Barnett Tim: Civil Union Bill — In Committee Procedure 
Barnett Tim: Civil Union Bill — In Committee Procedure 
[Volume:622;Page:17498] 
TIM BARNETT (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 I speak as a man who has never felt as though he has been through a traumatic experience. I do not think anyone abused me into becoming gay. From the very earliest time I recognised my sexuality I realised I was gay. It may come as a shock to Paul Adams to hear that but the reality is that there are many people in our society who have a genuine sexuality that is normally identified as lesbian or gay and that has not been caused by a trauma or an experience on the road to Damascus. In my view the reasons are genetic but for whatever reason it is a reality. There are people who identify in that way and against all the odds we choose to try to form relationships with people of our own gender. In many ways our lives would probably be a lot easier if we chose to go along with the pressure that parents and the majority of people often put on us but we do not choose to do that. We choose to be who we are just like others in this Chamber and I think we generally get recognition by society for that. 
I have a friend who is now 94 years old. As it happens he is the father of a former member in this House. He recognised in his teens that there was something different about him. Brian Donnelly spoke very powerfully yesterday about the kind of sense he had about his brother that there was something a little different about him. My friend knew from his teens that he was different from many of his male peers and he identified that as being something that in those days was impossible to express externally. He married—a happy marriage—had a family and eventually his wife died. By then in his 80s he could come out as something he always was—namely someone who is gay. That was not as a result of an experience he went through; that was his sexuality. I know that Paul Adams represents an extreme in this Parliament. I know that there are honourable people like Stephen Franks who do not deny that sexuality outside of heterosexuality is a reality. It is just a pity that they cannot go one step further and recognise that we should be treated as equal citizens in this Parliament and in this country. 
I want to make a fundamental point about the Human Rights Act. Many in this Chamber choose to denigrate that but back in the early 1990s this Parliament after extensive debate agreed to substantially expand our human rights legislation. The major debate was around the issue of sexual orientation. There was also debate around—as the wording put it—the presence of organisms in the body which was about whether people who have hepatitis or are HIV positive should be protected from discrimination. Disability and other grounds were also added to that legislation. That was a fundamental debate. 
In many countries human rights laws such as we have are embedded in a constitution. When we describe New Zealand’s constitutional arrangements we talk about our human rights law. Having said that once that decision was made naturally it flowed through society. We saw through the 1990s that many private providers of for example pension schemes and insurance schemes recognised same-sex partners as part of a reality in society. So they removed discrimination from their services. Towards the end of the 1990s the National Government tried to give the Government itself a permanent exemption from the Human Rights Act. Eventually it withdrew from that proposal and 3 years ago really by agreement across this Parliament the Human Rights Act was expanded as was always intended to include the Government. Once it included the Government from which legislation comes it was always inevitable that legislation that was discriminatory against groups in our society would be addressed. 
If we look at New Zealand legislation we see that people with disabilities and people who are lesbian or gay are the two major groups who are discriminated against in our law. That is exactly what this legislation is about. It would have been possible at that point to say we had to expand marriage. Very sensibly I think the decision was made to leave marriage untouched and instead set up a separate institution called civil union which certainly should be open to same-sex couples and have the same basic elements as marriage. That is a fundamental delivery of equality to New Zealanders. At the same time given that we do not want to set up discriminatory institutions it makes some sense to open that to heterosexual de facto couples added on to the fact that we know that there are now many New Zealanders living in heterosexual relationships. One-quarter of all heterosexual couples and one-third of young heterosexual couples are living together in relationships. That is what this legislation is all about.