The New Zealand Parliament has voted to impose record suspensions on three lawmakers who did a Maori haka as a protest. The incident took place last November during a debate on a law on Indigenous rights.
New Zealand’s parliament on Thursday agreed to lengthy suspensions for three lawmakers who disrupted the reading of a controversial bill last year by performing a haka, a traditional Maori dance.
Two parliamentarians — Te Pati Maori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi — were suspended for 21 days and one — Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, from the same party — for seven days.
Before now, the longest suspension of a parliamentarian in New Zealand was three days.
I’m so shut down. Look at me shut down. What a buffoon.
let me be clear:
the events in the OP article are some racist fuckery. the penalty is far too severe, and it’s being maliciously timed to exclude the maori from being represented in critical government processes.
i do agree that disruptive protest has a place in any society and i am supportive of any instance of indigenous people in a colonizer state employing such (and other) measures by default. more please, i will always side with indigenous peoples over colonials.
so yeah i get the broad point and the way it relates back to the article. we see eye-to-eye on the important stuff i think.
my nitpick about comparing this to a filibuster (and it is a nitpick) is that i think the filibuster is a crap exploit exercised in bad faith, and is mostly wielded by bad actors to the detriment of the common person. i believe it is fundamentally a bug in my country’s government, as it is not explicitly described but supposedly “implied” by a certain open-endedness in one section of the constitution. it is a dark perversion of disruptive protest, not an example of it. it is an undesirable flaw, the other user is right about that.
i do not agree with them broadly that any disruption of government processes is undesirable. it is often very necessary and appropriate, and increasingly so as the world succumbs further to the grip of fascism.
anyway, both our efforts are better spent elsewhere than arguing over a nitpick in the fine details of an evil empire’s increasingly obsolete constitution.