Wow. Now THAT’s a protest!
New Zealand’s Parliament was temporarily suspended yesterday when Māori lawmakers suddenly launched into a haka, a traditional group dance. It was intended to demonstrated the nation’s Indigenous people’s community’s passionate objections to a bill that would reinterpret the country’s founding treaty with the Maoris.
When the proposal was read, and Māori lawmaker Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke was asked how her party, Te Pāti Māori, would vote on the Principles of the Treaty of Waitangi Bill. The response was what you see above.
‘So, you’re not in favor of it, then?”
Other opposition members joined the performance on the floor, and onlooker is the gallery also started dancing. The chamber’s speaker, Gerry Brownlee, temporarily stopped the session. Maipi-Clarke was suspended over the protest.
I’m not going to get in the high weeds of the bill, but will only present…
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day, which is…
Was this an unethical demonstration—disrespectful, disruptive, and a breach of proper decorum—or an ethical one?
I am decidedly undecided on this one. I sure don’t want to give AOC any ideas. The routine was cool, though, and effective.
Ethics Alarms 
it’s one of those things where you wait till they’re finished and then ask if they are done.
Heh.
I’m biased against haka because of the outsized popularity it has and to a degree because of the haka itself.
So I can’t render a fair conclusion.
I mean, if we dumped a bunch of tea on the House Speaker’s desk every time a tax bill was introduced…
The only time I have done the haka was when we were nine and we learned it at school. It is just a silly war dance out of place in modern times.
The Treaty of Waitangi was okay at the time in 1840 when the Māori and the British were two completely different cultures, but now the two cultures have merged mostly into one culture it should be irrelevant but the Māori activists have managed to get it interpreted to have cultural, social, economic and political rights never envisioned in the original treaty giving anyone with an ounce of Māori blood more rights than non Māori leading to an unequal society.
Always great to have EA reporters on the ground wherever ethics news is breaking.
My favorite haka video:
Entire Boys’ School Performs Electrifying, Emotional Dance For Teacher They Lost | HuffPost Good News
Frankly, having gone to an all-boys’ high school, watching this brings me to tears.
I’m always amazed opposing rugby teams let the New Zealand All-Blacks perform a haka on the grounds in the stadiums they are visiting.
While staying at the New Ohtani Hotel in Tokyo, one morning Mrs. OB was riding the elevator down from one of the upper floors. As the elevator made successive stops at the lower floors, large guys dressed in black would get on and say nothing to each other. By the time the car neared the lobby it was full of these huge guys, whereupon one of the guys made an almost under his breath aside to Mrs. OB, “We’re Mormon missionaries.” At the lobby, the doors opened to a mass of photographers and media people crowding around the guys as they exited. They were the All-Blacks in town for a game.
I am/was decidedly undecided as well – but I’m going to force myself to pick one or the other, and my choice is…. ethical.
I’m going to chalk my revulsion up to “ick factor”. It’s an otherwise peaceful protest and consequences have been accepted. The protest gained greater awareness and advocacy for the issue and was time-limited.
Should they do this regularly, it loses value and becomes unethical. In fact, I fully believe Colin Kaepernick’s NFL kneeling could have been successful and ethical if each time he did it, it was for a different person who was unjustly killed and not just an ongoing display of “just because”. Protests need to be time-bound and very specific and not have an outsized impact on a limited number of bystanders or make an impact bigger than the movement itself. Prime example is when you see 10 people shut down a highway with a single chain. If every group of 10 people shut down a highway whenever they wanted to make a point, the highway would never be open. Contrast that to a march where 100,000 people flooded the highway – well, the impact is proportional to the size of the protest.
Honestly – I think we could come up with a good framework of “ethical protesting” for making protests effective without shooting oneself in the foot. What does everyone else think?
Interesting concept, Tim, but probably misses the mark. Radicals who mount protests are playing the long game. There’s probably something on this very point in Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals.” “Out last them,” is a basic tenet, I’m pretty sure, of the radical left. Protests, like government programs and departments, are never time limited. They take on a life of their own. Individual protests may expire of natural causes over time, but they will rise again soon enough in another context. The left is relentless.
Agree and I understand where you’re coming from. But “outlast them” doesn’t have to be I’m going to chain myself to this tree for 2 years. It becomes ineffective.
I’m sure Saul addresses this somewhere. We can ask Hillary Clinton. She probably covered it in her Wellesley thesis on Alinsky.
I am wondering if this is just because they are a minority. Let’s say at a Minneapolis City Council Meeting, some people are mad that the city is blasting the Muslim call to prayer 5 times a day through the city loudspeakers. Imagine if a bunch of large, white men got up and shouted the lyrics to Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue”, while angrily pointing fingers and shaking their fists at a group of Arab men, you would probably rule that as unethical. Explain to me how this is different?
That’s a good idea.
A protest is usually held in response to corruption, or at least a policy that people strongly object to. Corruption is the phenomenon where a group of people do unethical things (illegal or not) and protect themselves from accountability using rules and legal processes. A protest may or may not involve illegal activity, but it is ideally not violent.
