New Zealand legislators voted Thursday to enact record suspensions from Parliament for three lawmakers who performed a M\u0101ori haka to protest a proposed law. <\/p>\n
Hana-R\u0101whiti 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\u2019s Parliament before. <\/p>\n
The lawmakers from Te P\u0101ti M\u0101ori, the M\u0101ori 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. <\/p>\n
But the protest drew global headlines and provoked months of fraught debate among lawmakers about what the consequences for the lawmakers\u2019 actions should be and whether New Zealand\u2019s Parliament welcomed or valued M\u0101ori culture \u2014 or felt threatened by it. <\/p>\n
A committee of the lawmakers\u2019 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. <\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
No such accord was reached Thursday. During hours of at times emotional speeches, government lawmakers rejected opposition proposals for lighter sanctions. <\/p>\n
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\u2019s mind changed, all lawmakers agreed that the debate should end. <\/p>\n<\/p>\n
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New Zealand legislators voted Thursday to enact record suspensions from Parliament for three lawmakers who performed a M\u0101ori haka to protest a proposed law. Hana-R\u0101whiti 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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17032,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-17031","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-world-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitaltradecenter.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}