Barnett Tim: Civil Union Bill — Second Reading 
Barnett Tim: Civil Union Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:622;Page:17406] 
TIM BARNETT (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 Submitters against the Civil Union Bill have described me as a practising homosexual—30 years and still practising some might scoff—as a leading pro-homosexual lobbyist and as someone with a very personal sexual lifestyle commitment. It was not in any of those colourful roles that I chaired the Justice and Electoral Committee. I am devoted to making the voice of the wider community heard in this place and have for 5 years chaired what I think is a very functional select committee. I am proud to be speaking in this debate as its chair. 
When the Civil Union Bill was referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee my role as chair was questioned. Of course my sexuality was the issue. For two reasons I was happy to carry on as chair. The role of leading a select committee is primarily about process. It was a personal challenge not to generate complaints from submitters that they had been unfairly treated by me as chair and we received none. Secondly most people who stand to benefit from this bill are heterosexual so if I declared an interest so should have all the other committee members and the committee would have collapsed. That made no sense. 
Of course as today sexuality dominated the debate. As an aside we realised as the select committee progressed that marriage has a history of being used as an expression of the dominant prejudices of the society and the time—bans on interfaith marriage bans on people with some sort of disability being able to marry and bans on interracial marriage in the USA only two generations ago. Civil unions are not marriages but the distaste expressed by biblical literalists towards the idea of two people of the same gender being able to have legal recognition of their relationship had all the flavour of the use of relationship law as a weapon to advance their latest prejudice. 
The select committee received very few specific proposals to amend the bill and we responded to each. We inserted a commencement date for certainty. We abandoned prescribed words for the solemnisation of the relationship to allow freedom of choice. We inserted recognition of overseas same-sex marriages and civil union type of arrangements as civil unions in New Zealand. We ensured that the language of marriage remained as such and that with civil unions comes new legal language applying only to people in civil unions. 
The select committee process was complex to manage and I thank Angela Van Dam Will Murray and Helena Strange for their outstanding work in keeping the floods at bay and making sure that submitters were treated well. I also thank my fellow committee members for putting up with a vigorous schedule and thank those of them deeply opposed to this bill—notably Murray Smith of United Future—for remaining quite calm and constructive. 
I shall devote the remainder of my speech to working through a series of comments made about the work of the committee on the bill and on the wider issues raised in the debate. Some say that the select committee rushed the process. Groups and individuals had 7 weeks to produce submissions after an open debate on civil unions lasting for the past year. It is ironic that the debate on the issue actually started back in 1999 when the then National Government issued a discussion paper on same-sex couples and the law. So this bill was a shock to no one. The committee gave every one of the 400 or so submitters who wanted to be heard the chance to be heard and 352 responded and ended up appearing. The 75 percent of those submitters who were opposed to the bill were highly repetitive. We then spent 7 weeks processing the information and the views collected. All of that totalled 82 hours of committee sittings. That is not the description of a rush. 
Some say that the committee ignored the majority of submissions. In fact a section in the committee’s report signed by seven of its 11 members makes clear that we heard what they said very clearly indeed and responded in detail. The numerical breakdown of submissions received by a select committee is not a referendum. The role of the committee is to separate emotion from fact. Some submissions were of standard wording with individual copies signed by many different people. Some were from groups. One had a petition attached signed by 2965 people in favour of the bill. In the last 36 hours my parliamentary office has received 1000 emails—800 in favour of the bill and 200 against. We can all play the numbers game. Members of Parliament are not statisticians. We are politicians seeking ideas and views for analysis. 
The school of gender and women’s studies at Victoria University analysed all the submissions. Of the 3383 substantial submissions received 74 percent—not 95 percent—were against the bill and 26 percent in support. Of those submissions from agencies rather than individuals 45 percent were in favour and 55 percent against. Was it divine intervention that caused the submission from the Destiny Church to fail to arrive? We shall never know. Of the submissions against the bill fewer than 1 percent were from people with direct experience in the matters dealt with by the bill. Of the submissions in support of the bill 33 percent were from people with direct experience of those matters. What I described above is a classic example of a group that did not represent either mainstream New Zealand or even mainstream Christian thought that was well organised and that flooded a select committee with submissions. That Victoria University study found by analysing the 2001 census that a maximum of 9 percent of New Zealanders held fundamentalist Christian views. So the moral majority may in fact be neither. 
 Many of the oral submitters against the bill stated that they had opposed at the time and still regretted homosexual law reform 18 years ago. I utterly respect their right to hold their views but they do not—and I am sure Parliament agrees—hold a veto on such matters. None of the 300 or so opponents of the bill heard by the committee presented any evidence on how homosexual law reform and the expansion of human rights grounds to include sexual orientation had personally affected them or had provided anything but good to society. There were no unintended consequences of those laws so what is different now? 
Some call for a referendum on this matter. This bill flows from the decision of this House in 1993 to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. That was a moment of constitutional importance. That moment has passed. It is now the job of this House to implement the consequences. 
Some say that same-sex couples could obtain the protections of civil union through personal legal contracts. To quote a Wellington gay submitter: “My partner and I have had to spend considerable sums on legal fees for the drafting of a relationship property agreement wills and enduring powers of attorney to property personal care and welfare yet still our relationship lacks any legal protection even approaching that automatically conferred by marriage. That is not equality and it is not acceptable.” 
Some say that the Relationships (Statutory References) Bill should have been dealt with first. That is nonsense. It is the Civil Union Bill that confers what many refer to as next-of-kin status. It gives certainty which can then be used to access the rights in the relationships bill and obviously both pieces of legislation should come into force on the same day. 
In conclusion homosexuality certainly inspires fantasy. Submitters spoke of a man in the United States wanting to marry his horse—male I assume. They described this bill as being the spark for the mass explosion of New Zealand’s volcanoes. They claimed that homosexual Arab terrorists were roaming Christchurch promoting the bill. They claimed that most gay men die by their early 40s giving me at 46 years of age kaumatua status in this House. Then I read chilling submission CU 748 in which a 12-year-old describes homosexuals as worthy of death. Those in this House who reject this bill need to realise what that rejection is validating be it blackshirts marching outside or twisted prejudice in the minds of our young. I commend this bill to the House.