Chlöe Swarbrick Stood Up for Palestine. Will New Zealand MPs Follow Suit?

They don’t want the world to be watching.

On the evening of August 10th, Al Jazeera confirmed that one of its journalists, Anas al-Sharif, and three of his colleagues had been killed in a deliberate Israeli attack on a media tent outside Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital. At the time of writing, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) estimates that at least 211 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed, severely injured, or have gone missing during the war in Gaza. 

Two days after those Al Jazeera journalists were killed, Chlöe Swarbrick, in a country over 16,000km away from the barely-still-beating heart of Gaza, was removed from her place of work after one person took offence at her asking for support for a bill demanding Israel be sanctioned for its war crimes. 

Because, as the Middle Eastern country continues its horrific encroachment on the Palestinian people unassailed, reporters and politicians like al-Sharif and Swarbrick are subjected to violence both big and small simply for daring to have a voice

“In some ways, I feel like the speaker’s actions have backfired on him.”

Swarbrick sounds remarkably chipper for someone who was ejected from Parliament just two days ago. She’s recounting the experience from her Auckland office, taking refuge in her constituency and community far away from the chaos of Wellington’s government centre.

“I don’t know if you know about the situation with Auckland Council sending cease and desist letters to people for gig posters (I do; it’s ridiculous). I’m in the thick of that as well as doing all the foreign affairs stuff at the moment.”

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“[…] not only has equivalent language not been pulled up in the same way, but worse and more egregious language also hasn’t been called out in the same way or punished in the same way.” —Chloe Swarbrick

The scene was tense inside New Zealand’s Parliament chamber last Tuesday.

The Speaker, Gerry Brownlee, had allowed for an urgent debate on the issue of New Zealand finally acknowledging Palestine statehood to unfold, as the desperate situation in Gaza became even more untenable before the world’s eyes. 

Despite impassioned speeches from others in the chamber, including Labour’s Peeni Henare (“How many more people will die because of the government dragging its heels?”) and Te Pāti Māori’s Debbie Ngarewa-Packer (“This is genocide and apartheid, and I have never been more ashamed to be in the House than I am today.”), it was Swarbrick’s speech aimed at coalition MPs that angered Brownlee. 

“I will reiterate my call for the government to pick up our Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill and to sanction Israel for its war crimes,” the co-leader of the Green Party implored, adding with gusto, “If we find six of 68 government MPs with a spine, we can stand on the right side of history.”

Brownlee, who had heard all manners of foul language in that very chamber in days and weeks before, took immediate offence. “That is completely unacceptable to make that statement. Withdraw it and apologise,” he interjected. When Swarbrick declined to do so, he told her to “leave the House for the rest of the week.” 

The shock ruling was, as Swarbrick and myriad commentators quickly pointed out, “uncharted territory.” 

“We actually have on the record, from both this term in Parliament and the last term, politicians like Kieran McNulty from the Labour Party [and] Judith Collins from the National Party using terms like ‘spineless,’ like ‘gutless,’” Swarbrick says. “And it should be noted that what I actually said is if we can find just six of 68 government MPs with a spine… I thought that’s pretty tepid in the context, [with] the war crimes that are currently unfolding but also the other language that’s bandied around the house. So not only has equivalent language not been pulled up in the same way, but worse and more egregious language also hasn’t been called out in the same way or punished in the same way.”

Image: Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick speaks during Budget Day 2025 at Parliament on May 22nd Credit: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

That wasn’t the only unprecedented part of the ruling.

Green Party whip Ricardo Menéndez March questioned the severity of Swarbrick’s punishment, noting that Parliament’s rules suggested she should be barred for no more than a day. Brownlee stood his ground, clarifying that Swarbrick could come back to the chamber on Wednesday if she agreed to apologise. 

“If she doesn’t, then she’ll be leaving the House again,” he said sternly. “I’m not going to sit in this chair and tolerate a member standing on her feet… and saying that other members of this House are spineless.”

Swarbrick was duly invited back to Parliament on Wednesday to apologise, but she declined again. Brownlee, once more, asked her to leave the chamber. Labour Party Leader Chris Hipkins’ attempt to raise a Point of Order was rejected; when Swarbrick stood her ground, Brownlee declared, “I therefore name Chlöe Swarbrick.”

In Parliamentary terms, “naming” is a serious affair, leading to a loss of a day’s wages and the ability to vote or participate in committees or the House. As only the House can “name” a member, a vote was required. The vote was contested and a party vote showed the governing parties in favour and opposition parties against. (A second vote also led to the same result.)

