History’s judgement of the manner in which the Coalition Government’s majority expressed its racially-charged hostility towards Te Pāti Māori is unlikely to be kind, says Chris Trotter

By Chris Trotter*

The 'tyranny of the majority' isn’t good, but it’s a whole lot better than being tyrannised by a minority.

As a young varsity student I marched in the streets against a regime in which 3 million whites tyrannised 25 million blacks.

A few years later, I recall veteran trade union organisers telling me, a new recruit to the cause, that anyone who called a strike on the basis of a 51/49 percent vote was an idiot. Worse than that, they were almost certainly leading their members into the jaws of a major defeat. “If you can’t get at least two-thirds of the membership backing a strike,” they warned, “then you don’t call one.”

It is always reassuring to recall the simple wisdom of ordinary people – most especially their rational sensitivity to the consequences of irrational actions. Those who cry ‘Let justice be done though the heavens fall!’ are seldom to be found living in the rubble.

Which is not to say that ordinary people are always right. At the start of 1981, a clear majority of New Zealanders told pollsters that they supported the scheduled tour of the Springbok Rugby team. New Zealand’s populist prime minister, Rob Muldoon, determined to do justice by that majority, set the country on a collision course with heaven.

Eight months later, with the Springboks safely returned to their minority-ruled homeland, New Zealanders’ views had changed. Having been given a taste of what it feels like to have heavenly masonry crashing-down all around them, the delights of uncompromising leadership had become much harder to identify. The pollsters were now recording a majority of citizens opposing further sporting contacts with Apartheid South Africa.

There were still enough Tour supporters voting in key marginal seats, however, to secure a third term for Muldoon’s National Party.

Seemingly, it is possible for the majority to be both right and wrong – albeit not simultaneously. As Labour’s Mike Moore used to warn young political players: “It’s a sin to be right at the wrong time!”

The week just past has given New Zealanders pause to reflect on the subject of majorities, minorities, and the electoral consequences of doing the right thing at the wrong time. The cause of that pause? The (delayed) parliamentary debate on the Report of the Privileges Committee.

That report, and its punitive recommendations, was presented on the strength of a narrow partisan majority. The Coalition Government had, not unreasonably, given itself the most votes to cast on this most powerful of parliamentary committees, and it used them to ensure that the three Te Pati Māori MPs who participated in a disorderly, out-of-their-seats haka at the conclusion of the First Reading debate of the Treaty Principles Bill would, with Parliament’s assent, receive punishments of unprecedented harshness.

That the Clerk of the House had cautioned against relying on the brute force of a simple majority, advising instead that the Committee should seek the broadest possible cross-party consensus on its recommendations, cut no ice with the Coalition’s representatives. They had adjudged the risk of the Committee being seen as a government-driven vehicle for running over its enemies to be one worth taking.

When the Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, announced that he and his coalition partners would be voting in favour of the Committee’s recommendations, the die was cast. There would be no compromise: Rawiri Waititi and Debbie Rarewa-Packer would be suspended from Parliament, without pay, for 21 days. Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke would be unseated and go unpaid for 7 days.

These penalties went far beyond even the most dire of their antecedents. The harshest previous penalty was the 3-day suspension imposed on Rob Muldoon for disrespecting the Speaker of the House.

Those outside the tight loops of National’s and Labour’s internal polling are in no position to judge whether either party had an early heads-up on the public’s generally supportive response to Te Pāti Māori’s comeuppance. The feelings of the electorate only became generally known thanks to the RNZ-Reid Research Poll data released on the day of the final vote. It showed 54.2 percent of New Zealanders believing the penalties imposed were either “about right” or “too lenient”.

The Coalition partners had every reason, therefore, to congratulate themselves for being right at the right time. If it is true that vox populi, vox Dei – the voice of the people is the voice of God – then the punishments meted out to Te Pāti Māori by the Privileges Committee now boasted a divine seal of approval.

But vox populi is expressed in many ways. That Pakeha voters largely endorsed the Privileges Committee’s judgement is undeniable, but equally undeniable is the fact that the video of Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke’s spinetingling challenge to the Act Party’s Treaty Principles Bill has now been viewed by close to one billion of the planet’s inhabitants.

I imagine their reaction to Te Pāti Māori’s haka performance being roughly the same as my own reaction to Native American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie’s extraordinary 1966 release “My Country ‘tis of Thy People You’re Dying” – eye-opening.

It took me many years to accept that the differences between Uncle Sam’s treatment of Native Americans, and the treatment meted out to Māori by our own ancestors, were far fewer than I had been encouraged to believe. The world’s judgement of what went down in the New Zealand House of Representatives on Thursday, 5 June 2025, is likely to be somewhat different to our own.

In the ears of the formerly-colonised peoples of the world, the Privileges Committee’s outrage at the breach of the New Zealand Parliament’s Standing Orders will likely ring hollow. All-too-reminiscent, perhaps, of the self-righteous tantrums of their former colonial masters. Some may even recall Mahatma Gandhi’s succinct summation of the decolonising process: “First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win.”

Rob Muldoon was furious when the Springboks vs Waikato game was abandoned due to protesters occupying the pitch, and it is likely that a majority of New Zealanders felt the same. For Nelson Mandela, however, listening in his prison cell on Robbin Island, “it was like the sun coming out”. By 1984 a majority of New Zealanders were as proud of those protesters as Mandela had been three years earlier.

No matter how many New Zealanders now feel “tyrannised” by the Māori minority and their intransigent parliamentary representatives, History’s judgement of the manner in which the Coalition Government’s majority expressed its racially-charged hostility towards Te Pāti Māori is unlikely to be kind.

Right now, Labour and the Greens, the parties which sought a principled compromise on how to deal with Te Pāti Māori, may acknowledge ruefully to being “right at the wrong time”. There is, however, a better-than-even chance that New Zealanders, recalling Thursday’s vote 40 years hence, will say, simply, that they were right – full stop.

And a majority of all their fellow citizens will likely agree with them.

*Chris Trotter has been writing and commenting professionally about New Zealand politics for more than 30 years. He writes a weekly column for interest.co.nz. His work may also be found at http://bowalleyroad.blogspot.com.