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Summarised by Centrist
After years of denouncing ACT and its bills as racist and colonial, newly independent MPs Takuta Ferris and Mariameno Kapa Kingi have suddenly reversed their votes to back ACT’s Medicines Amendment Bill in the House.
After initially voting against their former party, Te Pati Maori, both MPs stood in the House to “correct” the record, insisting the anti-bill votes had been cast by mistake.
The Greens say that their explanation is simply not true.
The MPs, expelled from Te Pati Maori last week, had their votes cast via Green Party proxies because they were absent from the debating chamber. Their votes were the only ones recorded against the bill at its third reading.
Those votes immediately raised political eyebrows because voting against their former party could be used as evidence they have disrupted proportionality in Parliament. That is the threshold needed for Te Pati Maori to trigger waka jumping byelections.
The standoff leaves the two MPs facing a credibility problem. Either they miscommunicated their vote or they misled Parliament about why they changed it.
Green whip Ricardo Menendez March said the Greens had asked both MPs how they wanted their proxy votes cast and were explicitly told to vote against the bill. He said it is simply not factually correct to claim the Greens cast the votes by mistake.
After the correction, the bill passed with unanimous support. Winston Peters raised a point of order in the House, signalling the issue is unlikely to disappear quietly.
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