The ACT Party has this month latched on to a Question Time tactic of using consecutive supplementary questions on a repetitive theme as a pile-on against the government.
David Seymour's attempt at asking a question in Te Reo Māori fell flat but it was followed by a barrage of supplementary questions by his party members, all slight variations on the same question. (File photo)
Repetition is often used in Parliament as a political tool to get a particular narrative seared into the public discourse.
It's likely with this strategy in mind that the opposition ACT Party has this month employed a new tactic during Question Time in Parliament: the use of consecutive supplementary questions by different party members which follow the same theme and structure.
This week, Opposition MPs became fixated on a tool used by some hospitals in Auckland and Northland whereby prioritisation of non-elective surgery wait-lists is based partly on ethnicity, alongside several other criteria including the person's time spent on the waitlist, their geographic location, and deprivation level, and most importantly clinical need.
MPs from the National and ACT parties zeroed in on this ethnicity factor, ostensibly out of concern that Māori and Pasifika are moving up the wait-lists unfairly.
This is despite research establishing that long-term inequalities in New Zealand's health outcomes reflect ingrained discrimination against Māori and Pacific people in the health system, and the pandemic having shown that these groups of people generally wait longer for surgery.
Barrage of questions
Questions regarding the ethnicity factor in the wait-list tool dominated Question Time on Tuesday. After Prime Minister Chris Hipkins had responded to Opposition Leader Christopher Luxon's primary and supplementary questions about crime and the economy, the ACT Party asked some supplementaries of their own.
Notwithstanding a clumsy attempt by the ACT leader David Seymour to ask a question in Te Reo Māori - which the Speaker Adrian Rurawhe concluded was not actually a question - junior ACT MPs moved in for the attack with a barrage of questions for the prime minister about the wait-list tool.
First, it was Nicole McKee asking Hipkins if he deemed it acceptable that as a Māori woman she could be placed higher on a surgical wait-list than someone of a different ethnicity, even if their clinical need, time spent on the wait-list, location, and deprivation levels were the same.
This was followed by Karen Chhour asking Hipkins if it was acceptable that her Cambodian husband could be placed lower on a wait-list than her (Chhour is of Māori descent) even if they met the same criteria, apart from ethnicity…