Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Did someone try to stop the Māori Party from hijacking Parliament?

It's happened again, unfortunately - the Māori Party has hijacked Parliament once again with a haka.

It played out like this:

Oriini Kaipara, who's their new MP replacing the late Takutai Tarsh Kemp, delivered her maiden speech because today’s her first day in Parliament. Afterwards, there was a song and the public gallery was involved. She stepped out of her seat into the aisle, onto the floor to receive the song.

As soon as the song ended, someone - sounded like it was somebody up in the public gallery - started a haka and she started to haka back.

From news reports I’ve read, one of the other MPs, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, also started to haka.

Speaker Gerry Brownlee said, “Oh no, not that.”

He went on to say that was not the agreement that had been struck, but they didn’t stop, they basically ignored him.

He got to his feet, at which point the House is usually supposed to stop everything it’s doing and go quiet to allow him to speak, and they just completely ignored him.

He threw his hands in the air, he then suspended the House, walked off, and the camera feed cut.

He’s come back subsequently very unhappy about it, and I’m going to bring you up to speed on all of that.

Now, the thing is, though - before you get angry about it - don’t bother wasting energy on being angry at the Māori Party for doing this, because that’s akin to wasting energy on getting angry at an alcoholic for getting drunk if you put beer in front of them, or getting angry at a toddler for packing a tantrum if they’re tired.

This is what the Māori Party does, right? This is the stuff that they thrive on. They thrive on performance, they thrive on sticking the middle finger to authority, it’s basically what they would call their kaupapa.

I’m just surprised that Gerry Brownlee got hoodwinked so easily into making an agreement with them and thinking this wouldn’t happen. Or maybe he didn’t, or maybe someone in Parliament didn’t get hoodwinked, because it looks like someone was prepared for this.

As soon as that haka started, the camera never cut back to the Māori Party or the gallery. It stayed on Gerry, and as soon as he suspended Parliament, the feed cut.

Now, what that means is you never really see the Māori Party doing the haka or anyone doing the haka. You can just kind of hear it in the background, but you can’t see it.

That basically robs the Māori Party of the ability to do what they did previously - strip the crisp, professional parliamentary TV feed, put it on their social media, and hope the thing goes viral.

It’s not going to happen this time because that footage is not there for them.

Now, it is not ideal, obviously, having Parliament’s rules broken like this for obvious reasons, but it is not unexpected.

So I think, given all things, the best outcome may be the one that was achieved today - which is just a blackout.

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