Last December, Australian opener Usman Khawaja was charged by the International Cricket Council for wearing a black armband to acknowledge the lives lost in Gaza during a test against Pakistan - after initially wanting to wear a humanitarian logo on his shoe.
At the Fifa Women’s World Cup in New Zealand last year, Football Ferns captain Ali Riley painted her fingernails rainbow colours to support the LGBTQ+ community after the global governing body threatened sanctions, including yellow cards, for any players who wore rainbow armbands during matches.
Rugby is a sport in New Zealand with Māori and Polynesian athletes at its core.
At a time when the coalition Government is dialling back the use of Māori language in government organisations, scrapping anti-smoking legislation and the Māori Health Authority, and inciting division by questioning the Treaty of Waitangi principles (despite never intending to support the bill beyond its first reading) is it really surprising a rugby team has now taken a stance?
On the one hand, it’s entirely understandable Hurricanes chief executive Avan Lee has been left in damage control after being blindsided by the Poua haka that called out “puppets of this redneck Government”.
Professional rugby is big business and with lucrative organisation-wide sponsorship to protect, the Hurricanes will apologise to the Government over the protest in an attempt to mitigate the fallout.
Fair enough. The views of the Poua will not be shared by everyone at the Hurricanes or by their range of financial backers. Cue panic stations.
As a sport, though, rugby is treading a fine line between embracing its prevalent indigenous cultures – and their talent in the sporting field – when it suits and not supporting their drive to fight for their heritage.
In the ever-expanding commercial age, haka is constantly front and centre of New Zealand rugby. Often for financial gain, too.
Labelling the Government redneck is a step too far for many – yet when the 180-year-old founding document of New Zealand is challenged and Māori culture is seen to be seriously threatened or diminished, reactions are inevitable.
Thousands marched across the country last December to protest the same Government policies perceived to plunge New Zealand back decades in race relations.
The Poua haka is an extension of those protests.
The core point of activism is to be seen and heard. On that front, the Poua sure hit their intended mark.
While the translated haka terminology is jarring, freedom of speech in a democratic society is a fundamental right. Debate and dissemination are imperative to holding those in power to account.
And who could possibly argue using haka as a powerful vehicle to protest Māori rights is not appropriate.
Marginalised throughout their quest for acceptance in the professional scene, top-flight sportswomen are accustomed to fighting for their rights.
In the who-shouts-loudest age of social-media context to protests are often lost. Consider, therefore, these comments from Hurricanes Poua prop and haka leader Leilani Perese, who told RNZ they had team management backing for their stance.
“I believe that in rugby, we have a platform where people watch and listen. And why not use our platform to show our people we will never fold? To tell the Government that we are stronger than ever, and we will never go down without a war,” Perese said.
“We wanted it to represent not just Māori, but people of all races and cultures.
“When we say ‘taku iwi tuohu kore e!’ that means ‘what will always last is our people, we will never fold’. Whether we’re Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Indian, what have you. I thought it was important for us to say because we’ve got a lot of other ethnicities in our team. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t just about one culture, it’s about all of us.”
Those who claim sport and politics don’t mix should reconnect with the litany of examples throughout history. And if those views are still held then it must go both ways by keeping politicians well away from changing rooms and events of significance where they all attempt to leverage their profile in the most overt, icky fashion.
Lastly, on the subject of appropriateness, the petulant responses to the haka from Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters and Act leader David Seymour, both of whom derided the Poua on field performance, speaks to the thin-skinned nature of those two men.
Rather than choosing to actively engage with the Poua team, Peters and Seymour reverted to type for profile and point-scoring political gain to only reinforce New Zealand’s problematic cultural divide.
Liam Napier has been a sports journalist since 2010, and his work has taken him to World Cups in rugby, netball and cricket, boxing world title fights and Commonwealth Games.
