It's not a House. It's a home.

I'm catching up with today's news, and I'm disappointed (if completely unsurprised) that we've missed the opportunity for a conversation about the role of tikanga in Parliament.

We're led to think about the House as this place of neutrality and rationality - with a set of universal rules that are fair and relevant to everybody. Really?

I mean, leaving aside some fairly obvious stuff about Te Tiriti and iwi not ceding sovereignty and the historical awkwardness of the shaky basis for our system of government ... everything about Parliament is British as feck.

MPs sworn in by the Governor General? British as feck. Opening a Parliamentary term with a Speech from the Throne? British as feck. The mace? Who needs a sodding mace? It's comical, like watching The Castle - specifically the bit about jousting sticks. British as FECK.

Hansard. The layout of the debating chamber. The rules and the terminology. You see where I'm going with this. British. As. Feck.

Parliament, the way it operates, is one of the last remaining monuments to our cultural insecurity. You can argue one way or the other whether our system of government is good or bad - but either way, it's harder to justify the rituals and the trappings. They're the cut-and-paste of another country's traditions, from a whole other century: barely more relevant to tauiwi than to Māori.

It says everything we need to know when Parliament sees haka as foreign and naughty, but reckons a mace is where it's at. You'd struggle to find a New Zealander who's attached in any genuine way to the rituals or trappings of Parliament. Ultimately, it's the cultural superiority that appeals, the emotional pull of it.

That the rituals of our own nation - like our haka - are foreign in our Parliament should be a hell of a wake up. But to quote The Castle, we're dreaming.

And there’s a better quote we could be borrowing from that classic movie. It’s not a House. It’s a home.

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