Te Pāti Māori haka: A balancing act for Labour as National seeks end to controversy
Photo:
RNZ/Mark Papalii
Analysis
: More than six months after Te Pāti Māori's hair-raising haka protest in Parliament, the saga has at last come to a close - but it foreshadows further fault lines ahead.
Government MPs endorsed the verdict as expected - a 21-day suspension for the co-leaders and seven days for Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke - after what was a fiery but fairly brief debate on Thursday afternoon.
In the end, suggestions of a drawn-out affair - or a form of filibuster - came to nothing: after just three hours, Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi called time himself.
Inside the debating chamber, it was loud, fractious and sometimes ugly.
Te Pāti Māori put up
a defiant defence of its MPs' actions
, enthusiastically backed by its friends in the Greens.
All three individuals in the gun argued they had no choice but to act in the face of an attack on Te Tiriti.
"I will not apologise for my actions," said Maipi-Clarke. "We will wear this unapologetically," declared Ngarewa-Packer.
"We will not be silenced. We will not be assimilated. We will not be subjugated," concluded Waititi.
The National Party all but ghosted the debate, with only Chris Bishop standing to make a brief contribution: "Let's end this issue once and for all... and get back to the major issues facing this country."
Chris Bishop during the debate.
Photo:
VNP/Louis Collins
It was a calculated non-engagement, a judgement that while many New Zealanders may be unimpressed with Te Pāti Māori's behaviour, they perhaps aren't enthused by politicians engaging in slanging matches either.
Coalition partners ACT and New Zealand First showed no such qualms.
With ACT's David Seymour abroad - taking part in the renowned Oxford Union debate - it was left to his colleagues Parmjeet Parmar, Nicole McKee and Karen Chhour to hammer Te Pāti Māori for "playing the race card", "bullying" and "stand-over tactics".
NZ First leader Winston Peters
unleashed a barrage of insults
, at one point labelling Waititi an "extremist" with "scribbles on his face".
And he levelled a warning to Labour about defending the minor party.
"I hope that some sober, conservative, right-thinking Māori people in the Labour Party will wake up before it's too late," Peters said.
"[Te Pāti Māori] has left middle New Zealand a long time ago, and the Labour Party is going to leave them hanging in the wind too."
No doubt those comments were weighing on Labour MPs' minds as they challenged the punishment as "disproportionate" without endorsing Te Pāti Māori's rule-breaking.
Four of its MPs spoke in yesterday's debate, arguing the penalty was excessive and a dangerous precedent.
But they also gently chided Te Pāti Māori for its approach. Senior MP Willie Jackson suggested: "a sorry wouldn't go amiss."
Senior Labour MP Willie Jackson
Photo:
RNZ/Samuel Rillstone
And former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe cautioned: "When you come into this House, you swear the oath... you agree to the rules of this House. You can't have it both ways."
Labour leader Chris Hipkins' recent comments also tell a story. Speaking to RNZ last week, he questioned Te Pāti Māori's choice of priorities, a line aimed squarely at centrist voters who might support Māori aspirations but baulk at Te Pāti Māori's tactics.
The RNZ-Reid Research poll out this week also helps to explain Labour's caution.
A clear majority of voters - more than 54 percent - said the 21-day ban was either appropriate or not harsh enough.
Among Labour supporters specificially, that number was 38 percent. That is a sizeable proportion of voters, and a bloc Labour needs to hold if it is to have any hope of reclaiming government.
The severity of the punishment is undeniable, unprecedented in scale, seven times longer than any previous suspension.
Certainly, it is an uncomfortable image: a government using its majority to strip a minority opposition party of its voice in the debating chamber.
Opposition MPs used their speeches to lay out a litany of past offences that earned milder rebukes: the infamous Trevor Mallard-Tau Henare punch-up among them.
But, as with all comparisons, each crime is different in its own way. Government MPs point to Te Pāti Māori's repeated refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing, right down to the final debate.
They argue the punishment is not about silencing dissent, but defending institutional integrity.
On current polling, it is clear Labour will need Te Pāti Māori's support to form a coalition, and this week's debate should act as a clear illustration of the potential difficulty with that.
