Points of order
After a sleepy recess week, it’s all kicked off. This week has seen the worst of Parliament’s workplace culture aired in the House, claims of secretive separatism and old-fashioned racism in the House, and backroom discussions about declaring ‘‘genocide’’ in the House. If all that parliamentary action wasn’t enough, the Beehive has been busy pushing out a public service pay freeze that landed like a lead balloon, and making good on a promise to entirely change the industrial relations landscape.
A bouquet to Brooke van Velden who used her cross-party lawmaking experience (her resume includes work on the End of Life Choice Bill) to usher through a parliamentary motion decrying the ‘‘severe human rights abuses’’ being perpetrated against the Uyghur Muslim minority in the Xinjiang province of China. Getting the whole of Parliament to agree on condemning the abuse as genocide – as van Velden initially proposed – was always going to be a stretch, given the high legal threshold of the crime, the Labour Government’s need to preserve its position with Beijing, and the majority it holds in the House.
The messy Wednesday session in which the Xinjiang motion passed was made more confusing by Golriz Ghahraman fudging an utterly symbolic attempt to seek an amendment vote on the original ‘‘genocide’’ motion in the House. It was a last-minute gambit attempted in the heat of the moment, but the Green MP didn’t have a grasp on the required parliamentary procedure, and it failed on the spot.
Enough has been said about the lateevening battle between Trevor Mallard and Chris Bishop in the House over his handling of a defamation claim arising from his alleging a parliamentary staffer had committed ‘‘rape’’. ‘‘No-one covered themselves in glory,’’ has to be the most repeated, and most accurate, assessment of the sorry affair in the days since. But that group of no-one also included Willow-Jean Prime, who escaped Jacinda Ardern’s ire but deserves a mention. Standing to take a swing at the National MPs prosecuting Mallard, she accused them of slandering the victim at the centre of the saga -- ‘‘It really sounds like she asked for it. Her skirt was too short. She was drunk’’. For an MP supposedly concerned about the victim at the centre of this, she only served to inflame the situation by levelling a plainly incorrect allegation.
Across the aisle, Tim van de Molen showed a similar lack of restraint, yelling over Kieran McAnulty that ‘‘Wairarapa’s coming back to us’’. Really? It was hardly the moment for electoral politics, and we understand van de Molen received a talking to over this.
Somewhat lost amid Judith Collins’ attack on Labour’s claimed ‘‘separatist’’ agenda and a busy news day was the frustration aired by Rawiri Waititi. Annoyed that ‘‘two Pa¯keha¯ women are talking about Ma¯ori issues when they’re not talking to Ma¯ori themselves’’, Waititi raised a point of order (which the Speaker ruled wasn’t really a point of order): ‘‘Over the last two days, all I have heard is Ma¯ori, Ma¯ori, Ma¯ori bashing in this House ... So we want an explanation of why that is happening.’’ Waititi ended the week without finding an answer to his question. There’s few avenues for someone to pursue such a claim of racism in the House. However, Kris Faafoi wasn’t willing to buy into the bicultural narrative. He was questioned by Melissa Lee on ‘‘political bias’’ in NZ On Air’s $55 million funding, in which she attempted to rope the non-issue into National’s narrative that Labour was boosting Ma¯ori separatism. Why did the fund have a focus on Ma¯ori political journalism, and not the same for non-Ma¯ori or other ethnic media? Faafoi said NZ On Air had for decades funded journalism, including Q +A, The Nation, Tangata Pasifika and, he made a point of emphasising, Asia Downunder. Lee was the producer and presenter of Asia Downunder, before becoming a National Party MP.