Speaker’s lack of action criticised
THE Act New Zealand party have accused Gerry Brownlee of failing to address racial harassment in Parliament and its confidence in the Speaker of the House is ‘‘falling by the day’’.
It comes as Children’s Minister and Act MP Karen Chhour says she is under constant personal attack in the halls of power and no longer feels safe at work.
‘‘It no longer feels like I can walk these corridors without fear of personal attacks from either other members around the House or even from outside the House as well,’’ Ms Chhour said.
‘‘It just feels like this environment is so toxic. How can we actually do our job? How can we actually do what we need to do in this place if we fear what we say is going to cause that kind of retaliation and it’s not going to be called out?’’
Ms Chhour said she raised concerns about a comment Te Pāti Māori MP Mariameno KapaKingi made in the House in May, in which she told ministers she had been ‘‘made a puppet’’ by her party in te reo Māori.
‘‘I felt that that was wrong and she should apologise for that. Then [the Speaker] said he had spoken to her, she was going to apologise to me . . . crickets, nothing.’’
A Te Pa ¯ti Māori spokesperson denied that the party had been asked to apologise.
The Speaker’s Office said Mr Brownlee was not commenting. It follows a heated exchange in Parliament on Wednesday, when Act leader David Seymour asked to table correspondence between the Act Party’s whip and the Speaker.
‘‘You appear to give a green light to racial harassment in this Parliament,’’ Mr Seymour told Mr Brownlee.
Act had written to the Speaker last week, asking Mr Brownlee to refer an incident involving one of its MPs to the Privileges Committee.
Act MP Laura Trask felt ‘‘shaken, saddened and angry’’, the letter read, after MPs from the Greens and Te Pāti Māori opposed her chairing a subcommittee on the repeal of section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act. ‘‘She was told by other members that it would be better if it was someone who was Māori or Pasifika because submitters, quote, ‘could not see themselves in her’.
‘‘In no workplace in New Zealand is that acceptable. The Speaker has an obligation to stand up to that. He hasn’t,’’ Mr Seymour said. Mr Brownlee did give Mr Seymour the chance to table his correspondence, but it was blocked by other parties.
Act MPs then used their party lapel pins, in a move later dubbed ‘‘lapelgate’’, to protest the Speaker’s handling of their complaint; refusing to take them off in the House despite the display of any party logos being against the rules.
‘‘There’s a bigger issue where one of our MPs has been seriously discriminated, harassed on a racial ground. We think that’s wrong,’’ Mr Seymour said.
Both the Greens and Labour said Act was misrepresenting what happened.
Committee member Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni said the opposition to
Ms Trask chairing the subcommittee was based on her relative inexperience, not her ethnicity.
‘‘This is a really disappointing and actually quite ridiculous misrepresentation of what happened . . . the main part of the conversation was the sensitive nature of the submissions and the fact that the vast majority are opposed to this Bill.
‘‘Laura is from the Act Party that is proposing this Bill. We don’t know that Laura has the experience with the social sector in the communities and the people that are coming through.’’
Leader of the House Chris Bishop said things were pretty heated and on ‘‘lapelgate’’, MPs could do better. ‘‘We’ve got a whole lot of new MPs, I think we’ve got 70something new MPs who haven’t been MPs before, so it’s quite a youthful Parliament in the sense of experience . . . so it’s quite a rambunctious place at the moment.’’ — RNZ