun” gesture is not cultural expression. If it occurred and is not just “in the eye of the beholder”, as Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick suggested during the suspension debate, some sanction is warranted. Surely a harsher sanction than Waititi received, yet no harsher than precedents would suggest? And surely an equivalent sanction should have been given to National Party MP James Meager, whom Swarbrick accused of pointing a finger gun at her. The Speaker accepted Meager’s assurance that it wasn’t intended to intimidate, and there was no sanction.

Haka are allowed, but not during the conduct of a vote. Just as speeches aren’t allowed while a vote is underway. They can’t be used to intimidate, just as other forms of expression can’t be intimidatory. However, earlier in the year, when the Green party MP Julie Anne Genter crossed the floor to shout at an opponent while waving a book in his face, she was censured and asked to apologise, but not suspended.

Timing and intent are important — so is consistency

The privileges committee chair and National Party MP Judith Collins said: “It is highly disorderly for members to interrupt a vote while it is being conducted. The right to cast one’s vote without impediment goes to the heart of being a member of parliament.”

The problem with this argument is that the ACT Party had cast its vote before the haka. There was no attempt to stop the party voting and no attempt to stop the vote itself.

Labour MP Willie Jackson accused Te Pāti Māori of grandstanding over the issue to suggest that, with a different approach, it might have been settled without suspension.

However, there are discrepancies in how the privileges committee works, and there is no single explanation. But racism is undoubtedly a factor, and Maipi-Clarke was right to ask: “Are our voices too loud for this House?”

Every voice matters in a representative democracy. People must be able to express themselves in their own ways and to make sense to the people they represent.

Haka make sense as part of a broader tikanga. This is why Willie Jackson’s proposal for parliament to establish a tikanga committee may allow it to take something positive and potentially transformative from this affair.

A committee could consider how and why tikanga Māori should be present in parliament’s Standing Orders. This would start to address the fundamental democratic question of who really owns parliament. And, by extension, who really owns the entire system of government — everyone, or everyone except Māori people?

Who ‘owns’ parliament?

Te Pāti Māori and Green Party policies include the full implementation of the Matike Mai Aotearoa report on constitutional transformation, commissioned by the Iwi Chairs’ Forum and published in 2016, as a blueprint for the design of a binational state. Its thinking on independent Māori political authority (rangatiratanga) over their own affairs is principled and well thought out.

But its argument that the Crown governs only for “its” people, presumes no place for tikanga in parliament because Māori people don’t need to be there. Parliament belongs to “them” in a “them” and “us” binary. “Our” political authority is, according to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, entirely elsewhere.

Under Matike Mai’s binational vision, Māori people would presumably choose whether to be one of “them” or one of “us”. An impossible demand for the Labour Party to consider, when the opportunity comes for it to form government, yet almost certainly dependent on Te Pāti Māori and Green support.

Could a tikanga committee help change the way politics is done?

Willie Jackson’s proposed tikanga committee won’t arise, or consider anything meaningful, unless it has government support. However, if it gets that support, it will start a potentially transformative conversation about the true meaning of citizenship. An essential and enduring question for social democratic parties like Labour.

Te Tiriti’s third article, which Matike Mai sets aside, said that citizenship would be grounded in “equal tikanga”. Citizenship that is equal because, among other reasons, it reflects culture, provides the Labour Party, if it wants it, with an alternative and easily defensible liberal democratic way of thinking about Te Tiriti. This isn’t an alternative to rangatiratanga, but a fair and reasonable complement.

As I argue in a forthcoming book, it’s important to recall that allowing liberal democracy to develop was the Crown’s concession that it doesn’t interpret its Treaty right to establish government (first article) as the right tobe government. Liberal democracy says that government is the people’s job.

Liberal democracy sets some parameters, but it doesn’t tell us exactly how that job should be done. Equal tikanga provides guidance. The present story tells us that we need that guidance.

In 2022, I was commissioned to write a paper for the ministerial review into the future of local government. Rangatiratanga, Citizenship and a Crown that is ‘Māori too’: Boldness and the Future of Local Governmentraised questions about the place of tikanga in local government. My book will examine the relevance of these questions to central government.

The first of these questions that a tikanga committee might consider is which kinds of values and procedures would best help parliament to work as a site of both respectful inclusion and respectful difference. Furthermore, are there principles and practices of Māori decision-making that might help parliament to work in this way? Could this be an example of what citizenship as equal tikanga looks like?

A parliamentary committee would undoubtedly include members knowledgeable of tikanga and members with disdain for it, perhaps both in the same person. The New Zealand First leader Winston Peters showed how, during the suspension debate, when he referred to Rawiri Waititi’s moko kanohi as “scribbles on his face”.

Tikanga needs the people, not just parliament

Parliament is a place of adversarial contest and perhaps isn’t well-placed to have this conversation on its own.

Parliament belongs to its members, but more importantly, it belongs to the people of New Zealand. Māori people as much as any others.

Admitting citizens into the debate, through a randomly chosen citizens’ assembly, would do several democratically important things. It would bring people together as deliberators, not advocates or people with a political point to score. They would hear from experts in tikanga, citizenship, democracy and parliamentary practice.

Their task would not be to make a decision. That can’t be taken from parliament, but they would inform parliament and citizens. They would do so by independently and rigorously examining, interrogating and debating expert ideas through a process of reason, rather than adversarial politics. Every contribution would be respected, provided that reasons are shared and exposed to critique. The process does not preclude racist perspectives, but it does ensure that when these are raised, they may be clearly exposed and responded to for what they are.

Kylie Smith and her colleagues’ work on Māori decision-making demonstrates similar principles. They argue that through the hui, for instance, people practice “deliberative democracy as a fundamental way of life, learned through ongoing active and meaningful participation throughout childhood, [which] improves the integrity of democratic decision-making”.

There is a particular lesson for public decision-making in their observation that “Whaikorero recognises that listening is as important as speaking.” It’s clear that no one listened much to anyone during the privileges committee process.

The intellectual tools and cultural frameworks already exist for the ideal that I presented to the local government review panel, which is simply that we avoid making decisions until we understand each other.

A tikanga committee, supported by a citizens’ assembly, would not simply address questions of haka but also the bigger democratic questions of how and why decisions are made. It would tackle the fundamentally important question of how politics is done, for whom, and by whom.

Dominic O’Sullivan (Te Rarawa and Ngāti Kahu) is a professor of political science at Charles Sturt University, adjunct professor at the Auckland University of Technology and Research, and academic associate at the University of Auckland. Dominic is the author of eight books, most recently Indigeneity, Culture and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (Singapore Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).