New Zealand Parliament Suspended as Maori Lawmakers Perform Haka to Protest Bill

Asia Pacific|Why New Zealand’s Maori Lawmakers Protested With a Traditional Dance

New Zealand’s Parliament was temporarily suspended on Thursday as Māori lawmakers performed a haka, a traditional group dance, demonstrating their community’s anger and fear over a bill that aims to reinterpret the country’s founding treaty with its Indigenous people.

During a first reading of the proposal, when the speaker asked Māori lawmaker Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke how her party, Te Pāti Māori, would vote on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill, she stood up, tore up what appeared to be her copy of the legislation, and started performing a haka.

She was joined in the haka by other opposition members on the floor, as well as people in the gallery overlooking the chamber.

The speaker, Gerry Brownlee, temporarily stopped the session. Ms. Maipi-Clarke, who performed the haka in Parliament after she was elected last year, was suspended over the protest, which Mr. Brownlee described as disrespectful.

The Treaty of Waitangi, signed by Māori chiefs and the British Crown in 1840, is considered New Zealand’s founding document. It forms the basis of the laws and policies aimed at redressing historical wrongs against the Māori by colonizers.

But a political party known as Act, the most right-wing member in the conservative coalition government, says it wants “equal rights” for all, and that special provisions for people based on their ethnic origin have been divisive for New Zealand society.

This month, Act introduced the bill, which experts say could severely damage race relations and undo decades of work aimed at redressing historical wrongs against the Māori people by colonizers. It has already stoked racial tensions in the country.

Māori make up roughly 20 percent of New Zealand’s 5.3 million people. They experience material hardship, have worse health indicators and are incarcerated at much higher rates than the population at large.

Thousands of people protested the bill by marching across the nation to Wellington, the capital, this week, according to local media.

The National Party, the main center-right political party in New Zealand and the senior member of the governing coalition, has tried to distance itself from the bill. But party leaders had agreed to introduce the bill when they formed the alliance with Act.

Lawmakers voted to advance the bill on Thursday, but the legislation is unlikely to progress further or become law.

“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.