Aotearoa New Zealand’s Parliament has confirmed the unprecedented punishments proposed for opposition indigenous Te Pāti Māori MPs who performed a haka in protest against the Treaty Principles Bill.

Te Pāti Māori co-leaders Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Rawiri Waititi will be suspended for 21 days, and MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke suspended for seven days, taking effect immediately.

Opposition parties tried to reject the recommendation, but did not have the numbers to vote it down.

Te Pati Maori MPs speak after being suspended.  Video: RNZ/Mark Papalii

The heated debate to consider the proposed punishment came to an end just before Parliament was due to rise.

Waititi moved to close the debate and no party disagreed, ending the possibility of it carrying on in the next sitting week.

Leader of the House Chris Bishop — the only National MP who spoke — kicked off the debate earlier in the afternoon saying it was “regrettable” some MPs did not vote on the Budget two weeks ago.

Bishop had called a vote ahead of Budget Day to suspend the privileges report debate to ensure the Te Pāti Māori MPs could take part in the Budget, but not all of them turned up.

Robust, rowdy debate
The debate was robust and rowdy with both the deputy speaker Barbara Kuriger and temporary speaker Tangi Utikare repeatedly having to ask MPs to quieten down.

Tākuta Ferris spoke first for Te Pāti Māori, saying the haka was a “signal of humanity” and a “raw human connection”.

He said Māori had faced acts of violence for too long and would not be silenced by “ignorance or bigotry”.

“Is this really us in 2025, Aotearoa New Zealand?” he asked the House.

“Everyone can see the racism.”

He said the Privileges Committee’s recommendations were not without precedent, noting the fact Labour MP Peeni Henare, who also participated in the haka, did not face suspension.

Henare attended the committee and apologised, which contributed to his lesser sanction.

‘Finger gun’ gesture
MP Parmjeet Parmar — a member of the Committee — was first to speak on behalf of ACT, and referenced the hand gesture — or “finger gun” — that Te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer made in the direction of ACT MPs during the haka.

Parmar told the House debate could be used to disagree on ideas and issues, and there was not a place for intimidating physical gestures.

Greens co-leader Marama Davidson said New Zealand’s Parliament could lead the world in terms of involving the indigenous people.

She said the Green Party strongly rejected the committee’s recommendations and proposed their amendment of removing suspensions, and asked the Te Pāti Māori MPs be censured instead.

Davidson said the House had evolved in the past — such as the inclusion of sign language and breast-feeding in the House.

She said the Greens were challenging the rules, and did not need an apology from Te Pāti Māori.

NZ First leader Winston Peters said Te Pāti Māori and the Green Party speeches so far showed “no sincerity, saying countless haka had taken place in Parliament but only after first consulting the Speaker.

“They told the media they were going to do it, but they didn’t tell the Speaker did they?

‘Bunch of extremists’
“The Māori party are a bunch of extremists,” Peters said, “New Zealand has had enough of them”.

Peters was made to apologise after taking aim at Waititi, calling him “the one in the cowboy hat” with “scribbles on his face” [in reference to his traditional indigenous moko — tatoo]. He continued afterward, describing Waititi as possessing “anti-Western values”.

Labour’s Willie Jackson congratulated Te Pāti Māori for the “greatest exhibition of our culture in the House in my lifetime”.

Jackson said the Treaty bill was a great threat, and was met by a great haka performance. He was glad the ACT Party was intimidated, saying that was the whole point of doing the haka.

He also called for a bit of compromise from Te Pāti Māori — encouraging them to say sorry — but reiterated Labour’s view the sanctions were out of proportion with past indiscretions in the House.

Greens co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said the debate “would be a joke if it wasn’t so serious”.

“Get an absolute grip,” she said to the House, arguing the prime minister “is personally responsible” if the House proceeds with the committee’s proposed sanctions.

Eye of the beholder
She accused National’s James Meager of “pointing a finger gun” at her — the same gesture coalition MPs had criticised Ngarewa-Packer for during her haka. The Speaker accepted he had not intended to; Swarbrick said it was an example where the interpretation could be in the eye of the beholder.

She said if the government could “pick a punishment out of thin air” that was “not a democracy”, putting New Zealand in very dangerous territory.

