Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Wealthy Nation TodayWealthy Nation Today

Latest News

New Zealand Parliament votes for record suspensions of 3 lawmakers who performed Māori haka protest

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.

The lawmakers from Te Pāti Māori, the Māori Party, performed the haka, a chanting dance of challenge, last November to oppose a widely unpopular bill, now defeated, that they said would reverse Indigenous rights.

But the protest drew global headlines and provoked months of fraught debate among lawmakers about what the consequences for the lawmakers’ actions should be and whether New Zealand’s Parliament welcomed or valued Māori culture — or felt threatened by it.

A committee of the lawmakers’ peers in April recommended the lengthy punishments in a report that said the lawmakers were not being punished for the haka itself, but for striding across the floor of the debating chamber towards their opponents while they did it. Maipi-Clarke Thursday rejected that, citing other instances where legislators have left their seats and approached their opponents without sanction.

It was expected that the suspensions would be approved, because government parties have more seats in Parliament than the opposition and had the necessary votes to affirm them. But the punishment was so severe that Parliament Speaker Gerry Brownlee in April ordered a free-ranging debate among lawmakers and urged them to attempt to reach a consensus on what repercussions were appropriate.

No such accord was reached Thursday. During hours of at times emotional speeches, government lawmakers rejected opposition proposals for lighter sanctions.

There were suggestions that opposition lawmakers might extend the debate for days or even longer through filibuster-style speeches, but with the outcome already certain and no one’s mind changed, all lawmakers agreed that the debate should end.

This post appeared first on cnn.com

You May Also Like

Latest News

Athletes, coaches and officials are among 22 people killed in a road accident in northern Nigeria as they returned from the country’s National Sports...

Investing News

Here’s a quick recap of the crypto landscape for Wednesday (May 28) as of 9:00 a.m. UTC. Get the latest insights on Bitcoin, Ethereum...

Editor's Pick

E.l.f. Beauty announced on Wednesday plans to acquire Hailey Bieber’s beauty brand Rhode in a deal worth up to $1 billion as the cosmetics...

Latest News

A South African mother and two accomplices were sentenced to life imprisonment on Thursday for trafficking her then-6-year-old daughter, in a case that gained...