Louisa Wall A number of New Zealanders feature in the Darwin Outgames’ Human Rights Forum, which begins today. Labour MP Louisa Wall will speak at Friday morning’s plenary session on ‘precision timing’ when it came to getting marriage equality in New Zealand. Jack Byrne from New Zealand’s Human Rights Commission will co-chair the Thursday plenary session. He will also take be on the panel for a Friday morning workshop on the Transrespect vs Transphobia Project, and run a Friday afternoon session on ‘How 101 workshops can change government laws, policies and practice’. Tomorrow, Phylesha Brown-Acton from the Pacific Islands Safety and Prevention Project will run a workshop called ‘The Pasifika Rainbow and Beyond - Voices and Visibility’. The New Zealand-based tireless champion for the rights of sexual minority groups within the Pacific has developed a lgbtqi programme with a strong focus on the Pasefika community. “The required assistance for lgbtqi in the Pacific is to take them from being small community-based groups to being established entities set up in their own functioning community centres,” Brown-Acton says. “Enabling this to happen will allow the advocacy and work to be taken more seriously by government and will place them in a more viable position to function. “Pacific rainbow organisations have functioned on the ground for over 20 years and the time is ripe for a more formal structure to be set in place.”
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 14th May 2014 - 10:15am