United Future leader Peter Dunne will have some gay competition in this year's general election, courtesy of Wellington lawyer Charles Chauvel. Chauvel has been selected as Labour's candidate for the Ohariu-Belmont electorate – Dunne's stomping ground – at this year's general election. He's hoping for support from gay constituents who wish to help unseat the fundamentalist United Future party from Parliament, which relies heavily on its leader, Dunne, holding the Ohariu-Belmont electorate, which takes in Khandallah, Ngaio, Johnsonville, Tawa, Newlands, Churton Park and the Western Hutt Hills. "Dunne holds the seat with a majority of around 20,000, but if he were defeated and his party scored under the 5% threshold (as it is in current polling), it would be removed from the House of Representatives," Chauvel says. "This would rid Parliament of a party that has proved itself to be extremely homophobic." Chauvel has worked for the past 15 years on gay/lesbian legal issues, and is a former board member and chair of the NZ AIDS Foundation. He was extensively involved in lobbying to pass the Human Rights Act in 1993, and also was involved in the campaign to pass the Civil Union Act. He acted as counsel on a pro-bono basis in 1994 in a case before the Indecent Publications Tribunal seeking to classify fundamentalist Christian anti-gay hate literature, and again before the High Court in 2000 in the infamous Living Word case, which involved videos of a similar nature.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Tuesday, 18th January 2005 - 12:00pm