The Singers and the Song.

Far from being a “lynching”, the suspension of three Te Pāti Māori MPs from the House was little more than a peevish Pakeha protest.

THAT Te Pāti Māori’s punishment was excessive and driven by racism is certainly an arguable proposition. That it amounted to a lynching, as at least two left-wing bloggers are asserting, isn’t just wrong, it bears witness to a truly appalling level of ignorance about what a lynching entails. Hyperbole has its place in political discourse, but words like “lynching”, “holocaust” and “genocide” should only be used to reference the historical phenomena they describe. They should never be used metaphorically.

If Te Pāti Māori had fallen victim to a real lynching, Rawiri Waititi, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer and Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke wouldn’t be suspended from the House of Representatives, they would have been suspended from the nearest tree or lamp-post: naked, bloody, and very, very dead.

What’s more, that suspension wouldn’t have been the result of a parliamentary vote, it would have been the final act of a homicidal mob. Having grown large enough to render official protection impossible, that mob would have broken into Parliament, seized the three breachers of privilege, hauled them out of the building, dragged them down the steps, stripped them, beat them senseless, strung them up, and then, jeering, cheering and clapping, watched them die.

To assert, even metaphorically, that New Zealand is capable of producing such a mob is to announce one’s more-or-less complete separation from reality.

To describe an event as a lynching also entails the assumption that all those who carried out and/or applauded this obscene act of public torture and murder would suffer no legal penalty or reputational damage. That’s because lynching is a form of socially-sanctioned terrorism, which can only be sustained in communities so far gone in their hatred of the racial “other” that any horrors perpetrated in the name of keeping those others “in their place” are perceived as being both right and necessary.

Has New Zealand ever played host to such communities? No, it has not. The settler state of the 1860s was not, however, averse to the occasional judicial murder.

The killing of the German-born missionary (and probable government spy) Carl Volkner by Pai Mārire warriors at Opotiki in January 1865 prompted Governor George Grey to authorise a punitive expedition which, in addition to the usual violent clashes, heavy Māori losses, and land confiscations, caused four warriors to be falsely charged with Volkner’s murder, transported to Auckland, tried, found guilty, and hanged.

It was this incident to which Rawiri Waititi made reference by holding aloft a hangman’s noose and quoting the words of one of the condemned warriors, Mokomoko: Tangohia mai te taura i taku kakī kia waiata au i taku waiata. (“Take the rope from my neck that I may sing my song.”)

“Nothing Te Pāti Māori does is accidental”, Debbie Ngarewa-Packer told the House during the three hour debate of the Privileges Committee’s recommendations. Certainly, Waititi’s referencing of Mokomoko was carefully calculated to surface the memory of Māori military resistance to the Settler Government’s abrogation of te Tiriti o Waitangi, and to link the injustices of the 1860s with the conduct of the National-Act-NZ First Government in 2025.

Linking the past to the present constituted a large part of Te Pāti Māori’s presentation to the House of Representatives. What was happening there was nothing like as violent and destructive as Governor Grey’s military expedition to the Bay of Plenty, but its punitive intent was just as plain.

When Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke rose in the House during the closing stages of the First Reading debate of David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill and unleashed the spine-tingling haka heard round the world, it was one of those moments when, somewhere far beneath the fine stone buildings of the state and the towering citadels of commercial power, something foundational shifted. And somehow, through all their protective stupidity and utterly unwarranted arrogance, the Coalition Government felt it – and were suddenly made afraid.

And nothing makes Pakeha angrier than being made to feel afraid – especially by those who were supposed (after 30 years of Treaty Settlements) to have been rendered safe. Mokomoko was hanged in 1866. The creation of the four Māori Seats took place the following year. Doubtless, they were the work of Pakeha parliamentarians similarly convinced that Governor Grey and his 12,000 imperial troops had rendered the Māori of their own time – safe.

So ham-fisted and lacking in political subtlety was the Privileges Committee Report; so unabashedly partisan; and so far removed from all historical precedent; that it may be safely assumed that its masterful expression of Ti Riri Pakeha (the white man’s anger) was almost entirely unconscious. Conceived in the toxic historical fog of this country’s bastardised Westminster System, the Report honoured the traditions of parliamentary sovereignty laid down in Seventeenth Century England – forgetting entirely that it was a time of radical social upheaval and political revolt.

For laughing in the face of politicians still weighed-down by all the venerable vestments of a political institution poorly copied from the original, Te Pāti Māori had to be punished. To experience the performance of a haka that was neither authorised nor respectful; to be made to feel in their bones its raw power and, by extension, the power of the young and angry rangatahi to whom it was addressed; was intolerable. Far from being a “lynching”, the judgement of the House was little more than a peevish Pakeha protest.

After all, “We” had won, Māori had lost, and they were expected to eat that bitter reality and declare it delicious. But, that was always a deeply racist expectation. Te Pāti Māori’s “crime” was to remind us, forcefully, and with performative élan, that Seymour’s attempt to drown out the songs of te Tiriti with the rock-n-roll of neoliberal capitalism was always doomed to fail.

Parliament can vote to suspend the singers for twenty-one days, but it cannot hang the song.