Swarbrick then left the chamber with a final call of “Free Palestine.” 

It really was “uncharted territory.”

As per RNZ, Parliament’s Library could not find any example of a Speaker demanding such an apology in a timespan of 22 years and 585 ejected MPs. That statistic might sound staggering, but Brownlee’s outrageous demand directly contradicted a current Speaker’s Ruling (ruling 21/1, from Speaker Hunt in 2001), which concludes “where a member refused to apologise and was ordered to leave the Chamber by the Speaker, the matter is at an end at that point.”

Swarbrick received near-unanimous support in the aftermath, from people you’d expect and others you’d definitely not expect to be in her corner. 

Hipkins submitted another Point of Order, pointing out that the Speaker’s demand for an apology the following day was acting in contravention of the rules. “I’ve been in the House quite a long time and there have been plenty of instances where members have been ejected from the Chamber for the rest of the day for doing exactly what Chlöe Swarbrick did. There is not a single instance where a member has been asked to withdraw and apologise the following sitting day, and then named for not doing that,” Hipkins said.

“The general public overwhelmingly understands the egregious abuse of human rights that is the intentional slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, and they want the government to act.” —Chloe Swarbrick

Xena the Warrior Princess herself, Lucy Lawless, tweeted that Swarbrick reminded her of former New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange, “whose moral leadership set a new high benchmark for our cultural identity when he/we stood for a nuclear-free Pacific against the US Navy. This govt is riddled with Hollowmen who have no love for humanity.”

Foreign Minister Winston Peters even backed Swarbrick over Brownlee: “Mr Speaker, I’ve been in this House when a Prime Minister accused the Opposition of [needing to] ‘[get] some guts’ – it was a serious accusation; nothing happened – and then, worse, I’ve heard the ‘c’ word being accepted as language that can be used in this House. My personal view is that I don’t agree with a thing that Chlöe Swarbrick said at all, but this is a robust House where people have a right to express their views as passionately as they may, within certain rules. But I do not think that eviction was warranted. That’s my position.”

“[…] the speaker himself was clear that he was the one who took personal offence at the statement,” Swarbrick notes. “Nobody else in parliament made a point of order to call offence or whatever else.”

So why did Brownlee take “personal offence” at Swarbrick’s speech? (Mr. Brownlee’s office didn’t respond to Rolling Stone AU/NZ’s request for comment.) Why didn’t he react so vehemently, instead, to Simon Court accusing MPs of repeating “Hamas propaganda”? Why didn’t he respond to Ngarewa-Packer using loaded words like “genocide” and “apartheid”? Perhaps it’s because Swarbrick’s comments called for direct action on Palestine; perhaps it’s because, in showing such moral backbone, she highlighted something reprehensible and salient about New Zealand’s current position: this country isn’t doing enough to support Palestine in the war in Gaza. 

Swarbrick has been a rising star — for want of a better phrase — of New Zealand politics for some time now.

Aged just 22, she embarked on a much-publicised but ultimately unsuccessful run in the 2016 Auckland mayoral election. In the 2020 election, she was elected as the Member of Parliament for her beloved Auckland Central, which made her the second Green Party MP ever to win an electorate seat. (Even more notable: she was the first to do so without a tacit endorsement from a major party leader.) After retaining Auckland Central in the 2023 election, she was elected co-leader of the Green Party alongside Marama Davidson the following year. Swarbrick is currently the Green Party Spokesperson on a range of important issues, including mental health, drug law reform, and climate change. 

Image: Green Party co-leaders Marama Davidson (L) and Chloe Swarbrick (R) address media during Budget Day 2025 Credit: Hagen Hopkins/Getty Images

Throughout her career so far, her continuous support for Palestine has been well-documented.

At the end of 2023, she received criticism from opposition politicians after chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” during a pro-Palestine rally. She still regularly attends Auckland’s weekend marches in support of Palestine, where she witnesses first-hand the groundswell of support from Kiwis for the beleaguered state.

“Where we are at now… the public response that I have had and that we have had is demonstrative of a colossal shift,” she says. “The general public overwhelmingly understands the egregious abuse of human rights that is the intentional slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, and they want the government to act. So I think that we are on the cusp of a reckoning.”