An emotional Maipi-Clarke said she had been silent on the issue for a long time, the party’s voices in haka having sent shockwaves around the world. She questioned whether that was why the MPs were being punished.

“Since when did being proud of your culture make you racist?”

“We will never be silenced, and we will never be lost,” she said, calling the Treaty Principles bill a “dishonourable vote”.

She had apologised to the Speaker and accepted the consequence laid down on the day, but refused to apologise. She listed other incidents in Parliament that resulted in no punishment.

NZ Parliament TV: Te Pāti Māori Privileges committee debate.  Video: RNZ

Maipi-Clarke called for the Treaty of Waitangi to be recognised in the Constitution Act, and for MPs to be required to honour it by law.

‘Clear pathway forward’
“The pathway forward has never been so clear,” she said.

ACT’s Nicole McKee said there were excuses being made for “bad behaviour”, that the House was for making laws and having discussions, and “this is not about the haka, this is about process”.

She told the House she had heard no good ideas from the Te Pāti Māori, who she said resorted to intimidation when they did not get their way, but the MPs needed to “grow up” and learn to debate issues. She hoped 21 days would give them plenty of time to think about their behaviour.

Labour MP and former Speaker Adrian Rurawhe started by saying there were “no winners in this debate”, and it was clear to him it was the government, not the Parliament, handing out the punishments.

He said the proposed sanctions set a precedent for future penalties, and governments might use it as a way to punish opposition, imploring National to think twice.

He also said an apology from Te Pāti Māori would “go a long way”, saying they had a “huge opportunity” to have a legacy in the House, but it was their choice — and while many would agree with the party there were rules and “you can’t have it both ways”.

Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said there had been many instances of misinterpretations of the haka in the House and said it was unclear why they were being punished, “is it about the haka . . . is about the gun gestures?”

“Not one committee member has explained to us where 21 days came from,” he said.

Hat and ‘scribbles’ response
Waititi took aim at Peters over his comments targeting his hat and “scribbles” on his face.

He said the haka was an elevation of indigenous voice and the proposed punishment was a “warning shot from the colonial state that cannot stomach” defiance.

Waititi said that throughout history when Māori did not play ball, the “coloniser government” reached for extreme sanctions, ending with a plea to voters: “Make this a one-term government, enrol, vote”.

He brought out a noose to represent Māori wrongfully put to death in the past, saying “interpretation is a feeling, it is not a fact . . .  you’ve traded a noose for legislation”.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Prime Minister Fiamē Naomi Mata’afa has advised Samoa’s head of state that it is necessary to dissolve Parliament so the country can move to an election.

This follows the bill for the budget not getting enough support for a first reading on yesterday, and Fiame announcing she would therefore seek an early election.

Tuimaleali’ifano Va’aleto’a Sualauvi II has accepted Fiame’s advice and a formal notice will be duly gazetted to confirm the dissolution of the Legislative Assembly.

Parliament will go into caretaker mode, and the Cabinet will have the general direction and control of the existing government until the first session of the Legislative Assembly following dissolution.

Fiame, who has led a minority government since being ousted from her former FAST party in January, finally conceded defeat on the floor of Parliament yesterday morning after her government’s 2025 Budget was voted down.

MPs from both the opposition Human Rights Protection Party and Fiame’s former FAST party joined forces to defeat the budget with the final vote coming in 34 against, 16 in support and two abstentions.

Defeated motions
Tuesday was the Samoan Parliament’s first sitting since back-to-back no-confidence motions were moved — unsuccessfully — against prime minister Fiame.

In January, Fiame removed her FAST Party chairman La’auli Leuatea Schmidt and several FAST ministers from her Cabinet.

In turn, La’auli ejected her from the FAST Party, leaving her leading a minority government.

Her former party had been pushing for an early election, including via legal action.

The election is set to be held within three months.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Funding for New Zealand’s Ministry for Pacific Peoples (MPP) is set to be reduced by almost $36 million in Budget 2025.

This follows a cut of nearly $26 million in the 2024 budget.

As part of these budgetary savings, the Tauola Business Fund will be closed. But, $6.3 million a year will remain to support Pacific economic and business development through the Pacific Business Trust and Pacific Business Village.

The Budget cuts also affect the Tupu Aotearoa programme, which supports Pacific people in finding employment and training, alongside the Ministry of Social Development’s employment initiatives.

