Bob Edlin: Tākuta Ferris – chided by Shane Jones for delivering apology only in Maori....

Tākuta Ferris – chided by Shane Jones for delivering apology only in Maori – says his generation was born to agitate

Tākuta Ferris found to have misled the House…

That was the headline on a post by David Farrar on Kiwiblog yesterday after the Privileges Committee reported:

The Privileges Committee has considered a question of privilege concerning a member’s denial that he made a particular statement in debate, and recommends that Tākuta Ferris be required to apologise for deliberately misleading the House.

Farrar says the irony in this is that Ferris was accusing other MPs of being liars, but in fact the record has shown Ferris himself lied.

We asked Mr Ferris to provide written comment about the question of privilege, which he has done. We then invited Mr Ferris to a hearing of evidence to elucidate some of those comments. Mr Ferris declined our invitation.

Farrar says it is rare for an MP to decline to appear before the Privileges Committee to explain their version of events, and allow questioning.

Making an inaccurate statement in the House is likely to involve a single temporal moment in the charged atmosphere of the debating chamber, and it is appropriate that inadvertent misleading without intent should not be judged too harshly. Denying that a misleading statement was made may be quite different—it may involve a sustained course of action and judgement, rather than a single moment.

Farrar notes this is a key difference.

We reiterate that the House operates on the basis that members are assumed to behave truthfully and honourably. The House must be able to rely on the truthfulness of its members in order to operate. In deliberately misleading the House, Mr Ferris has impeded the House in its ability to do so. For this reason, we find that Mr Ferris committed a contempt.

Farrar noted that the Privileges Committee has nine members – National (3), Labour (2), ACT 1, NZ First 1, Greens 1 and TPM 1. The report doesn’t have a minority view, so presumably the decision was unanimous or by consensus.

Parliament debated the Privileges Committee’s report later in the day.

Ferris contributed to the debate.

But earlier in the debate, New Zealand First’s Shane Jones delivered a rebuke.

The Hansard record says:

Hon SHANE JONES (Minister for Regional Development): It’s more in sadness than anything else I take this call, because Māoridom has such high expectations when the younger generation come to Parliament that they’ll not only bring the passion of the electorate they represent but they’ll bring enough humility to respect the House which reflects the inordinately strong traditions of our democracy—one of the longest unbroken chains of democracy in the civilised world. There are three legs to this offensive stool: (1) the committee must determine whether or not the words uttered were misleading, (2) members of the committee must determine whether or not the misleading statement was known at that time to be actually inaccurate, (3) it must have been the intention to mislead the House. Those three legs are laid out in our parliamentary encyclopaedia.

This young, inexperienced, largely unknown member has come to this House, levelled serious attacks against other members which caused our party, through our whip, to make a formal complaint. These decisions are not taken lightly. But sadly, the complaint cannot deal with the deeper virus. The virus is that member, day after day, swaggers and shows an utter contempt for the obligations and duties that fall upon us as taxpayer representatives of the public. Look no further than the surreptitious manner of that politician’s apology. An attempt not to offer the apology in both languages. And I’m saddened by that. I know that te reo Māori is one of our official languages. I know the member is allowed to use te reo. The people, however, who deserve the apology on the basis of a finding of contempt, they ought to have heard that apology in both languages of the Treaty. An unwillingness to offer an apology in English shows contempt for the vast majority of the New Zealand members of the public who pay his salary.

Of course, this is a small element of seeking to deploy and weaponize tikanga and Māori culture to pretend if you have Māori blood and you’re in this Parliament, you don’t answer to the same rules and regulations. I prey and hope that the New Zealand public at the next electoral experience deliver an appropriate response to that level of superciliousness. We cannot afford to have this ethnic warping of our democracy. If you come to Parliament, you accept, along with your fellow New Zealanders, an obligation to uphold the duties of being a parliamentarian. If you do not want to uphold those obligations, get another job. Don’t come and deprecate, don’t come and take for granted, and do not trivialise the inordinate privilege that many other Māori members of the iwi community, or the Tai Tonga community, have sought to achieve the status of being here to replace. Such people as Eruera Tirikatene, such people as Patterson from Ngāi Tahu in the 1800s, such people as the All Black Tutekawa Wyllie. Do you really think that they would have thought there was any honour in giggling, trivialising, demonising this Parliament through that display of not only committing an act of contempt but accusing my leader, Winston Peters, and others, of being liars.

