Outrage! Te Pāti Māori, pay equity and the rules of Parliament – Simon Wilson

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Rawiri Waititi (left) and Debbie Ngarewa-Packer at Waitangi this year. Photo / Dean Purcell

THREE KEY FACTS

• Parliament will be debating the fate of three Te Pāti Māori MPs in June, after the Privileges Committee found they broke parliamentary rules.
• The MPs are accused of intimidatory behaviour on the floor of the debating chamber.
• The Government has recently rescinded, under urgency, the pay-equity provisions of the Equal Pay Amendment Act 2020.

The debate is delayed, but it seems Te Pāti Māori is still to be punished for breaking the rules.

There’s one good thing about this: those same rules mean Parliament can’t tie the offenders to posts, strip off their clothes and whip them senseless. But in my view, the Privileges Committee’s lengthy bans and fines are the “civilised” equivalent of that older punishment.

A three-week ban from the debating chamber is proposed for party leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi and seven days for Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, and they lose their salaries during that time. No other MP has been treated even remotely as harshly.

Their sin: they left their seats in Parliament and performed a haka in front of Act MPs, as the vote on Act leader David Seymour‘s Treaty Principles Bill was ending.

Labour‘s Peeni Henare joined in the haka but has escaped punishment because he has expressed remorse.

It’s not because they did a haka, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told RNZ on Monday. “That actually happens often. It’s actually about not following the rules of Parliament.”

It so often is. The merits of a complaint against power are sidelined by the powerful, who would prefer not to debate the complaint itself. The sanctity of the rules is far safer ground.

For one thing, the rules are apolitical, or so we’re supposed to think.

For another, focusing on the rules appeals to a desire for order and even for fairness: if we don’t have rules, how can we know what justice is?

But if rules are for regulating behaviour, that also points to a deeper purpose: they reinforce the authority of those who make them. Rules aren’t apolitical, or neutral. They protect the powerful. We all know this, we learned it when we were little children.

What else did we learn when we were young? Naughty people must be taught a lesson. And by “taught a lesson”, we don’t mean “given a special educational opportunity”. We mean punished.

We cling to that one, even when our culture is full of warnings of what can go wrong. Everything from the Abuse in Care report to movies like Hunt for the Wilderpeople and We Were Dangerous reminds us that punishment is often meted out not on merit, but to reinforce power.

That’s what’s happening here: a reminder of the hierarchy of power is being visited on some “uppity” people who won’t sit down, won’t show contrition, won’t shut up.

And what of the rules themselves? Both Luxon and Judith Collins, who chaired the committee, have hung their desire to punish on the suggestion the haka prevented Act MPs from voting.

But Act had already voted.

Given that, why has Collins not apologised and recalled her committee to reconsider its decision?

If the committee was a proper court and not a politically motivated circus, the manifest falseness of this “they were stopped from voting” argument wouldn’t survive half a second on appeal.

Some have said Te Pāti Māori was doing it for show, that it was all theatre. Excuse me? What goes on in the debating chamber is all for show.

Besides, the committee didn’t agree it was just performative. Its report says: “There is no question the behaviour of Ms Maipi-Clarke, Ms Ngarewa-Packer and Mr Waititi could have the effect of intimidating other members.”

But there very much is a question. Te Pāti Māori says interpreting its MPs’ actions as “a potential threat of violence reflects personal prejudice and ignorance of tikanga Māori, not reality”.

The evidence suggests the Act MPs agree with that. Photos and video of the incident do not show them taking evasive action, defending themselves or even looking worried. They seem to be doing their best to look bored.

Members of Te Pati Maori perform a haka in front of Act MPs during the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill in Parliament. Photo / Adam Pearse

These politicians have been confronted by challenging haka before, at Waitangi and elsewhere. They’re well versed in the rituals. We all are.

Seymour likes to call haka a “war dance”, but that’s demonstrably not the role of haka today.

They can be ferocious, confronting, sometimes even fuelled by rage. But in the modern age, no one gets hurt. Whatever the occasion, haka provide a ritualised outlet for some very strong emotions. That should be respected.

Haka also say: “Just because I’m not literally going to attack you with my taiaha doesn’t mean you should ignore this. I really am enraged.”

