Thu 26 Feb 2015 In: New Zealand Daily News View at Wayback View at NDHA
The Gay Auckland Business Association has “utterly and totally” rejected a call by for its president to stand down in the wake of her involvement in the handling of protesters who invaded the start of last Saturday's Auckland Pride Parade route, and says it will no longer respond to issues raised by the protesters. Three protesters broke through the crowd barriers and obstructed the police force members marching with motorbikes and mounted police. They were primarily protesting the treatment of transgender people in the prison system, but were also unhappy with police presence in the parade. GABA's president, Heather Carnegie, has been accused by the protesters of violent behaviour during the protest and of wilfully damaging a protest supporter's phone by grabbing it and throwing it away. The call for her to resign is “utterly and totally rejected,” says GABA, after a debriefing meeting held last night between GABA and parade organiser Richard Taki. “GABA is completely supportive of its president ... GABA is absolutely standing behind Heather on this issue.” GABA says the Executive is concerned at the way in which GABA has been brought into the matter. “The irony here is now that GABA seems to be being targeted simply for the fact that somebody recognised who Heather was and they now seem to be going after us. It was decided last night that from now on there will be no further dialogue or response to any more questions initiated by these people. I suspect Heather herself feels the same way.” Of Carnegie's role on the night, GABA says “Heather was there in her role as the event manager of the Glamstand ... Her sole purpose was to try to facilitate the safe exiting of the protesters from the street, not having any clue that things would become violent in the way they did or that they would react the way they did. The situation exploded around her and suddenly there it was all going on with phones being shoved in faces and all of that.” While witnesses have backed up Carnegie's assertion that she was not violent and was solicitous of the well-being of an injured and handcuffed protester, video evidence shows her tossing the cellphone aside. She has previously explained this as “a minor incident while being pushed in the chest by a protester videoing on a phone. When trying to get them to stop, the phone went flying. This was unintentional." Asked about the discrepancy between Carnegie's recounting of the cellphone incident and the video evidence, GABA says “the whole thing happened so fast that Heather doesn't actually recall clearly what happened until she had a chance to talk with some of the people around her who said this is what happened, this is what the video showed, do you remember that and she is sort of vaguely going 'ok, I must go and have a look at what happened.' She was not clear because the whole thing was going on. You can imagine, you are trying to help somebody off, the person you are helping off is not the person you were helping in the video who wasn't being pushed or anything like that which I think we have all agreed on, so she was solicitously helping get someone off the street. At that point all of this exploded around her and one of the people was shoving a phone in her face as she was trying to help this person off the road and then the whole thing goes 'boom' around her with people kicking and the whole thing exploded.” “All she remembers is trying to get it away. Whether she held the thing in her hands and then threw it, does it really matter?” The GABA Executive says it's concerned about the way the situation concerning Carnegie is playing out. “This is starting to sound like some kind of trial without jury or judge, in terms of an inquisition of specific details. So we've given you the context, we've given you the answers and we've given you Heather's quote on what happened and it was not intentional, it was accidental, she responded and reacted to the very stressful situation which was not of her making." Carnegie has not herself responded to further questions from GayNZ.com Daily News regarding her role on the night and the cellphone incident.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Thursday, 26th February 2015 - 11:03am