Perspective with Heather du Plessis-Allan: Will we ever get order back into Parliament?

It sounds like Gerry Brownlee thinks that the Māori Party punishment is too harsh.

He started Parliament today with the Speaker's ruling and he dropped some pretty strong hints that he thinks that 21 days without pay for Debbie and Rawiri over that haka is too much.

He called the punishment very 'severe' and unprecedented because up til now, the harshest punishment has been 3 days, not 21 days.

He pointed out that the punishment was only carried by a narrow majority on the Privileges Committee - and that going through with the punishment as it stands will deprive the Māori Party of their ability to vote in the House for several sitting days, and that Parliament does not have to go through with it.

He told them that - he said, you don't have to go through with it, Parliament can change the punishment.

Now, I can't say I agree with them on this for one simple reason, and that is deterrence.

Whatever the punishment is going to end up being, it has to be harsh enough to stop the Māori Party doing this again - or at least try to stop them doing this again - because this is a strategy from them.

We need to see this stuff for what it is. This isn't like Julie Anne Genter losing her rag in Parliament in the heat of the moment, apologizing, and then ending up with just a censure and perhaps never doing it again.

The Māori Party break the rules deliberately. This is their strategy, so you can assume that they will keep on doing it.

And the reason they keep on doing it is because it gets them attention.

Attention for wearing sneakers in the house, attention for wearing a cowboy hat in the house, attention for doing a haka in the house, attention for not turning up to the Privileges Committee, attention for leaking the recommendations of the Privileges Committee - the list just goes on.

They say this is about tikanga - but it's not about tikanga. Sneakers are not tikanga.

This is about breaking rules for attention - it's a PR strategy.

3 days without pay is not going to deter them. To be honest, I don't even know that 21 days without pay will deter them, but it surely has a better chance of doing it.

And for the record, a 21-day suspension is not that wild in the UK, where our Parliament derives from.

Just in the last two years, three MPs in the UK have copped suspensions of 30 days or more. In 2019, one guy was suspended for six months.

Now I don't know that we will ever get order back into Parliament the way things have gone in the last few months, but if we don't try, we definitely won't.

So in that context, 21 days doesn't seem overly harsh.

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