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Hi. I'm Doctor Alison Laurie. I was the Gender and Women's Studies programme director at Victoria University of Wellington here in New Zealand for many years. I'm a writer, oral historian and lesbian and gay activist. Today I'm going to be looking at human rights and how these apply to lesbian and gay bisexual and others. Uh, and the inclusion of sexual orientation as a human right, this matter [00:00:30] starts being discussed. Uh, here in New Zealand with the original, uh, passage of the Human Rights Commission Act in 1977 which includes a number of areas where discrimination is outlawed. It's outlawed on the basis of sex, uh, marital status, uh, and so on now, human rights, uh, don't include everything. It's a question of [00:01:00] prohibiting discrimination, uh, in specified areas employment, housing and access to goods and services. What goods and services mean is often subject to interpretation. It clearly it would be being able to go to your public library or to go to the park, access to insurance and things of that kind. But it's often a matter of discussion as to what that actually means. Access to goods and services. So protection is not absolutely [00:01:30] for everything. Uh, we don't have in this country legislation against hate speech. So people can express negative opinions about, uh, lesbians and gay men or about homosexuality that is not covered by human rights. So it's specified access. Human rights are not special rights, which is what Anti gay. Uh, people have often tried to say, Oh, they're asking for special rights. These are not special rights. These are ordinary [00:02:00] rights that everybody in the community should be entitled to have. The notion of human rights begins, uh, after the Second World War, Uh, spearheaded by people like Eleanor Roosevelt, uh, working within the framework of the United Nations. Uh, concerned about the things that happened during World War Two, where people were denied their human rights, uh, where Jewish people, for example, were not allowed to. That started with not being allowed [00:02:30] to attend certain universities or, uh, all of that kind of thing. So there's been a discussion about these matters since that time trying to ensure that everybody in a society is entitled to the same rights. A terrible example of that was apartheid in South Africa, where black people were not allowed the same kinds of rights, even though the governments of that time tended to say that it was a separate but equal clearly it was not. So This has been a matter of [00:03:00] some discussion during the latter part of the, uh, 20th century. Uh, in this country, the, uh, National Gay Rights Coalition. The NGRC. Becomes active thinking about the extension of the Human Rights Act to include sexual orientation and that that begins to be discussed right from 1977. And they made, uh, submissions, uh, unsuccessful submissions to the Human Rights Commission. And, for example, in July [00:03:30] 1980 when the Wellington City Council refused to place a lesbian centre advertisement on city buses uh, a big campaign, uh, emerged. The sign that the Lesbian Centre wanted to put on the buses was simply a simple sign that said lesbians contact your local community right to PO box whatever. In Wellington and the Wellington City Council refused to allow this advertisement to be put on the buses [00:04:00] and said that, um, that was very undesirable because, uh, in in fact, the, uh, town clerk uh McCutcheon claimed that a small boy might see it and ask his mother what a lesbian was, uh, so that would be undesirable. So this was a matter of some discussion. The centre, the, uh, lesbian centre, uh, contacted the Human Rights Commission, which said it could do nothing about this. And [00:04:30] then the chief Commissioner downy claimed that some sorts of discrimination should not be legislated against, uh, and a human rights campaign emerged, and that wanted to, uh, include sexual orientation in the Human Rights Act. So then, uh, a number of groups were fighting to achieve this. And the first measure [00:05:00] of success, uh, was the introduction of the homosexual law reform bill part two, which would have added sexual orientation to the homosexual law reform bill. And, uh, that was defined. Uh uh, Sexual orientation was defined as having a heterosexual, homosexual, lesbian or bisexual orientation. So, in other words, any kind of sexual orientation [00:05:30] within those areas, uh, is protected, uh, during the campaign for this bill. Although the part one of the bill which decriminalised male homosexual acts that was passed eventually after a very hard fought campaign. Uh, but the MP S and the opponents of the bill fought just as hard against Part two of the bill and in particular that you couldn't. You couldn't have protection for homosexual teachers. You shouldn't have protection for homosexual [00:06:00] soldiers. Uh, for firemen, um, and for all this kind of thing And in the finish, there was just so going to be so many amendments that the lesbian and gay groups themselves thought that it would be far too dangerous to pass it with those amendments because that would be that would look like permission to discriminate against people in those areas especially, you know, for homosexual teachers. So that was lost at that time. Then, eight years later, [00:06:30] the intention of part two of the bill was reactivated when Caine O'Regan, who was the national member of Parliament for Raglan, proposed amendments to add several new grounds to the Human Rights Commission Act of 1977 to include sexual orientation. And others of these grounds included the presence in the body of organisms, uh, which could could cause disease. So that was to provide some protection for people people with who [00:07:00] are IV positive