The Law Commission wants the Human Rights Act 1993 amended to make it unlawful to discriminate on the grounds of gender identity and expression. Earlier this year their team of highly paid taxpayer funded lawyers and bureaucrats produced a 200 page “Issues Paper” on the matter. Their employment on this exercise was apparently money well spent. The new Minister of Justice, Paul Goldsmith, certainly gave no instruction to the Commission to cease work on the matter.

The Issues Paper identified 80 different questions that ostensibly needed to be addressed. Public submissions were then invited on these questions. Of course this was a classic case of where the questions, determine the answers. As I noted in my response to the Commission,

…the entire paper is written in such a way that the ideology of gender fluidity is presented as an established paradigm and the only questions needing to be asked are how to work out the details of its legal enforcement. This effectively shuts out any contrary views from those who find it difficult to identify a point of engagement with your paper at a more foundational level.

However if you made it to the end of the prescribed questionnaire, the final question did open a slight door for wider comment. It asked – are there any other issues relevant to this review or options for reform that we have not identified or anything else you would like to tell us? I offered the following observation,

This review ignores the foundational question of what is true about sex and gender. As noted earlier it pre-supposes that the ideology of gender fluidity is true and something that should be normalised in New Zealand law. As such it risks giving legal force to a falsehood.

A very large number of New Zealanders do not agree with this approach. And they are increasingly concerned that the propagation of this ideology is seriously undermining their fundamental rights to freedom of expression, conscience, religion and political opinion. This review has given very little consideration to such concerns. The only time these rights are mentioned is primarily in the context of how it is justifiable to limit them, rather than how to uphold them.

More importantly many New Zealand parents are increasingly concerned about the impact that the promotion of the ideology of gender fluidity is having on their children, and indeed all the children of New Zealand. At best it is causing confusion, and at worst it is causing serious harm to our children. The Law Commission should seriously reflect on its role in normalising this ideology by undertaking this review. The suggestion that this ideology should be given significantly increased influence in our culture by gifting it the legal powers discussed in this issues paper is profoundly misguided.

The final point in my comment above is the key problem here. Any change to the Human Rights Act will give gender ideology legal force in our culture. This empowerment will make it far more difficult to resist its promotion and propagation across multiple domains including academia, business, sports and education. For instance it is currently NZ First policy to remove the teaching of gender ideology from schools, and to ensure publicly funded sports bodies do not allow gender rules to compromise fair competition. However if the Commission’s proposals for the HRA are implemented, any such policies are likely to be deemed discriminatory and challenged as unlawful.

One wouldn’t be so concerned if this was just the isolated thinking of a bunch of elitist and woke bureaucrats, unlikely to see the light of day. However given Prime Minister Luxon’s public record of support for the “diversity” agenda, there is a real chance that the Commission’s proposals will indeed be implemented. The silence of his Justice Minister on this matter certainly doesn’t bode well…

Ewen McQueen
November 2024

Read my full submission on the Law Commission Issues Paper here