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Explainer - The public likes to have their say. Tens of thousands of public submissions come in every year to bills before Parliament and to local government entities. With large-scale campaigns and website submission forms, the ability to speak out is easier than ever - but that's causing a problem on the other end of the system, where planners and politicians can struggle to keep up. Artificial intelligence has increasingly been drafted to go over public submissions. Some have applauded the technology's ability to process data quicker than humans, while others fear the human touch may be getting lost in the shuffle. What exactly does AI processing of public submissions mean, how does it work, and are everyone's views getting a fair shake in the process? Here's a breakdown of it all. First, how do public submissions work? It's a chance for people to get their voice heard in local and national government. People can make submissions to both their local councils and to Parliament. Submissions can be made to local councils on things like planning and urban development, while the public can make submissions to Parliament select committees on upcoming bills. Submissions have been sky-high in recent months, where the Treaty Principles Bill received more than 300,000 submissions, while the Regulatory Standards Bill which is now before Parliament also has had huge interest. Final submission numbers on that have not been released, but even the early discussion on the proposed bill at the end of last year received about 23,000 submissions. Dr David Wilson, Clerk of the House of Representatives who oversees the business of Parliament's rules and procedures, said public input is at a high. "The Treaty Principles Bill had more submissions than the last two parliaments combined," he said. At one point submission numbers were so large the website suffered technical difficulties. Wilson said the number of submissions does put a strain on resources in Parliament. 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Eddie Clark, a senior lecturer in public law at Victoria University of Wellington who is critical of AI use in public submissions, noted that large numbers of submissions have been processed before AI became widely available, such as the Conversion Practices Prohibition Legislation Bill in 2021 which received more than 100,000 entries. "So it is possible for very large numbers of submissions to be actually read and processed by actual human staff. What was required was time and resource, and in my opinion the denial of both is a reason the huge number of submissions has become such a problem several times over the last couple of years." Enter artificial intelligence This is where artificial intelligence is starting to come in - both in local and national government, where it's being used to help process, sort and analyse public input. The Office of the Clerk does not use AI in processing submissions, but it's up to the individual committee overseeing the bill to decide whether to do so when the bills come to their end, Wilson said. For instance, it's been used along the way for the Regulatory Standards Bill. "Committees make their own individual decisions; they don't have any central guidelines around it at the moment." Wilson said the Office of the Clerk is looking at how it might use AI in the future, but is being cautious and "not rushing into it". "I still think ultimately we need to have human decision makers but AI has capacity to do things more quickly than people can - such as flagging submissions that are irrelevant or defamatory. Most submissions are absolutely fine." AI processing has been taken up by local councils, too. In Nelson, the city council worked with local firm the AI Factory to process submissions to their long term plan, Group Manager for Strategy and Communications Nicky McDonald said. 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"All emails and Citizen Space submissions (a digital tool that submits an online form) were assigned a preliminary classification by Public Voice using a LLM that followed a logic model created by the Ministry, analysing it and classifying it as supporting, partially supporting, opposing the bill or unclear on its stance." The majority of submissions on the proposed bill were analysed by AI. However, the summary also said that in a qualitative analysis sample, 939 of those 22,821 submissions were examined by Ministry for Regulation staff to "analyse the themes raised in submissions and feedback on specific policy proposals." That process "involved several staff across the Ministry manually reviewing the sample of submissions (both email and Citizen space submissions) and applying thematic tags." Another 605 submissions were also looked at separately. Submissions made in te reo Māori were translated. "Our approach was carefully designed to reflect all submissions in the final analysis, noting there were many similar points made across most of the submissions," the ministry's deputy chief executive Andrew Royle told Newsroom. How much human scrutiny is applied to the process? Can the AI avoid a bias? "As a rule of thumb, having humans in the loop will be the best practice - humans in charge and AI as a co-pilot," Fu said. "The risk is very high if we completely rely on AI to do the work. To put simply, such biases are generally embedded in our institutions as well as the information humans generated, and these biases are then input into the model to train. Then they become inherent to the model. Because AI systems are black boxes, it is uncertain and unclear about the nature and degree of these biases." Nelson Council's McDonald said they were transparent about how they were using AI. "Every submission form included a statement saying we'd be trialling AI to help speed up submission processing and reduce the resource burden on staff. "We intentionally ensured there was always a (sceptical!) human in the loop sense checking the tool's outputs. Staff (and elected members) read every submission and we had processes to check AI responses." Fu said there are differences in how AI approaches looking at thousands of public submissions. "AI is really good at consistency (if instructed properly) whereas humans are likely to miss things due to fatigue, boredom, or bias towards particular viewpoints (humans are biased too). "AI can do things much faster than humans, and AI's work can be more transparent if designed well because you can ask AI to document its processes and responses for later review and replication. On the downside, humans excel in knowing about the contexts, while AI knows little about the local contexts and backgrounds." Is there a risk that people's voices aren't being heard? "I absolutely think that a regular practice of AI analysis of submissions risks undermining people's confidence in the democratic process and thus the legitimacy of government," Victoria University's Clark said. He said there was a need for more options for people to consult on legislation. He noted in the case of the Regulatory Standards Bill, the pre-legislative consultation was conducted mostly over the holiday period from mid-November to mid-January. This "leads to people seeing the Select Committee stage as their only real chance to comment, incentivising mass submissions expressing simple opposition or support", Clark said. "Giving people a chance to be heard throughout the process, not just at Select Committee, could help deal with the problem. There is a reason the legislative process is generally slow and deliberate, and derailing that good, democratic process has consequences. 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Where should AI not be used? Most agree AI should never be making decisions on policy, however. "What I don't think I can do - and I wouldn't trust it to do anyway - is make judgements," Wilson said. "Nobody's going to predict what's going to happen next month in the AI space because it's evolving so rapidly," Fu said, noting that hyperbole over AI is everywhere at the moment. "We're still in that hype space ... I think we need to start thinking about the responsible use." And for some, there's still a question as to whether the technological advances of AI might be leaving something behind. "In short, democracy takes money and time," Clark said. 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Newsroom
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Youth MPs – what are they good for?