That should be respected too. Haka are ubiquitous now and on the whole that’s a good thing. But it does tempt us to think their proper role is to entertain or to mark a significant moment. Te Pāti Māori has reminded us that isn’t true.

The thing about rules is that they don’t always correlate with doing the right thing. This has been coming up a lot.

The Government undid the provisions of the Equal Pay Amendment Act, a law that established a framework for assessing pay equity claims. Most Government MPs were part of the Parliament that voted unanimously for this law in 2020.

The abolition of that framework is retrospective and it was done under “urgency”, so there was no chance for public input or considered law-making.

The rules allowed all this but that doesn’t make it right. It’s another blatant example of the way rules can be used against those without power.

The Government has tried to claim the act needed changing because it had got “out of hand”. Social workers, they scoffed, were being compared with detectives!

But why not? The most common type of crime in this country is family harm. Juvenile offending is also common. We expect social workers to know who’s committing both these types of crime and somehow to manage the households involved so it stops. And we blame and shame them when they get it wrong. Detectives face very little of that.

The pay equity provisions of the 2020 law constituted a good bunch of rules, but they threatened the power balance. Can’t have that.

I’ve got another comparator: Why don’t we compare teachers with MPs?

Teachers have to think on their feet every second of the working day. Their base salary range is $61,329 to $103,086 and two-thirds of them are women. MPs, most of whom are men, are told how to vote and get an entry-level salary of $168,000.

Abandoning the pay equity rules means scrapping 33 claims already in the system, each of which represented good-faith commitment to research and analysis that was going to be held up to rigorous scrutiny. That’s a disgraceful way to treat the rules.

That’s also true for not allowing select-committee hearings: it undermines the democratic process and invites bad law.

As for making the new law retrospective, that’s frightening, because it suggests none of us know if we are currently breaking the law. Not the current law, but some law from the future that could be used against our behaviour now.

Maybe you think that’s a stretch. In my view, anyone who holds to the sanctity of rules should be well exercised about that one.

Protesters rally outside National minister Tama Potaka’s electorate office in Hamilton opposing the Government’s pay equity legislation. Photo / Mike Scott

“I think it’s really important that the rules are upheld,” Luxon said about the haka incident. But he doesn’t think that about the pay equity rules he voted for in 2020.

Worst of all, binning the 2020 act means an estimated 150,000 women and their families have been denied billions in income that was going to be theirs.

Why did the Government chose to make women the victims of its Budget cuts? Not because it was the right thing to do. How could they think that, after voting for the 2020 act?

They did it because they could. The rules let them get away with it.

Rules, eh. No political party has been hauled before the courts for electoral corruption, despite considerable evidence that at the very least deserves close legal examination. The rules allow it.

The Government has imposed a funding regime on the health system that puts lives in jeopardy and undermines the wellbeing of tens of thousands of people. The rules allow it.

Speed limits are rising, which means, say experts everywhere, that more people will die. The rules allow it.

The rules also allow Parliament to take no clear stand over one of the most pressing moral touchstones of our time: what’s happening in Gaza. I know opinion is divided, but I agree with UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese, who calls it “genocide”.

And the Government has signed up to an agreed set of rules for lowering climate emissions, even though it is in the process of breaking them. The rules allow that too.

It’s a trope of this debate that the rules of Parliament have already been bent to let Māori in. Te reo is officially allowed, haka and waiata are heard in the galleries and on the floor, some parts of the Parliamentary complex contain beautiful, richly meaningful whakairo (carving), raranga (weaving) and other expressions of tikanga Māori.

We should be proud of all this. But almost none of it has changed the Victorian protocols of our Parliament. An insistence on the archaic behaviours of the English ruling class are everywhere.

Worst of all, the rules allow much of the business of Parliament to be conducted with little to distinguish it from a cockfight. Pun intended.

I’m not arguing against rules. They are helpful and often necessary, especially when they safeguard freedoms and protect the vulnerable. But rules designed to insulate the powerful are a different matter. And so is keeping a sense of proportion.

Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke became a global sensation when she ripped up the Treaty Principles Bill in Parliament. An awful lot of people understand what she did and why. They’ve heard “you can’t break the rules” before, many of them perhaps all their lives. They know what it means.