Turmoil is the state of affairs where conflicts are resolved using violence, force, and coercion. To prevent turmoil, people create systems of rules, but if too much corruption develops within a system, then people start seeing turmoil as increasingly attractive. Protesting is an intermediate step before turmoil takes place, to give people a chance to end the corruption.
I would expect the goal of a protest to be to raise awareness of how much an issue matters to people, and to call other people to judge the decisions and behavior of the people in power and take action to hold them accountable.
“This is unjust. We strongly object to this. Everyone see how we are mistreated, and express your agreement so that the people in charge know that there will be consequences if they don’t change what they are doing.”
I would hope that a protest would have very clearly defined grievances and ideally a defined goal with associated demands. In accordance with constructive principles, the demands should be reasonable, ethically justifiable, and flexible enough to allow for negotiation and exploring options that people didn’t initially consider. The protest should be done only after pursuing redress through conventional channels.
I think protests in general run into a problem: The United States doesn’t really have a way to hold those in power accountable for bad decisions, even when a protest gains support. We have elections every few years, during which we have to choose between a handful of mediocre candidates. We can’t demand that people in power do anything differently if we don’t have the power to replace them with someone who will do a better job. Candidates can’t just be fired whenever; they need some leeway to make minor mistakes, but there are effectively no consequences for incompetence or corruption.
We may need to figure out a decent process for making sure politicians answer to the people, with objectively defined principles and enough popular buy-in that people won’t feel the need to enforce double-standards depending on whether they like someone’s policies.
Complicating the issue, humans don’t yet know how to define good, constructive demands. They get fixated on overly specific goals that have unintended consequences, and unless there are clear leaders in a movement, it’s difficult to negotiate and explore mutually agreeable approaches to a conflict.
None of “civilization” business works without a reasonably educated population, which is why that’s my ongoing project.
Thoughts?
Thanks.
Not all protests are a response. Some are advocacy. Not all responses are to corruption, some are to events.
Had me until the last 3 words. I would have ended it with “to obtain a just or desired outcome.”
100%. However, often is the case that a person goes to protest and fails to gain the traction they seek and rather than reflect and try another method, they yell louder, protest longer, and find ways to increase their effect without actually increasing their size.
100%. I think there are a lot of people who are turned away from protest because they see the end result as “impossible” or the movement as “undefined” and without a time constraint. Additionally, protest should be a tool in an advocacy plan, but not every day can be protest day. You need day to day operations to advocate and protesting should be confined to a specific goal of raising awareness or showing strength. Running a show of strength when legislature is not in session sort of misses the mark.
There’s an intelligence gap here too. Are we talking about “bad decisions” or “decisions I don’t like”? In reality, we could probably talk in circles, debate, argue, and still be of like minds in this discussion because what we really need is to talk specifics. We should identify something in the future to analyze and discuss in this “ethical protesting framework” and see if we could get to some agreeable criticisms and praise for how it unfolds.
Right. When a movement kicks off, if there is no organizer or leader in a movement, it can be so much more complicated. George Floyd is an example where it went straight to turmoil. Yes, there were people out to be seen, as a show of force who wanted justice. Justice in America will always be “charged and pending trial”. The minute it was known that charges would be brought, everyone should have returned home… but many stayed out and participated in turmoil as a threat to those in power “this is what you get when this happens.” It was vigilantism.
I agree. We have to be more educated and intelligent in our actions. One main problem I see is that we have maybe too much “social studies” geared toward making activists without education for language, science, or math. To me, that’s by design. There seems to be a lot of targeting for inner city schools to teach students how oppressed they are with shit schools and it’s a self fulfilling prophecy because all they taught those kids was how to be oppressed when they should have been teaching language, speech, debate, math, entrepreneurship, science, home economics, etc.
Most importantly though, there isn’t enough taught to kids that sometimes, being heard is all you can ask for and much of the time, you aren’t going to win. Accept defeat and find another peaceful way.
I would lean slightly unethical, but mostly because of circumstance and could be persuaded otherwise. I am for protests where warranted, but I struggle to find the warrant in this case. Otherwise, it feels like normalizing disruptive protests for everything any politician disagrees with (shades of Kant’s categorical imperative). The Maoris had a way to make their voice heard with a vote without the performance. It feels like the meme from Anchorman – “well that escalated quickly”. I will say it gives me a chuckle when my overactive imagination envisions Nancy Pelosi doing this after tearing up the State of the Union speech.
Unethical. They are members of the legislature: they get to argue and vote for their point of view. Protesting is for those who believe depend on elected representatives to represent them
I say unethical. First of all, this protest is against equality and for retaining white New Zealanders as second class citizens under the law. Second, this is a war chant and dance. I would bet that if this was translated into English, you would never allow this to be shouted in the face of political opponents in a legislature. Its purpose is to intimidate the opposition.