“[…] it’s been pretty clear that they have basically been told that if they were to support it [the bill], then they would be in a position where they would kind of lose their job.” —Chloe Swarbrick

Swarbrick and the Green Party’s Unlawful Occupation of Palestine Sanctions Bill is their attempt to expedite this “reckoning.” 

“Israel is currently carrying out a genocide in Palestine with impunity. Our government has failed to take meaningful action despite the people of Aotearoa New Zealand repeatedly calling for it,” the bill, which was drafted at the end of last year, states. 

For the bill to be passed into law, 61 MPs need to support it. 55 opposition MPs from the Green Party, Te Pāti Māori and Labour already do, which means at least six more MPs need to support the bill to get it into Parliament for debate, and then it will need majority support to become law.

If passed, the bill will get Aotearoa “to adopt concrete legislative measures to impose consequences for Israel’s actions.”

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Over the phone, Swarbrick is eager to plainly lay out the intricacies of the bill. 

“[…] I was trying to make it clear [with the bill] that the very least that we can possibly do is apply the same approach that we did to Russia for its unlawful invasion and occupation of Ukraine (New Zealand imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the illegal war of aggression against Ukraine in 2022). So it’s largely exactly the same legislation, just obviously that the framework applies to Israel in this instance, and the enabling Israeli parliamentarians and ministers and the IDF. 

“So it was just trying to create that very clear equivalence where members of [the] government, when they were members of [the] opposition, were calling for the government to act at pace, and it was within a matter of weeks that we had the Russia Sanctions Act passed… Obviously with this situation, the question has to be asked: what’s so different about it?

“So that’s where the huge lobbying effort that’s been happening from communities all across the country to particularly put pressure on electorate MPs has been really, really strong.”

New Zealand will formally make a decision on whether to recognise Palestine as a state over the coming weeks, whereafter Peters will travel to the UN Leaders Meeting at the General Assembly in New York in late September.

Getting those six necessary votes sounds achievable, but is it likely to happen? Swarbrick lowers her voice.

“So I’ve met with and had direct conversations with a number of government MPs, and the information that I’ve basically had from them — they haven’t necessarily been super explicit, but it’s been pretty clear that they have basically been told that if they were to support it [the bill], then they would be in a position where they would kind of lose their job.” 

This raises an uncomfortable point: if protecting one’s career is of more importance than acting on moral, humane grounds, then the entire purpose of politicians in our society comes into question. 

If, quote unquote, “normal people” — you or I, workers or neighbours — can stand up for their beliefs while fearing persecution, why can’t politicians, who are supposed to act in our best interests on a national and international scale, not do the same? 

In London, England, the weekend before Swarbrick and Brownlee’s showdown, local police arrested over 500 people on suspicion of terror offences. Their crime? Expressing support for the protest group Palestine Action, which the British government recently proscribed as a terrorist organisation. These peaceful protestors could now face up to 14 years in prison, simply for having convictions in their morals.

Irish writer Sally Rooney, author of Normal People and Conversations with Friends and outspoken critic of Israel’s war crimes, penned an essay in The Irish Times reiterating her own support for Palestine Action. “To ensure that the British public is made aware of my position, I would happily publish this statement in a UK newspaper — but that would now be illegal,” she went so far as to say. “The present UK government has willingly stripped its own citizens of basic rights and freedoms, including the right to express and read dissenting opinions, in order to protect its relationship with Israel. The ramifications for cultural and intellectual life in the UK… are and will be profound.” 

Image: Sally Rooney speaks onstage during the Hulu Panel at Winter TCA 2020 Credit: Erik Voake/Getty Images for Hulu

As Rooney’s essay noted, murals celebrating the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), are still spotted around Northern Ireland, despite the UVF being proscribed under the same law as Palestine Action. The key difference, however, is that the UVF is responsible for the murders of hundreds of civilians during the Troubles, while Palestine Action mainly conducts peaceful demonstrations. 

By advocating for Palestine Action, Rooney is putting her morals before her livelihood; she knows that her book sales might suffer and her career might be damaged. 

“My books, at least for now, are still published in Britain, and are widely available in bookshops and even supermarkets. In recent years the UK’s state broadcaster has also televised two fine adaptations of my novels, and therefore regularly pays me residual fees,” she wrote.

“I want to be clear that I intend to use these proceeds of my work, as well as my public platform generally, to go on supporting Palestine Action and direct action against genocide in whatever way I can. If the British state considers this ‘terrorism’, then perhaps it should investigate the shady organisations that continue to promote my work and fund my activities, such as WH Smith and the BBC.

