Why is the video of Mana Wāhine Kōrero’s oral submission against the Midwifery Council’s revised Scope of Practice being withheld from public viewing?

In an extraordinary move, the NZ Parliament Petitions Committee has decided to withhold the videoed oral submission made against the Midwifery Council’s revised Scope of Practice by Māori women’s group Mana Wāhine Kōrero (Sovereign Women Speak) from public viewing.

The Petitions Committee, who “oversees and coordinates the petitions process, and considers petitions and any related matters”, has advised of this decision without explanation. Conversely, they have made the videoed oral submissions by the Midwifery Council and midwife Deb Hayes, who was the initiator of the petition against Midwifery Council’s revised Scope of Practice, available for public viewing.

The Committee invited Deb and two groups - Mana Wāhine Kōrero and the Midwifery Council - to make oral submissions to them about the petition, which had collected almost 7,500 signatures. That’s a lot of signatures for a Parliamentary petition in New Zealand. However, many more people than those who signed it agree that a document about women and babies should at least have the words ‘woman’ and ‘baby’ in it. The Midwifery Council spent four years revising their Scope of Practice, which takes up no more space than an A4 piece of paper, only to make it sexless and baby-less. At the last minute before officially gazetting the Scope, in response to what I’m guessing was a grudging awareness of the petition, they (perfunctorily) inserted the words ‘woman’ and ‘baby’ into it before the petition was presented to Parliament.

The entire development of the Midwifery Council’s revised Scope of Practice has been a woke shambles. Both Deb and Mana Wāhine Kōrero have dug deep and exposed this, which, using the discovery of that information, I have previously written about. I have included screenshot versions of the Scope in both English and te reo Māori (Māori language) in the above-linked article. See if you can make any sense of this revised Scope.

Normally, videos are available for public viewing shortly after oral submissions to Parliamentary committees have been made. But, for reasons unknown, the Petitions Committee have advised that Mana Wāhine Kōrero’s video of their oral submission will not be made available for public viewing. Whatever is in their submission which the Committee has deemed unsuitable hasn’t been conveyed to them.

I watched the livestream of the oral submissions to the Petitions Committee about the Midwifery Council’s revised Scope of Practice, and heard nothing I considered objectionable. If we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, the only ‘objectionable’ thing I heard was the Midwifery Council’s rather less-than-stellar performance from a professional body. True, Di Landy and Sarah Henderson’s joint submission on behalf of Mana Wāhine Kōrero asked some hard questions, as I would expect in any important matter, but whether or not that is what the Committee has deemed unsuitable for public consumption can only be guessed at.

In light of the Petitions Committee decision, Reality Check Radio (RCR) has invited Di and Sarah to read their oral submissions on ‘Breakfast with Paul Brennan’ on Monday 30^th September NZT. The replay will be available afterwards.

In the video embedded in their blog below titled “What’s going on??!”, Di and Sarah discuss what has happened. Di also notes that when her sister, Rex, called MP Ginny Anderson a “fucking disgrace” at the end of her oral submission about prisons a while ago, not only was that video kept available for public consumption, it got into the news!¹

What’s going on ??!

¹ New Zealand’s hate speech laws get kicked to the kerb; Rex Landy makes the news; and the woman who got trespassed from a supermarket for wearing a truth-telling t-shirt tells her story. (substack.com)

• 2024/09/12 - Petitions on Vimeo -Deb Hayes’s oral submission to the Petitions Committee - starts at 1.30mins

• 2024/09/12 - Petitions on Vimeo - the Midwifery Council’s oral submission to the Petitions Committee – from 0.00 to 16.40 mins