Kevin Hague Kevin Hague has expressed frustration at the bill he has crafted being labelled a “gay adoption bill,” pointing out is has a much wider scope – and also clarified why the Green Party will vote against a Labour MP’s adoption bill. Hague’s legislation is a complete overhaul and update of the nation’s long-outdated adoption laws, and while it does cover gay couples, it also includes everything from open adoptions to surrogacy. “I’m gay, but that doesn’t make my bill a gay adoption bill,” the Green MP explains in a post on Frogblog, in response to headlines claiming it is. “This Bill is very big and complex,” he says. On the question of why he and his fellow Green MPs will not vote for Labour MP Jacinda Ardern’s bill, which has been pulled from the ballot, he points out they are not at all similar. “Jacinda’s Bill does not change adoption law in any way,” he says. “While my Bill is a substantive reform of adoption and surrogacy law, Jacinda’s instead gets the Minister of Justice to ask the Law Commission to update the advice they have already given on adoption reform and turn that into a bill. “With the best will in the world, that process will take at least two or three years to arrive at the point we have already reached, and will use valuable Law Commission money and time to bring us to where we already stand! “Even then the notional Bill would require a well-disposed government to do something with it. Well if we had one of those, it would pick up my Bill and advance it as a Government one. And hers doesn’t deal with surrogacy.” Hague says Labour withdrew from a long-running cross-party process on adoption in order to advance Ardern’s approach which he describes as “a choice of unilateralism over multilateralism”. He believes a history of unilateralism from successive governments that has led to the situation we have now, where everyone agrees the existing law is obsolete and harmful, but nobody has done anything about it. “I told Jacinda at the time, and then said publicly, repeatedly, that we opposed her move, because what we really need is an approach that will actually takes us forward, not a bill that won’t pass and is instead a distraction from the goal of having adoption law that actually works for families. “It should be no surprise to anyone that our position hasn’t changed. Supporting Jacinda’s Bill would undermine the cross-Party work we have been doing for the last three years.” Ardern is reported to be disappointed at the Green Party’s stance as she believes the opportunity to get the ball rolling on reforming adoption laws, through her Bill, is too good an opportunity to miss. She was planning to add an amendment which would immediately cull the basic discrimination about who can adopt as a "quick fix" until the Law Commission's work was complete. Hague says sometimes friends might agree on a destination but disagree about the route to get there. He says Ardern’s bill will be defeated at the first reading, and would have been regardless of how the Green Party voted. “I am sure Labour people will have helpful suggestions for how to improve our Bill, and I hope they will be prepared to rejoin a cross-Party approach to securing this important reform.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 17th October 2012 - 1:01pm