This year's election shows a reining-in of left-wing 'rainbow' policies, while right-wing parties are using "moral issues" as a focus point for policy and debate. Labour, Green and Progressive are proposing no change to existing policies, and holding back on promoting their gay-friendly ideas. The Labour party remains cautious in promoting any of their further proposed “gay” policies, as many opposition parties are using progress made on LGBT issues this term as ammunition for the ‘moral' vote. LGBT issues remain on the table for Labour's third term agenda, such as same-sex adoption, banning hate speech, and MP Georgina Beyer's bill to ban transgender discrimination. Labour's full Rainbow policy released this week maintains previous commitments to ensuring young people are safe as they explore their sexual orientation, to continue to remove discrimination in the law and to expand training for public servats in dealing with all communities. However there are no specific promises this time, as there were three years ago. United Future plan to amend the law, to protect gay and lesbian couples' rights to share and inherit property, and to be buried together, but they also support the notion to define marriage as only between a man and a woman. National, NZ First and ACT say they would repeal the Civil Union bill under referendum. Don Brash told Kapiti Grey Power last week that he would not scrap Civil Union legislation should National win the election, however National party family affairs spokeswoman Judith Collins has announced that they would change the law, to restrict Civil Unions to gay and lesbian couples only. The Alliance Party promises to support French President Jaques Chirac's proposed international airline tax to combat AIDS. They also promise, if elected, to recognize same-sex marriages and combat discrimination against LGBT people. Despite the current government's good track record for supporting LGBT policies, they are unusually quiet this year in their “rainbow” policies. Little recognition has been given to issues other than the Civil Union bill by most of the major parties, leaving issues like HIV/AIDS, same-sex marriage, same-sex adoption, and discrimination to hide in the fine print of larger policies. http://pridealliance.randomstatic.net/index.php http://rainbowlabour.org.nz/ www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/policy4760.html www.national.org.nz/default.aspx http://www.unitedfuture.org.nz/
Credit: GayNZ.com News Staff
First published: Sunday, 4th September 2005 - 12:00pm