or had a I. And in July 1993 the Human Rights Act was passed, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation defined as homosexual, lesbian, bisexual or heterosexual orientation. And so that was very important. And although there was a campaign against, uh, this, uh, it was not such a hard fought campaign as many of the others. This act came into force [00:07:30] on the first of February 1994 and it applied immediately to the private sector. However, government had various exemptions to give it time to bring laws and policy into line with the intention of the act. It was supposedly supposed to do that by the year 2000. Then, uh, the Human Rights Amendment Act 2001 was passed. Uh, it came into force from the beginning of 2002, [00:08:00] and, uh, that said that the government was no longer exempt from fully complying with the human rights provisions because the government had been delaying on the implementation of this with a great deal of discussion happening through, uh, that decade. As a consequence of this, the civil Union Act 2004 was able to be passed, which created legal partnerships for different and same sex couples with many of the provisions of marriage. [00:08:30] Uh, Tim Barnett, Uh, an openly gay MP was someone who fought, uh very strongly to get this legislation passed. However, it's it is the case that whatever government was in would, necessarily, unless it had repealed aspects of the Human Rights Act 1993 or the Human Rights Amendment Act 2001 would have been obliged to pass something like the civil Union act. Because [00:09:00] if you say that, uh, lesbians and gay men have access to the same goods and services, this does imply marriage or partnership. And certainly when we come into questions like the provision of inheritance and all of these kinds of things, something like that would have had to be passed. There were a number of gay and lesbian individuals, uh, who were concerned that the Civil Union, [00:09:30] uh, the civil Union legislation provided for a second class kind of marriage they would have liked to see actual marriage. There were other lesbians and gay men who in fact, were opposed to civil union and opposed to marriage because they took a more radical view of partnerships and didn't see why. Uh, sexual relationships should be privileged over other kinds of relationships, so there was a spectrum of different ideas, even in the lesbian and gay communities. There was, [00:10:00] however, tremendous opposition to this legislation with, um, Brian Tamaki who, uh, from Destiny Church raising, uh, a lot of, uh, antagonism having a big street march, uh, protesting against it and with large numbers of of submissions, which, uh, raised all kinds of questions about that. So this was this was actually a very hard fought campaign as well. But it was passed, as was also the, uh, relationship [00:10:30] Statutory References Act of 2005, which provided for consistency for same sex and de facto couples across a large range of existing laws which affect married couples from trivial things like whether you can fix somebody's electrical wiring in their house because you can do that for your marriage partner or or a civil union partner. But you can't go and do that for your neighbour. Um, and so some rather trivial things, but very important [00:11:00] things as well, including superannuation, benefits and inheritance. There were some losses in this as well. It meant that, uh, because it applies to de facto relationships as well the that that particular, uh, act 2005. It means that a same sex couple living together for more than two years the same provisions that apply to a married couple or a civil union couple will apply to them unless they've made a special statement before they began to live together. Uh, opting [00:11:30] out of that, uh, So it means that, uh, property common property will be, uh will be considered a matter of consideration should they break up their relationship. And a difficulty also is that they can't both be, uh, one person can't be working and the other person on an unemployment benefit. In the case of lesbians, both people could not be on a domestic purposes. Uh, benefit. Uh, so there are some losses like that as well. And for older, [00:12:00] lesbian and male couples, it means that they would get a lesser rate of superannuation because it's based on the couple's rate rather than two single superannuation, as you might have before. So there were some losses, but generally the gains are that you can inherit equally that you are treated equally under the law and so altogether. Generally, this has been supported by the lesbian and gay community various lesbian and gay communities, uh, in this country. Then in 2008, [00:12:30] the birth, Death, Marriages and Relationships Registration Amendment Act 2004, uh, was amended to take account of the technological and social developments to allow lesbian mothers and their partners to both be reflected on birth certificates. So that's been an important, uh, addition as well, which starts to take account of these the circumstances of, uh, people who have Children and what might, uh, assist their family life. [00:13:00] Uh, there were there was still a way to go. The, uh, as far as the transgender community is concerned that those protections have not been incorporated into law. Uh, some legal opinion said that they thought they were covered by six. There was an attempt to put forward, um, a legislation benefiting this community by our first transgender member of parliament, Georgina Baer. But that didn't happen. And there there was still a way to go [00:13:30] on legislative change so far as the addition of human rights for all of our communities are concerned. But we've come quite a way further than many other countries have done.
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