“And by now, almost two years into a live-streamed genocide, we owe the people of Palestine more than mere words.” 

Here’s the hypocritical playbook: they offer us empty platitudes, hoping that we’ll be placated for a time, while punishing those who dare to say proper statements. In football, which is increasingly becoming a political arena, Celtic FC, a principled Scottish club whose entire foundation rests on community solidarity (Celtic formed in the late 19th century as a means of feeding working-class Irish immigrants in Glasgow’s impoverished East End), was fined almost $20,000 by UEFA, European football’s governing body, in 2023 after its fans waved Palestinian flags during a Champions League match against Atletico Madrid; at this month’s Super Cup Final between Tottenham and PSG, that same governing body displayed a purposefully vague banner which read “Stop killing children – Stop killing civilians”. Shaista Aziz of Amnesty International (as per the BBC) summarised the banner’s hollowness best: “To name the crime but not the perpetrator is an act of cowardice.”

As it is abroad, so it is at home. On the same day Swarbrick was being ejected from Parliament, New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon had ‘harsh’ words for his Israel counterpart Benjamin Netanyahu, saying he had “lost the plot.” The proper statement was punished; the empty platitude achieved nothing. 

Image: Demonstrators attend the pro-Palestine Action protest on August 9th in London, England Credit: Alishia Abodunde/Getty Images

“[…] it’s not about me, never has been.”

Swarbrick sprinkles reminders that, despite the intense media focus at home and abroad (“We’re not really making international headlines for good reasons!”), this isn’t about her; it’s about the Palestinians people, who are being killed and dehumanised on a daily basis. 

Her words bear sobering similarity to a statement made by one of the arrested London protestors, Irish woman Sinéad Ní Shiacáis, who spiritedly emphasised that protestors are “not the story.” 

“We have to take action because what’s happening in Britain is an encroachment on our rights as citizens,” she told BreakingNews.ie. “I’m not anxious about being charged. I made the choice to go over, I knew what I was doing… I’m privileged and I have civil liberties that I may have given up to take a stand, I’m more anxious that not enough people are doing enough. We are not the story, the Palestinian people are the story. They are begging people to give them a voice. I’m not the story, the Palestinian people are the story, and hopefully more people will realise that.”

Swarbrick acknowledges that there have been some dissenting voices.

“[…[ the only people who I have seen kind of tripping in the comments — and this is the same thing that I see whenever we advocate for freedom of people on the other side of the world — is people kind of saying that, you know, how are we doing this [advocating for Palestine] if we’re not looking after our own backyard? 

“But we just really need people to understand that the same system that asks us to ignore genocide of innocent human beings on the other side of the world, is also asking us to ignore other human beings sleeping rough outside of luxury stores, is also asking us to ignore the poisoning of our waterways. All of these issues are so deeply interconnected.” (A quick scan of Swarbrick’s social media this week would quickly prove the dissenters’ line of thinking to be false: she’s attended rallies in support of better pay for teachers and spoken out on youth homelessness, both pressing matters in Aotearoa.)

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She cites a recent report by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese that named several global companies aiding Israel’s occupation and war on Gaza, which she says shows “just how much our current economic system and large companies and investment firms are ingratiated in the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Gaza.”

On a profound level, New Zealand is a country whose people are finely attuned to the suffering of an Indigenous population at the hands of an invading coloniser.

As peace rally organiser Te Otāne Huata told Te Ao Māori News in 2024, the oppression of other marginalised Indigenous groups is innately linked to liberation struggles in Aotearoa and beyond. “All of the injustices, from apartheid to our own, they are interconnected,” Huata said. 

Swarbrick finds it “really interesting” that the last time New Zealand Parliament made international headlines involved the Treaty Principles Bill, the right-wing ACT Party’s controversial proposal that threatened to severely alter the way the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document, is interpreted, and in turn undermine Māori rights in this country. 

Last November, a vote on the bill was temporarily suspended when opposition parties joined in a haka, led by Te Pāti Māori MP Hana-Rawhiti Maipi-Clarke, who also ripped up a copy of the bill.

When the Privileges Committee recommended handing down unprecedented punishments to three Te Pāti Māori MPs over the incident, former Speaker of the House Adrian Rurawhe, normally a politician of quiet dignity, sounded a dire warning: “The Privileges Committee of the future will have a new precedent… You can also guarantee that governments of the day, in the future, will feel very free to use those penalties to punish their opponents.”

