United Future is not acting in concert with other anti-gay groups in its campaign against the Civil Union bill, says leader Peter Dunne, there was merely a consensus between all eight MPs on how they felt about giving gay couples the same legal rights as straight couples. In an interview with Michael Laws on Radio Pacific, Dunne sidestepped questions on whether gay couples should be allowed legal relationship recognition rights and defended himself by saying that he voted for homosexual law reform in 1985. Laws said that United Future was a socially conservative party, but Dunne refused to be labelled as such. “Well...it depends what you mean by liberal. If you mean classically liberal and you go back to the nineteenth century description of liberal, which was really about support for communities, support for families...We are inherently a liberal party. If you use the modern perverted sense of liberal meaning a libertarian then absolutely not, we are not a libertarian party.” “I think from our vantage point the reason we went out there and have started to mount a campaign is that we felt that this thing was coming up on to peoples' agenda. Most New Zealanders weren't aware of it, most New Zealanders haven't a strong view one way or the other about it and it was time to actually start to put the issue before the public, particularly in the broader climate we've got at the moment where people are anxious about what they perceive as increasing strains of political correctness.”
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Thursday, 29th April 2004 - 12:00pm