Now, there may be elements in our iwi community who think this is a gross overreaction. This is not an overreaction. This is a level of the obligation that sits upon everyone. Because when we are here as parliamentarians, we have an indivisible duty. And it’s about time—and this report actually affirms the importance of not splitting rules to suit people who enjoy a different ethnicity. Yes he did make an apology in te reo. I’ve been speaking te reo since that guy was born, and I would have had no hesitation in offering an apology with humility to every single New Zealander who I have treated with contempt and I take for granted the money they pay every day for the handsome salary we enjoy as public servants. No. This member beats to a drum where he believes he’s impervious, he’s beyond any of this criticism because he’s blessed with some pure, non-muggles Māori blood. Shame on you for bringing your own people into disrepute. Shame on your leaders for not insisting you show whakaiti—you show humility. And shame on you for misrepresenting and bringing whakamā to the long list of leaders who have held the position of the Māori seat. There is no honour in this arrogant, no honour in this childish, no honour in this contemptuous display of disregard for what it means to be a parliamentarian.

I’m very proud to stand and give this speech and to stand with the architect of this report. Too afraid to turn up in the courtyard of Parliament’s highest committee. No, it’s in here. I can quote the invitation was given. The invitation was not taken up from the very member who says that a number of us are too afraid in our political life to stand up and be counted. So to the committee who have come up with this report, sadly there are likely to be other instances. Let it be a lesson for those of us who treat with absolute privilege that we are here that this report is an indictment. This report is a very sad day. And hopefully there is the opportunity for the person in the wrong to learn a lesson: that without whakaiti, there is no rangatiratanga. The rangatira who does not understand duties and obligations is whakahēhē, whakamanamana. These are Māori words that we know very deeply, and they call for a level of modesty, humility, and the tohu of a rangatira. Thank you very much.

Ferris – the last MP to speak – said :

TĀKUTA FERRIS (Te Pāti Māori—Te Tai Tonga):

[Authorised reo Māori text to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

[Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

I’m not afraid of consequence or anything like that. I made some statements on the day; I wrote the speech. I’m the holder of three undergraduate degrees and a master’s degree—written plenty of stuff. I know the nuances of the English language, and I know what I wrote, and that’s the view that I had on the day. It’s the view I maintain. There is a—

SPEAKER: I’ll just suggest that the—we’re debating the report itself. It’s not the right time to go into a justification that might suggest that the report is wrong. I don’t mean to interrupt the member, but there’s a point where we have to move on and it’s what comes before us that’s more important than what has happened some time back. So can I just suggest that in the remaining time, the member concentrates on the process—you don’t have to use all the time, by the way—and not get into a position where there is now contest from the member about the event for which he has apologised to the House.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Kia ora. Tēnā koe e te Pīka. I’m not offering any contest; I accept the ruling. I accept the ruling, and that’s fine. I understand that the House is uncomfortable with me, and I think that’s fine, too. Te iwi Maori have long, long fought to be heard appropriately, and our presence here is in that vein. We come here—I come here, yeah, as a younger Māori than Shane, but I’m a man of 46 years. I have three children. Two of them are grown; they’re nearly all out of kura. We’ve been doing this a long time, and we understand it well. We know that our position will agitate in this House, but it is a position that our generation was born into, raised, taught, developed into, and it will not be going away. It’s not disrespectful.

[Authorised reo Māori text to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

[Authorised translation to be inserted by the Hansard Office.]

What we are doing is not disrespectful.

As I sit here—well, I was sitting upstairs, actually, and someone was suggesting that the mana of te reo Māori may not be enough, may not suffice, in this two-partner House. I’m not too sure about that. If, deeply, truly, this Whare believes that an apology in te reo Māori may not be enough, I can guarantee you this: my apology in te reo Māori means more than my apology in English.

So I’ll leave it there. I’m OK with the ruling. I may not be OK with some things that were said, but we’ll wait for an opportunity on a marae somewhere in the future. Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Kia ora koutou.

We await with interest to learn what Ferris has to say when the opportunity arises.

One difference between speaking in Parliament and speaking on a marae, of course, is that whatever is said in the House of Representatives is protected by Parliamentary Privilege.

Bob Edlin is a veteran journalist and editor for the Point of Order blog HERE. - where this article was sourced.