The New Zealand Labour Party has released its rainbow policy platform for the 2011 election, which includes gay marriage and GLBT youth safety among the party’s primary concerns.

MPs Charles Chauvel and Jacinda Ardern visited the express offices this week to deliver the policy, which has three basic tenets – bringing about formal equality before the law, promoting safety and dignity for all New Zealanders, and promoting safety and dignity internationally.

Bringing about formal equality before the law

Labour’s policy states, “New Zealanders in a same-sex relationship may enter into civil unions, which are not fully equivalent in a legal sense to marriage, and they may not enter into marriage. They may not offer themselves as the adoptive carers for children. Transsexual and intersex new Zealanders face numerous barriers to full participation in society.”

To bring about formal equality before the law, Labour pledges to review laws and practices that offend section 19 of the New Zealand Bill of Rights. Specifically, the party will:

- Modernise the law relating to the care of children, to ensure that the widest pool of suitable adults is lawfully available to provide care to children in need
- Review and update relationship and relationship property law, and
- Implement the 2007 Human Rights Commission report To Be Who I Am, which focussed on improving the lives of trans and intersex New Zealanders.

“It’s our policy to open up the right to marriage so that people can make the choice,” says Charles. “I imagine there will be some who have some difficulty with that, but it’s consistent with our commitment to equality.”

Promoting safety and dignity for all New Zealanders

Labour’s policy platform states, “Every New Zealander should be able to live a life of safety and dignity. Many GLBT New Zealanders continue to be subject to insult, verbal and physical abuse, and to be made to feel inferior, most damagingly in schools. Too often, this results in high rates of self-harm and suicide amongst young GLBT New Zealanders.”

Labour’s policy is to support safety and dignity for all, including in school. In order to support safety in schools, Labour will encourage the establishment of queer / straight alliances, as well as other diversity groups.

Charles says Labour will also require schools to operate policies that prevent bullying of GLBT students.

“All our young people have to pass through schools and we all know how unsafe we can feel through bullying, negative comments or not being made to feel the same as your straight friends. It’s going to be a requirement of every school to have an anti-bullying policy that specifically mentions GLBT youth and is reported on regularly through the ERO mechanism. Parents will be able to know if their kids are going to a safe school.”

To those schools that have refused queer / straight alliances in the past, particularly on the grounds of religion, Charles says, “Just as we wouldn’t find it acceptable for any school that receives state funding to discriminate on any other ground, they can’t discriminate against our queer youth either.”

Labour’s policy platform also affirms the place of the last Labour-led government’s rainbow desk within the ministry of social development, which facilitated the planning and delivery of public services to the GLBT community.

The policy states, “Labour will ensure that the planning and delivery of public services continue to take the needs of GLBT New Zealanders into account. This includes the needs of an aging population.”

Charles says, “There’s no agency in central government that’s tasked with looking forward and finding out the needs of our queer populations going forward; there’s no one ensuring that existing public services are delivered safely. Nobody’s looking at the fact that we figure higher in suicide and self-harm statistics. Our policy puts a mechanism to deal with this right in the heart of central government in place.”

Promoting safety and dignity internationally

Labour’s pledge is to maintain and grow New Zealand’s participation in international bodies dealing with human rights, especially at UN level. The policy platform states a belief that New Zealand should raise its voice on these issues, including as an advocate on individual cases.

Charles says, “New Zealand should be saying – at a minimum – that it’s not acceptable to criminalise adult consentual same-sex behaviour and wherever we encounter this in the international community we will speak out against it.”

After the election

Both Charles and Jacinda assure us that regardless of the election’s result, Labour are committed to implementing laws outlined in the party’s rainbow issues policy.

Charles says, “If we are not successful in November, our policies become the agenda we’ll be advancing through private members’ bills and the like.”

Jacinda says, “If we become government, we do the work ourselves and it gets sped up significantly.

“If we’re not, my care of children bill will be kept in the ballot and I’ll keep progressing it, along with these other policies.”