what will Te Pāti Māori’s protest mean for tikanga in parliament?

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.

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.