Points of Order — Oral Questions—Use of “Aotearoa”
Point of order, Mr Speaker. Every day we come into this House, we pick up this Order Paper with this name and countless questions referring to a country called “New Zealand”. I want to know why question No. 1 has got a country imputably called “Aotearoa”, and who gave anybody the mandate to change this country’s name?
Well, we’ve been through this quite a bit. The reality is that Māori is an official language of New Zealand. If that is a name that Māori choose to use to identify the nation, then that is an acceptable thing. It has been for a very long time, and I know that there are moves in other directions to change the way in which things are done. The Standing Orders Committee would be the right place to bring up that matter.
Ricardo Menéndez March: Point of order.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Point of order. I want to finish my—
SPEAKER: No, the first point of order is with Ricardo Menéndez March.
Thank you, Mr Speaker. This is exactly the point that I was raising earlier. To me, I just want your clarity over how you wish to conduct constant challenges of rulings that you have explicitly made multiple times that have been explicitly challenged multiple times. I cannot see how this helps the decorum of the House. If any of us constantly challenges a ruling that you were making, we’d be getting kicked out. How can we have confidence that moving forward in relation to your comments around things like cyberbullying, this will be applied justly when you allow someone else to challenge you basically almost daily?
Yes. The Rt Hon Winston Peters, though, is a very experienced member who is very careful about the way he puts—[Interruption] Sorry, is there something wrong, Mr Willis? No, don’t speak—you haven’t been called.
It was an observation. The way in which a matter might be brought up again does depend on the language that’s used, and I’d ask you to look at Hansard to see how that was put together. The second point is that I have ruled on this twice, and, therefore, it should not be brought up again.
Point of order, Mr Speaker. You say that this matter should be referred to the Standing Orders Committee. Well, surely it’s a fair question to ask why, before any change was made, it was not first reported to the Standing Orders Committee to see what other people thought.
Well, it may well have been. I can’t recall the time when it was—
Rt Hon Winston Peters: No, it hasn’t been.
SPEAKER: It may well have been.
Rt Hon Winston Peters: Well, Mr Speaker, we protest. This is just so much an abuse of this Parliament that you are going to say that you have decided that this country can change its name.
No, I haven’t—that’s completely ridiculous.
Debbie Ngarewa-Packer: Point of order.
SPEAKER: No—no more points of order on this.