RODNEY HIDE: Parliamentary Licence with a halo
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer used the c-word in the House on Thursday. Willie Jackson played gallant. The Assistant Speaker called the Serjeant-at-Arms to walk him out.
Cue the usual sermon. Double standards. Mana wahine. Oppression.
Wrong sermon.
The first point is that a woman swore. In Parliament. The second point is what now counts as courage, and what now counts as defending women.
Parliament used to elevate the street. Now it imports it.
It is not just one word. It is the pile.
No ties. Hats in the chamber. Prayer dropped. Threats of violence — often from the women who once got the protection of manners. Each change alone is survivable. Together they are a steady decline in standards dressed up as progress.
Gallantry used to mean protecting women from that language. Now it means defending the woman who uses it. That is not liberation. That is a licence with a halo.
I know how seriously the Chair used to land.
I used to needle Speaker Margaret Wilson. Once when she ordered me out I packed my papers deliberately slowly. Exasperated, she called the Serjeant.
That evening I bumped into Clerk Dave McGee in an airport lounge. He explained what a touch-and-go thing it was. If the Serjeant laid a hand on me, I was gone — in the Standing Orders, suspended for the rest of the year; in McGee’s plain English, out.
The office is hundreds of years old. Originally a royal officer with power to arrest without warrant. The Commons got one in the fifteenth century so the House could arrest people who offended its privileges. The Mace was the authority to arrest. Later it became the symbol of the House itself.
He is not a bouncer. He is the House’s own muscle. Calling him is nuclear. Ordinary “leave the Chamber” orders are common. Serjeant escorts after refusal are rare. McGee recalled, after my turn in 2005, that the last one he could think of was under Speaker Gerard Wall in the mid-1980s.
This week the Serjeant was called again. Not for insolence over packing up. For the theatre that follows when coarseness is sold as mana and a mate rides in as gallant for the swearer.
Brooke van Velden said the word in May last year quoting a newspaper column. That was a misjudgement. Soft warning. No ejection. That was a misjudgement. Ngarewa-Packer put it on the record again in August referring to that episode. No sanction. That was a misjudgement. On Thursday the same word, a disputed aside about the Chair, and out she went — followed by Willie, assisted by the Serjeant.
Same vocabulary. Different setting. The Chair still has one last tool.
The Serjeant is still there.
The standards are not.
Where does it end? When every sitting needs him. And he is attacked as a symbol of colonial oppression. Our Parliament becomes a rabble and Westminster is lost.
Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader
SOMETHING IS SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH OUR SPECIES. All this Progressive Liberalism might not be such a good idea? Rodney might like to comment on the problems that young men and women are having socializing in these strange times. I hear so may women complaining that there are "no men left" and that no men approach them any more. I hear young men saying relationships with women are to difficult and even dangerous to bother with.
Younger women say that younger men don't meet their physical and finaincial standards so they have multiple brief "hook ups" with older men. Older women are asking why they are so lonely and undesired when they are so "hot", liberated, independent, assertive, successful and AMAZING.
As many say "Like, what…
It’s called the lowest common denominator - this process has been going on for decades, and it’s deliberate. Draging the standards to the gutter is being used by the activists, it’s the only place their anti colonial, victimhood rubbish can exist. It cannot exist in reasoned debate.
Not one among the fruit loops in the hive with the balls to call a spade a spade....
Why are we not surprised ?
Its not a measure for a lack of leadership as much as a measure of how much lower they have sunk
and yet the trough flows on... FFS
What really worries me about this post, is the absence of reaction to it.
This was an event, unprecedented, and a new low in NZ political history.
A real worry, about what is very close to anarchy in our parliament, totally unchecked, accepted, and tolerated without any consequence to the perpetrator whatsoever,
Maybe the 'racist' label, and associated 'fear' is working after all.
A great concern.
Nobody should get away with this utter dispespect for the society they have the privilege to live in, and the people she claims to represent..
Common as muck imho, and no place in our house of representatives.
Ameni.
"Together they are a steady decline in standards dressed up as progress."
It's not just in parliament. There is now a rot infesting society. A rot dressed up as progressivism, as mana, as inclusion.
Every week I am becoming more and more convinced that NZ is a place to escape from, while I still can.