Sun 21 Sep 2014 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
Anti-gay Conservative Party leader Colin Craig is vowing to make another tilt for Parliament in 2017, despite spending more than a million dollars on this election campaign and coming up short. Without special votes counted, the party led and funded by a man who thinks gay people are not normal finished short of the five per cent threshold needed to enter Parliament without an electorate seat, on 4.12 per cent. Craig has told media he's in it “for the long haul” and will try again in 2017. News the Conservative Party hasn’t made it to Parliament was welcomed by GayNZ.com readers last night. Linda Wallace says she’s “grateful that we got a small victory here.... So we move forward not back five decades.” Toni Farrow jokingly suggests he “donate the rest of his money to the gays”. The Conservatives’ failure was also greeted with wry amusement and relief by a number of gay men out on the town in Auckland last night. Patrick, an accountant of Birkenhead, said he always found Colin Craig creepy and "weirdly obsessive" so he's glad he won't wield political power. Joe, a student of Grafton, says he saw Craig in action at a Marriage Equality debate at the university and felt "totally demeaned by the man... he was talking about our actual lives and it all seemed a game to him... good riddance." If Craig had managed to get the Conservative Party into Parliament, some of the MPs he could have brought along include Garth McVicar, who thinks gay people getting married will increase the crime rate. Despite claims from the Conservative Party that marriage equality had killed Labour’s support among Pacific Islanders, Labour MPs including openly-lesbian marriage equality champion Louisa Wall retained their seats in South Auckland.Discuss this story on our Facebook page here //
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Sunday, 21st September 2014 - 9:49am