How the Opposition could derail Budget week and save Te Pāti Māori

Newsroom

16-05-2025

Analysis: After a slim majority of government MPs on Parliament's Privileges Committee handed down unprecedented 21-day suspensions for Te Pāti Māori co-leaders, Speaker Gerry Brownlee has opened a door for the sanction to be rolled back.
The aftershocks of the haka heard around the world are still playing out at Parliament, six months after the infamous first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill. On Wednesday evening, the report of the Privileges Committee – the cross-party committee that investigates breaches of Parliament's rules – into Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi and MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was released.
It showed the National, Act and New Zealand First members of the committee, who hold a narrow majority, recommended a 21-day suspension without pay for Ngarewa-Packer and Waititi and seven days for Maipi-Clarke. The Opposition parties represented on the committee entered differing views, with Te Pāti Māori saying its MPs had done nothing wrong and Labour and the Greens arguing the sentence was too harsh.
The suspensions are not yet in effect, as they must be adopted by the House. That motion will be put to Parliament on Tuesday, after Question Time but before bills and other matters are considered. If approved, the suspensions would kick in immediately, meaning the MPs would miss Thursday's Budget debate – one of the biggest events of the year in Parliament.
'Unprecedented' is a word that has floated around Parliament for several weeks now.
Judith Collins, the Attorney-General and chair of the Privileges Committee, said in early April that the party's decision not to attend the committee in person was 'unprecedented'. On Thursday, she said the punishment was unprecedented because the 'situation was unprecedented'.
Te Pāti Māori has deployed the term too, with Ngarewa-Packer saying ahead of the final report that the punishment would be 'unprecedented' and the committee was trying to 'make an example of us'. After the sanctions landed, the party's press statement called it 'unprecedented' as the 'harshest punishment in Parliament history'.
Some of this is hyperbole. Some of it is true – Brownlee confirmed the suspension is the longest in the New Zealand Parliament's 171-year history.
All of it is positioning, part of escalating rhetoric for a situation truly without precedent: the complete breakdown of consensus on Parliament's usually unanimous Privileges Committee.
Notwithstanding the everyday fireworks between parties in the House, all prior Privileges Committee reports for many years have been accepted by all parties, including those whose members have been criticised or censured.
Unanimity has been broken before. In 2008, Labour and NZ First opposed the recommendation of the majority of the Privileges Committee that NZ First leader Winston Peters be censured over the Owen Glenn scandal. However, Labour's other coalition and confidence-and-supply partners voted alongside the Opposition.
The situation here is different. First, censure and suspension are substantively different – the former comes off as a slap on the wrist while the latter deprives constituents of a voice, and parties of their MPs.
Second, the dividing line falls neatly between Government and Opposition. In effect, the Government has used its majority in Parliament (and therefore on the committee) to remove several members of the Opposition from Parliament for a period of weeks.
While the proper processes have been followed and this is all within Parliament's rules, it is a drastic step that looks, on its face, undemocratic. Were the decision unanimous, or at least accompanied by support from Opposition parties other than Te Pāti Māori, it might more closely resemble a consensus about how to punish rule-breaking. Instead, it looks vindictive and – with the timing before Budget day – opportunistic.
Perhaps that is why Brownlee took the chance on Thursday, ahead of the debate, to make clear the gravity of the proposed suspensions and lay the ground for a serious clash between government and opposition MPs debating the report on Tuesday.
'As the committee's report states, the Speaker has a duty to protect the rights of members of all sides of the House. In particular, there's a longstanding convention for Speakers to safeguard the fair treatment of the minority. I intend to honour that convention by ensuring the House does not take a decision next week without due consideration,' Brownlee said.
'In my view, these severe recommended penalties placed before the House for consideration mean it would be unreasonable to accept a closure motion until all perspectives and views had been very fully expressed.'