While $5.25 million a year will still fund the programme, a total of $22 million a year has been cut over the last four years.

The ministry will save almost $1 million by returning funding allocated for the Dawn Raids reconciliation programme from 2027/28 onwards.

There are two years of limited funding left to complete the ministry Dawn Raids programmes, which support the Crown’s reconciliation efforts.

Funding for Pasifika Wardens
Despite these reductions, a new initiative providing funding for Pasifika Wardens will introduce $1 million of new spending over the next four years.

The initiative will improve services to Pacific communities through capacity building, volunteer training, transportation, and enhanced administrative support.

Funding for the National Fale Malae has ceased, as only $2.7 million of the allocated $10 million has been spent since funding was granted in Budget 2020.

The remaining $6.6 million will be reprioritised over the next two years to address other priorities within the Arts, Culture and Heritage portfolio, including the National Music Centre.

Foreign Affairs funding for the International Development Cooperation (IDC) projects, particularly focussed on the Pacific, is also affected. The IDC received an $800 million commitment in 2021 from the Labour government.

The funding was time-limited, leading to a $200 million annual fiscal cliff starting in January 2026.

Budget 2025 aims to mitigate this impact by providing ongoing, baselined funding of $100 million a year to cover half of the shortfall. An additional $5 million will address a $10 million annual shortfall in departmental funding.

Support for IDC projects
The new funding will support IDC projects, emphasising the Pacific region without being exclusively aimed at climate finance objectives. Overall, $367.5 million will be allocated to the IDC over four years.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis said the Budget addressed a prominent fiscal cliff, especially concerning climate finance.

“The Budget addresses this, at least in part, through ongoing, baselined funding of $100 million a year, focused on the Pacific,” she said in her Budget speech.

“Members will not be surprised to know that the Minister of Foreign Affairs has made a case for more funding, and this will be looked at in future Budgets.”

More funding has been allocated for new homework and tutoring services for learners in Years nine and 10 at schools with at least 50 percent Pacific students to meet the requirements for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA).

About 50 schools across New Zealand are expected to benefit from the initiative, which will receive nearly $7 million over the next four years, having been reprioritised from funding for the Pacific Education Programme.

As a result, funding will be stopped for three programmes aimed at supporting Tu’u Mālohi, Pacific Reading Together and Developing Mathematical Inquiry Communities.

Republished from Pacific Media Network News with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

ANALYSIS: By Susan St John

With the coalition government’s second Budget being unveiled, we should question where New Zealand is heading.

The 2024 Budget laid out the strategy. Tax cuts and landlord subsidies were prioritised with a focus on cuts to social and infrastructure spending. Most of the tax package went to the well-off, while many low-income households got nothing, or very little.

Even the tiny bit of the tax package directed to low-income people fell flat. Family Boost has significantly helped only a handful of families, while the increase of $25 per week (In Work Tax Credit) was denied all families on benefits, affecting about 200,000 of the very poorest children.

In the recession, families that lost paid work also lost access to full Working for Families, an income cut for their children of about $100 per week.

No one worked out how the many spending cuts would be distributed, but they have hurt the poor the most. These changes are too numerous to itemise but include increased transport costs; the reintroduction of prescription charges; a disastrous school lunch system; rising rents, rates and insurance; fewer budget advisory services; cuts to foodbank funding and hardship grants; stripping away support programmes for the disabled; inadequately adjusted benefits and minimum wage; and reduced support for pay equity and the living wage.

The objective is to save money while ignoring the human cost. For example, a scathing report of the Auditor General confirms that Oranga Tamariki took a bulldozer to obeying the call for a 6.5 percent cut in existing social services with no regard to the extreme hurt caused to children and struggling parents.

Budget 2025 has already indicated that Working for Families will continue to go backwards with not even inflation adjustments. The 2025 child and youth strategy report shows that over the year to June 2024 the number of children in material poverty continued to increase, there were more avoidable hospitalisations, immunisation rates for babies declined, and there was more food insecurity.

Human costs all around us
We can see the human costs all around us in homelessness, food insecurity, and ill health. Already we know we rank at the bottom among developed countries for child wellbeing and suicide rates.