A former politician says change is needed to the Youth Parliament system if it's to stay relevant. MP-turned political commentator Peter Dunne says the scheme isn't just 'a rag-tag collection of young people coming together for a couple of days to play at being MPs,' but if the event is going to be taken seriously, more consistency is required around its processes. That's not the case at the moment, in everything from how the teens are selected to the quality of the mentorship they're getting. The triennial event usually passes under the media radar, but this year's event was overshadowed by what a handful of youth MPs said was censorship of their speeches. Dunne says he could understand the intention behind the message from the Ministry of Youth Development, which asked some students to remove parts of their speeches where they lacked political neutrality, but the issue could have been handled better. In the end, none of the students were stopped from making their speeches, even if they didn't make the changes. Youth Parliament has been held every three years for the past three decades and is described by the government as, 'a unique opportunity for young New Zealanders to learn first-hand about our democracy, influence government decision-making, and have their voices heard.' In many ways it's like the real thing with MPs selecting teens to represent them for a couple of days in Parliament where they debate, give speeches and discuss fictional legislation. Dunne says often the young adults outshine the older MPs. 'The contrast has usually been between the impeccable behaviour of the youth MPs and the somewhat unruly behaviour of their adult counterparts,' he says. The first Youth Parliament was held in 1995 and initially was just a couple of days. Now the programme has expanded, running from April to August and Dunne questions how much teens take out of those extra two months and 29 days. 'And more importantly, what weight is attached to that? They've got no formal status in the community, so what role can they play?' he asks. Dunne says much of what the young aspiring politicians learn and do is dependent on the MP they are mentored by. 'In some cases they won't do very much, in some cases the MP will work actively with them and assign them a particular project,' Dunne says. There also aren't any rules around how MPs select their mentee. Some get applicants to write essays, this year David Seymour held an election, and Dunne says a couple just shoulder tap the kids of a mate. 'The time is right to have a proper review into its function and purpose, including the role of the youth MPs, how they're selected and what are reasonable expectations of them. 'Because I think that with a much clearer focus the Youth Parliament can play a much greater role than it has done to date,' Dunne says. Oscar Duffy, representing List MP Melissa Lee, became interested in politics last year when his Nan was in hospital. 'She's a Māori lady and she didn't have the best experience … so that was a pretty key driver in me being interested in what's going on. 'Obviously there's so much tension between Māori and the Crown … and that affects my family really directly,' he says. Duffy agrees that the degree of mentorship varies. He spent substantial time working on projects in his community and in Lee's Mount Albert office but says others didn't have the same experience. '[Ministers] have no time right? Ministers are so busy, I roomed with Simeon Brown's youth MP and he didn't really see Simeon a lot, if at all,' he says. Duffy sees Youth Parliament as an opportunity for those interested in politics to get an insight into the system. He says everyone attending this year had a keen interest in advocacy and change making, but he admits that at times some see their role as more important than it is. 'There's just a lot of politically charged people in one room.' If he could change one thing Duffy would raise the age bracket for youth MPs because he thinks 16 is too young. 'Even just move it up one year, 17-19, so there's more first year uni students who have been through high school, who have seen the whole system,' he says. Check out how to listen to and follow The Detail here. You can also stay up-to-date by liking us on Facebook or following us on Twitter.