The Winston Peters smear campaign against GayNZ.com contributor Jim Peron has continued in Parliament today, but the bulk of today's allegations from Peters in Parliament have already been acknowledged on the record by Peron. Peters says an employee of Peron's at his bookstore in San Francisco during the 1980's was a paedophile and received a 16-year prison sentence for child molestation. He also alleged Peron's bookstore was raided by police and was found to have stocked magazines of men having sex with boys as young as eight. Peron told Scoop yesterday that the employee in question was a part-timer, and denied the bookstore had been raided. "When they arrested him and his friend, they went into both of the places where these individuals worked and searched both places of work for each of them to see if these individuals had put any type of evidence there," he says. "I know they never found anything at the bookstore." Peters also alleges ACT leader Rodney Hide assisted Peron in moving to New Zealand and wrote to the Immigration Minister asking him to speed up his application to come here. Peron says this is untrue, and that Hide merely wrote a letter to the Immigration Service enquiring about a situation whereby an NZIS official had railed against Peron saying "that no libertarian should be allowed to come and live in the country". "[On] appeal the immigration [NZIS] said that it had to be re-considered and this woman was not to go anywhere near this case," he says.
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Thursday, 10th March 2005 - 12:00pm