Since assuming power in a landslide 2023 election, New Zealand’s coalition government, consisting of National in partnership with ACT and NZ First, has increasingly explored ways of infringing upon the rights of Māori, who make up around 20% of New Zealand’s population. 

At a July event in Geneva, Switzerland, Julia Whaipooti, Te Kāhui Tika Tangata Te Tatau-Urutahi, told the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) about the many ways the coalition government is dismantling hard-won protections for Māori.

“The Government continues to remove measures that recognise and uphold Māori rights as Indigenous Peoples and Te Tiriti o Waitangi… against the warnings of the Waitangi Tribunal, against the advice of its own officials, and against the will of its citizens,” Whaipooti told the UN panel.

A recent damning report revealed that te reo Māori words have been almost completely banned from a series of books designed for younger readers. The Education Ministry report showed that New Zealand Education Minister Erica Stanford decided late last year to exclude all Māori words except for characters’ names from new books included in the Ready to Read Phonics Plus (RtRPP) series.

According to the paper, Stanford’s decision was driven by concern Māori words were confusing for young children learning to read English. 26 of the 75 books in the series had up to just three Māori words, while another, At the Marae, had six.

It was another troubling example of the New Zealand government’s increasing pushback against the language. Last September, New Zealand’s Māori language commissioner described the government’s policies to limit the use of te reo Māori in the public service as “a risk.”

In an interview with Rolling Stone AU/NZ last year, Aotearoa alt-pop artist Theia — who also performs as TE KAAHU, her Māori language project — passionately spoke out against the government’s policies.

“I’m shell-shocked at the colonial violence this new government has caused,” she told us. “The wounds of intergenerational trauma we have actively been trying to heal torn open, and this system threatening decades of indigenous progress in tino rangatiratanga. It makes me furious.”

It’s no coincidence that, at the same time Māori rights have been increasingly threatened, the coalition government has made the mind-numbing decision to tie us closer to the increasingly unhinged Trump administration,” as Swarbrick puts it. 

“I think it is actually quite a marked shift of direction under this government,” she continues. “I mean, very clearly you can look at its track records with regard to growing homelessness, growing climate changing emissions, environmental degradation, and the intentional decisions that they have made to further privatise profit and socialise costs, increasing the cost of living for regular people as they shift to privatising hospitals and otherwise.

“That shift very much echoes an attempt to kind of model the United States of America. And I think that that probably is our biggest clue that this government — and you know, it’s aligned to the opening of the new FBI office and otherwise — that this government is aligning us in the state of the world that it’s in right now.

“I think the other point which I’ve been able to glean is that, particularly on the instance of upholding human rights for Palestinians, it would appear as though particularly the ACT party, one of the three coalition parties, and obviously the one that currently holds the position of deputy prime minister [David Seymour], seems to be holding the rest of the government ransom on this issue.”

That’s a major reason why New Zealand is lagging behind other countries when it comes to recognising Palestine statehood; even neighbouring Australia has confirmed it will recognise Palestine as a state at next month’s UN General Assembly. 

“My message would be that when you don’t know what to do, turn up. Just turn up and look around you.” —Chloe Swarbrick

“We’re gonna win, mate,” Swarbrick says towards the end of our conversation.

When I ask if she has a message for any young Kiwis who might feel disillusioned by their government’s current actions (or lack thereof), she’s hopeful: “We know what we’re in opposition to. We’re in opposition to genocide and just this indiscriminate violence and this hatred. But what we stand for, for peace and love and justice and human rights is so much more powerful.”

Because it’s so important to remember that this is a grassroots movement.

When I walk into my town, Lyttelton, a port of barely 3,000 people, tomorrow, I will pass four or five Palestine flags on the main street, swaying defiantly outside cafés and houses and book shops. This coming weekend, thousands will once again join rallies across the country, from Auckland to Nelson to the capital, demanding action over the war in Gaza. 

“My message would be that when you don’t know what to do, turn up,” Swarbrick says. “Just turn up and look around you. And I have been at these rallies now, you know, every other weekend for the better part of two years, and I have seen regular New Zealanders from all walks of life coming together, unified on the basis of the things that we stand for. And we need to remind ourselves that we should not define ourselves by what we’re in opposition to.

“So I think it’s a matter of regular people… turning up, finding their people and not allowing ourselves to be divided or distracted by political players who are just interested in short-term games. If we hold steadfast to the things that we believe in, we can only move forward together.”

The world is watching.