Time is apparently running out for the three Te Pāti
Māori MPs whose haka in parliament during the Treaty
Principles Bill debate last year attracted huge
international attention.
Parliament’s Privileges
Committee has summoned
the MPs to appear on Wednesday (April 23). But given
their previous resistance to fronting up, it seems unlikely
they will.
The committee is investigating whether the
haka broke parliament’s rules. The MPs say they don’t
think they’ll get a fair hearing because the committee
won’t allow legal representation or evidence from an
expert in tikanga
Maori.
According to Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie
Ngawera-Packer, this “is a display of power designed to
silence us”.
But the case is about more than
possible breaches of parliamentary protocol and standing
orders. It also asks serious questions about our liberal
democracy in general.
Everybody needs to express
themselves freely and without fear. So, when MPs leave their
seats and come close to their opponents, does it cross a
line? That was certainly the ruling last year when Green MP
Julie
Anne Genter was censured for crossing the floor and
confronting another MP.
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Perhaps there is still good
reason for New Zealand following the British parliamentary
tradition of the government and opposition benches being two
and a half sword lengths apart.
But it has already
been established that haka are allowed in parliament. The
real questions are how, when, why and according to which
rules or tikanga?
The problem with
‘partnership’
According to the political
philosopher Nancy Fraser, democracy should
support every citizen to participate in public life
equally:
[Justice] requires social
arrangements that permit all members to participate in
social interaction on a par with one another. So that means
they must be able to participate as peers in all the major
forms of social interaction.
If
parliament and the democratic system belong equally to
everyone, then everyone should be able to say this ideal
matches their experience. In other words, people have one
voice of equal value, not just one vote.
This is why
the appropriate use of haka in parliament needs to be worked
out. At one level it is about people being able to express
their ideas in ways that make sense to them and the people
they represent.
At a deeper level, the issue revolves
around who actually “owns” parliament. Everyone? Or
everyone except Māori people and their representatives?
Does everyone have a voice of equal value?
Part of the
problem is the notion of “partnership” between Māori
and the Crown proposed
by the Court of Appeal in 1987. Well intentioned as it
might have been, this also created an “us and them” way
of thinking.
In this sense, the Crown and its
institutions are seen as separate or foreign to Māori –
as belonging to other people. If that’s the case,
parliament can’t then belong to everybody or reflect
everybody’s customs and ways of being.
But if
parliament belongs to everyone and sovereignty is not simply
the oppressive authority of a distant king, but rather the
shared
property of every citizen, then the haka belongs as a
distinctive form of political expression. It becomes part of
the tikanga of the parliament.
Tikanga Māori in
practice
However, tikanga is not simply about how
parliamentary procedure deals with haka, waiata
or the Māori language itself.
As an authority on
tikanga, Hirini
Moko Mead, put it, the concept is
a
set of beliefs and practices associated with procedures to
be followed in conducting the affairs of a group or an
individual. These procedures, as established by precedents
through time, are held to be ritually, are validated by
usually more than one generation and are always subject to
what a group or an individual is able to
do.
Like parliamentary standing orders,
tikanga is procedural and grounded in broader principles of
justice and ethics.
Legal scholars Māmari Stephens
and Carwyn Jones describe how tikanga prioritises
relationships, collective obligations and inclusive
decision-making. The Māori concept of wānganga
or “active discussion”, Jones has written, is a
framework for robust debate to enhance mutual understanding,
but which doesn’t necessarily require
consensus.
Tikanga Māori and deliberative
democracy
The idea that political decisions should be
based on reasoning, listening and serious reflection is
known as deliberative
democracy. It’s basically the opposite of outright
majority rule based on “having the numbers”, which
sometimes happens without any debate at all.
Political
theorists Selen Ercan and John Dryzek define
deliberative democracy as being
about
putting communication at the
heart of politics, recognising the need for reflective
justification of positions, stressing the pursuit of
reciprocal understanding across those who have different
frameworks or ideologies.
If that is
true, then shouting across the parliamentary debating
chamber doesn’t help. Nor does using the haka to
intimidate.
But using it to make a fair and reasonable
point, to which others may respond, is essential to a
parliament that is genuinely a “house of
representatives”. Tikanga Māori and deliberative
democratic processes offer complementary ways of working out
what this could mean in practice.
Dominic
O’Sullivan, Professor of Political Science,
Charles Sturt University and Adjunct Professor Stout
Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington and
Auckland University of Technology., Charles
Sturt University
This article is
republished from The
Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
Read the original
article.
