Act accuses Speaker Gerry Brownlee of failing to address racial harassment in Parliament

Speaker Gerry Brownlee has been accused of ignoring harassment in Parliament. Photo / Mark Mitchell

By Anneke Smith of RNZ

The Act Party says its confidence in the Speaker of the House is “falling by the day”, accusing Gerry Brownlee of failing to address racial harassment in Parliament.

It comes as Children’s Minister and Act MP Karen Chhour says she is under constant personal attack in the halls of power and no longer feels safe at work.

“It no longer feels like I can walk these corridors without fear of personal attacks from either other members around the House or even from outside the House as well,” Chhour said.

“It just feels like this environment is so toxic. How can we actually do our job? How can we actually do what we need to do in this place if we fear what we say is going to cause that kind of retaliation and it’s not going to be called out?”

Chhour said she raised concerns about a comment Te Pati Māori MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi made in the House in May, in which Kapa-Kingi told the ministers Chhour had been “made a puppet” by her party in te reo Māori.

“I felt that that was wrong and she should apologise for that. Then [the Speaker] said he had spoken to her, she was going to apologise to me... crickets, nothing.”

A spokesperson for Te Pati Māori denied the party had been asked to apologise.

The Speaker’s Office said Brownlee was not commenting.

It follows a heated exchange in Parliament yesterday, when Act leader David Seymour asked to table correspondence between the Act Party’s whip and the Speaker.

“You appear to give a green light to racial harassment in this Parliament,” Seymour told Brownlee.

Act had written to the Speaker last week, asking Brownlee to refer an incident involving one of its MPs to the Privileges Committee.

One of its MPs, Laura Trask, felt “shaken, saddened and angry”, the letter read, after MPs from the Greens and Te Pati Māori opposed her chairing a sub-committee on the repeal of section 7AA of the Oranga Tamariki Act.

“She was told by other members that it would be better if it was someone who was Māori or Pasifika because submitters, quote, ‘could not see themselves in her’.

“In no workplace in New Zealand is that acceptable. The Speaker has an obligation to stand up to that. He hasn’t,” Seymour said.

Brownlee did give Seymour the chance to table his correspondence, but it was blocked by other parties.

Act MPs then used their party lapel pins, in a move later dubbed ‘lapelgate’, to protest the Speaker’s handling of their complaint, refusing to take them off in the House despite the display of any party logos being against the rules.

“There’s a bigger issue where one of our MPs has been seriously discriminated [against], harassed on a racial ground. We think that’s wrong,” Seymour said.

Both the Greens and Labour said Act was misrepresenting what happened.

Committee member Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni said the opposition to Trask chairing the sub-committee was based on her relative inexperience, not her ethnicity.

“This is a really disappointing and actually quite ridiculous misrepresentation of what happened... the main part of the conversation was the sensitive nature of the submissions and the fact that the vast majority are opposed to this bill.

“Laura is from the Act Party that is proposing this bill. We don’t know that Laura has the experience with the social sector in the communities and the people that are coming through.”

Leader of the House Chris Bishop said things are pretty heated at the moment and, on ‘lapelgate’, MPs could do better.

“We’ve got a whole lot of new MPs, I think we’ve got 70-something new MPs who haven’t been MPs before so it’s quite a youthful Parliament in the sense of experience... so it’s quite a rambunctious place at the moment.”