Abject distress existing alongside where homes sell for $20 million-$40 million is no longer uncommon, and neither are $6 million helicopters of the very rich.

At the start of the year, Helen Robinson, CEO of the Auckland City Mission, had a clear warning: “I am pleading with government for more support, otherwise what we and other food relief agencies in Auckland can provide, will dramatically decrease.

“This leaves more of Auckland hungry and those already there become more desperate. It is the total antithesis of a thriving city.”

The theory held by this government is that by reducing the role of government and taxes, the private sector will flourish, and secure well-paid jobs will be created. Instead, as basic economic theory would predict, we have been handed a long and protracted recession with few signs of growth and prosperity.

Budget 2025 signals more of the same.

It would be a mistake to wait for simplistic official inequality statistics before we act. Our current destination is a sharply divided country of extreme wealth and extreme poverty with an insecure middle class.

Underfunded social agencies
Underfunded and swamped social agencies cannot remove the relentless stress on the people who are invisible in the ‘fiscally responsible’ economic narrative. The fabricated bogeyman of outsized net government debt is at the core, as the government pursues balanced budgets and small government-size targets.

A stage one economics student would know the deficit increases automatically in a recession to cushion the decline and stop the economy spiralling into something that looks more like a depression. But our safety nets of social welfare are performing very badly.

Rising unemployment has exposed the inadequacy of social protections. Working for Families, for instance, provides a very poor cushion for children. Many “working” families do not have enough hours of work and face crippling poverty traps.

Future security is undermined as more KiwiSavers cash in for hardship reasons. A record number of the talented young we need to drive the recovery and repair the frayed social fabric have already fled the country.

The government is fond of comparing its Budget to that of a household. But what prudent household would deliberately undermine the earning capacity of family members?

The primary task for the Budget should be to look after people first, to allow them to meet their food, dental and health needs, education, housing and travel costs, to have a buffer of savings to cushion unexpected shocks and to prepare for old age.

A sore thumb standing
In the social security part of the Budget, NZ Super for all at 65, no matter how rich or whether still in full-time well-paid work, dominates (gross $25 billion). It’s a sore thumb standing out alongside much less generous, highly targeted benefits and working for families, paid parental leave, family boost, hardship provisions, accommodation supplement, winter energy and other payments and subsidies.

Given the political will, research shows we can easily redirect at least $3 billion from very wealthy superannuitants to fixing other payments to greatly improve the wellbeing of the young. This will not be enough but it could be a first step to the wide rebalancing needed.

New Zealand has become a country of two halves whose paths rarely cross: a social time bomb with unimaginable consequences. It is a country beguiled by an egalitarian past that is no more.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

The central narrative of New Zealand’s Minister of Finance, Nicola Willis, is ‘There is only so much money to go around’. (For example, her interview on RNZ on 20 May, Willis on her second Budget, price of butter. The interview also covers, in the usual subservient way our media addresses these issues, Willis’s diversionary narrative to scapegoat supermarkets.)

A false zero-sum narrative

This zero-sum narrative about money is virtually uncontested, certainly in the mainstream media. Yet it’s not only sub-standard economics, it is also sub-standard theology. It is appropriate to debate whether ‘God made Man’ or ‘Man made God’; there should be no such contest about ‘Money made Man’ versus ‘Man made Money’.

Money is not (or should not be) God. The one fundamental truth about money, is that it is a human creation; Man made money. Money is a social technology, not a fundamental poverty-imposing constraint. In modern capitalism, central banks supervise the money supply, and can create money at will. The creation of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in 1934 was a critical component of the post-Depression recovery and expansion from 1935 to 1940.

In modern capitalism, central banks act as lenders of last resort and governments as borrowers (and insurers) of last resort. The process of central bank lending and government borrowing is the engine of global capitalism, just as the sun’s energy is the engine that makes ongoing life on Earth possible.

Japan versus Germany

It is instructive to compare the economic fortunes of Japan and Germany this century.

Japan developed the new macroeconomics during its ‘horrible decade’, the 1990s. Its economy has thrived since 2000. The basis of its success, in a country with a financially conservative middle class and low inequality, is to borrow from its large pool of savers, rather than to overtax them. Japan has a stable public debt, sitting at around 240% of GDP since before 2015. And it has a stable fiscal deficit of around 4% each year. It has had interest rates around zero for more than a decade; currently 0.5%. Inflation peaked at 4% in 2023 (in the context of a falling Yen), up from 1% in early 2022. Japan’s current unemployment rate is 2.5%, having peaked at 3% in 2020.