Brownlee went on to remind the House of the rules for the coming debate, including that the recommendation can be amended, that every member has the ability to speak for up to 10 minutes and that once an amendment is proposed, everyone who has already spoken can do so again.
In theory, this sets up the possibility of an American-style filibuster of the Government's plans for next week – although fall short of jeopardising the all-important Budget day debate..
A sufficiently coordinated Opposition could keep the debate going from after Question Time on Tuesday until the House rises at 10pm that evening, then resume again on Wednesday afternoon. If it were still running by 10pm on Wednesday, it would pick up again on the next post-Budget sitting day, which would be June 3.
Although Budget day would proceed as planned regardless, Ngarewa-Packer, Waititi and Maipi-Clarke would be able to participate if the Privileges Committee report had not yet been voted on.
The governing benches have one recourse to close off the debate: a closure motion, which any MP can propose but which requires the approval of the Speaker. (They could also move to adjourn the debate, but this would just delay, not stop it. Te Pāti Māori's MPs would still be able to participate on Budget day.) As Brownlee said on Thursday, he's not inclined to grant that motion 'until all perspectives and views have been very fully expressed'.
In other words, Brownlee has the final say here. He has intentionally left the door open for the Government to walk back the punishment, which could signal he has reservations about its severity.
The prospect of losing valuable time to advance the Government's legislative agenda on Tuesday is already haunting Leader of the House Chris Bishop, who queried Brownlee about the potential impact on 'timetabling'.
'I'm well aware of that,' Brownlee replied, before noting that the timing of the debate was required by Standing Orders and the rules of the debate are similarly enshrined therein.
While Bishop could tag his planned legislative actions for Tuesday onto the post-Budget urgency motion on Thursday, this would still keep MPs in Wellington for hours or days longer than planned. Instead, he might be willing to try to cut a deal with the Opposition, walking back some or all of Te Pāti Māori's sentence in exchange for the permission to get on with the Government's business in the House.
A filibuster could only succeed with Labour's involvement. The Green and Te Pāti Māori caucuses are too small to keep it going well into Wednesday without Labour's 34 MPs.
Is Labour keen to disrupt the House in this way? That's something the caucus will have to work out on Tuesday morning, when it meets to discuss the issue.
On the one hand, the party doesn't want to look like an agent of chaos to middle voters who want some sobriety restored to politics. It also doesn't want to align itself too closely to Te Pāti Māori.
There might also be a concern about precedent, but the potential for a filibuster here is the result of a unique confluence of events. The only debates that have no time limit and come before the Government's business of the day (so before urgency can be declared) are debates on reports of the Privileges Committee.
The rarity of non-unanimous Privileges Committee recommendations means such opportunities will very rarely present themselves. The Speaker can also shut off the debate at any time, so would need to be a willing implicit participant in any filibuster plot. Therefore, such an effort here is unlikely to become commonplace in Parliament.
What might drive Labour to support a filibuster are the chance to force a backdown from the Government, which comes along once in a blue moon in Opposition, and to complicate the narrative around the crown jewel of the political year: Budget Day.
Moreover, voters may well appreciate Labour standing up against suspensions that could be perceived as almost authoritarian excess, regardless of the party targeted. Flexing political muscle and shoring up democracy could be a good look for a Labour Party that has struggled to get cut-through so far this term.
Whether a filibuster actually happens thus relies on several moving parts: If Labour deems it a worthwhile risk, if Brownlee is frustrated enough to derail Bishop's plans for the week and if the Government is willing to come to the table to work out a compromise.
Regardless of the outcome, it will be a fascinating watch. As Waititi said in concluding his speech on the first reading of the Treaty Principles Bill, just minutes before the famous haka began: 'See you next Tuesday'.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the debate on the Privileges Committee report could delay the Budget day debate itself. If the debate on the Privileges Committee report is still ongoing at 10pm on Wednesday, it will resume on the next post-Budget sitting day – June 3. Thursday will see the Budget debate begin as planned, followed by government business.