Germany has taken the mercantilist line, which – in essence – posits money as God. It has imposed fiscal austerity on itself since 2010, and on the European Union which it then dominated. And it’s now in a state of socio-economic crisis, with a similar economic growth profile to New Zealand. In its last election (in February), using MMP, only 45% of voters voted for the two major parties. In the more recent opinion polls that support has fallen to around 40%. In the former ‘Communist’ East Germany, support for the two major parties combined is under 25%.

Germany, like most countries in the west, has stubbornly refused to learn from Japan. Fiscal counternarratives are effectively suppressed.

Debt ceiling?

New Zealand, when Grant Robertson was Minister of Finance, decided to impose a de facto ‘debt ceiling’ of 50% of GDP. Nicola Willis – inspired by Ruth Richardson’s (now entrenched) 1994 ‘Fiscal Responsibility Act’ – is entrenching this 50% debt ceiling. Thankfully for our great-grandparents, Michael Joseph Savage (and his Finance Minister, Walter Nash) did not operate similar ‘debt ceiling’ policies.

A policy to cut-back on government spending also has the effect of cutting back government revenue. That’s very basic Keynesian macroeconomics. If we buy less, we produce less, we earn less, and we pay less tax than we otherwise would. The combination of reduced government spending and reduced government revenue is anti-growth; pushed to its limits it represents a capitalist death spiral. The western world found a way out of such a spiral in the 1930s; before World War Two (WW2), but too late to prevent that war and the megadeath which came with it.

A true zero-sum identity

In a world in which the private sector – businesses and households – collectively chooses to run financial surpluses (choosing saving and debt repayment over borrowing), then governments must run deficits. When the world is divided into two sectors – private and public – the successful achievement of a surplus by one of those two sectors must be accompanied by a deficit in the other of those two sectors. In essence, governments can only – and have only – run surpluses or ‘balanced Budgets’ when businesses are running financial deficits. For the global economy as a whole, by definition there can be neither a financial surplus nor a deficit; financial balances add to zero, as an accounting identity.

Business sector deficits were substantially the norm in the twentieth century, but not since about 1990. Government balanced budgets were possible – though not normal – for much of the previous century. Japan met its new challenge in the 1990s, at a time when Japanese businesses were forced by their creditors to run substantial financial surpluses; substantial government deficits were a mathematically necessary part of the solution.

Inequality and increased private risk

The twenty-first century is characterised by high – and often-growing – levels of inequality in the western capitalist world. It is also characterised as a period of growing private risk, including the risk that even rich people (eg the ‘ten-percenters’) will struggle to afford life-saving medications for cancer and other ills. This twenty-first century private risk-profile means that the household component of the private sector is trying to run bigger surpluses. This is a kind of insurance situation; people feel they need ever bigger amounts of contingency savings to cover personal or familial ‘rainy days’. Japanese people led the way in this respect, in the 1990s.

This drive for ever bigger private surpluses – which includes things like debt repayments and retirement savings – means that, for capitalism to survive, governments must run bigger deficits; indeed ‘structural deficits’, in the way that Japan does.

Government spending on big guns.

In one sense the capitalist world – belatedly – is saving itself in this way through fiscal expansion; though only by trying to destroy itself in another way. Hitlernomics – a mutation of Keynesian economics – maintains de facto or de jure debt ceilings for civilian-oriented public spending, while allowing for virtual unlimited military spending on ‘big guns’ and ‘golden domes’. Germany explicitly moved in this direction in March 2025, by using a voted-out ‘lame duck’ parliament to authorise the removal of the de jure debt limit for military spending (and limited ‘infrastructure’ spending).

Urgent need for contestable democratic counter-narratives

We urgently need a democratic counter-narrative, which promotes public debt at least as a stabilising force (and in some cases to take priority over private debt). And a complementary counter-narrative promoting public-equity over pay-equity as an efficient means to correct destabilising inequality, given that excessive inequality is also a deathknell of capitalism. Capitalism depends on selling wage-goods to wage-workers.

*******

Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.