Today, all thirty-three MPs of the National Party voted against the First Reading (i.e stage) of a Bill the Labour Government submitted to Parliament. That Bill would outlaw conversion “therapy”. This is a practice intended to change the gender or sexuality of a person - typically a minor with no choice in the matter. Every party in Parliament concurs with the broad consensus amongst rainbow advocate groups that this practice is torture. Conversion therapy is as outdated as corporal punishment in a classroom or the ban on homosexuality itself.
So why would anyone then vote against outlawing it? The conduct of the National caucus has not been the only behaviour troubling me. This could have been cleanly resolved, but it hasn’t. Let’s step through the mess.
Justice Minister Kris Faafoi has failed again. I’m so sorry to say it. I want him to succeed. Former National Party adviser Ben Thomas provides a good argument that he’s been given too much to do. In that case, responsibility also lies with his superiors like Ardern who failed to spread the load.
I still have to hold him responsible for what he’s done here. Events have proven an eerie echo of hate speech laws. He has failed to clarify under what circumstances these new laws would apply. He has subsequently gone to ground rather than fronting the media.
This is triply damaging. His failure creates difficulties for the justice system to interpret how to actually execute on the law, once the Bill has passed. The passage of the law is slowed by giving the Opposition more ammunition to expend on amendments and procedural delays. Such a basic error reflects a failure of communication with and respect for the voices of rainbow people. Simply ask the activists they should be in touch with. Ask what they endured in their lives. Ask where legal intervention would’ve stopped torture. Ask where the law would’ve done nothing.
Yet Faafoi’s failures are not front and centre. National is. This is not an important issue for them to focus on. It’s bad politics. There are widespread, bread-and-butter issues like the housing crisis and the COVID response and that long-absent antagonist, inflation. There is no better target than those. Instead, Judith has opted for divisive social issues. These fire up only moralising conservatives and liberals, and those minorities affected by them. And it’s bad policy. National has failed , for instance, New Zealanders being failed by the healthcare system. They fail every day their PR doesn’t centre on Shane Reti’s inquiries into PHARMAC, or on Mike King calling for more and better investment in mental health provision, but on sticking up for cruel and unnecessary practices.
This is a parallel error of communication. The case that National believes in should have been a simple and clean one. 1: We support banning conversion therapy, as it is commonly understood. 2: We have concerns that this Bill would go beyond that common understanding. 3: Minister Faafoi has failed to allay them. This should sound familiar for a couple of reasons. We’ll come to one later. The other is that it’s the exact right-wing playbook on hate speech laws! Just swap “conversion therapy” for “incitement to violence”! Chris Bishop is out there doing precisely this, but that’s too little, too late, after this incomprehensible betrayal. How do you stuff this up? Judith and her cabal are chronically incapable.
What’s especially incoherent - and, again, we’ll come back to this in a sec - is that National is voting even against the First Reading. On Bill after Bill, most or all parties vote for a First Reading. Why? Because they see some merit in addressing the issue. They try to amend the Bill to reflect their concerns. Depending on if they get what they want, they either continue voting for or turn against the Bill at later readings.
There is no reason to disregard a healthy, collaborative Parliamentary process here. You only vote against First Reading if you think it’s a waste of time, or heinous to even consider. Yet National is, in theory, supportive of a ban of limited scope. The accusations of a flip-flop to play politics are, therefore, justified. Particularly because the flip flops against National’s only big post-election campaign: #DemandTheDebate. The nefarious agenda to convert our kids is apparently worth less discussion than calling Aotearoa “Aotearoa”.
This No vote is plain nasty from everyone in their caucus. Especially so after their future, the Young Nats, focused on advocating for a Yes, secured that prior commitment from them, and have since been sold out. Conservatives in the mold of Nick Smith will do this shamelessly and then, some day, turn around to apologise like he did. They are sorrowfully doing what will be wrong then, is wrong now, and has always been wrong.
Some of them will be unrepentant until the day they die. They hate, or are disgusted by, or have a total disregard for, rainbow people. They have taken that to the point of endorsing our torture. This is somehow still not considering a disqualifying characteristic, by hundreds of thousands of voters, to help govern our country. Finally, how are National’s so-called “liberals”, Shane Reti and Chris Bishop and Nicola Willis and more, really liberal if they can’t even stand up against this?
The best you can say in defence of the liberals is that they did it not because they genuinely believe it’s okay, but for political reasons. Chris Bishop is still claiming they’re all against conversion therapy and want a debate. He is doing this despite having just voted against a debate, and repeated scaremongering rhetoric from him and the gang. That’s still horrifying to value your personal political advancement, as somebody already in the elite by virtue of your office, that much. I don’t understand how you value that enough to go on the record as pro-torture, even if your vote won’t change the eventual outcome.
Note, too, that National would overall benefit politically if they were for banning conversion therapy. That’d help them soften their image in the eyes of urban liberals and move towards the centre. That is valued in one school of political science as the key way to win elections. This theory, while controversial, has recently been vindicated by Helen Clark, John Key, and Jacinda Ardern alike.
What is uncontroversial is that, in MMP, a party cannot win by cannibalizing its competitor for the same votes. ACT is presently better at getting the votes of people who vote for stands like this than National. It’s a waste of time. Best case scenario, it doesn’t change the (small) size of the right bloc in 2023 one bit. It’s likely a Labour-Greens coalition easily holds power against 45-55 right-wing MPs, whatever their distribution between National and ACT.
These MPs, even the liberals, are looking out for their personal political futures. Why? A spectre is haunting the National caucus - the spectre of Judith. The peak of her idiocy was pushing Todd Muller out of the party because he leaked info to the media. Leaking is a common practice in politics in general, let alone the bloody National Party, and sometimes defensible in the name of whistleblowing. The absurdity of such disproportionate retribution was highlighted by how I, a random Jill Bloggs on the street, know the entire story, because other colleagues presumably more in favour with her promptly leaked everything. She is waging war on her own caucus to stay in control and she is willing to scorch anyone’s backyard and barbie to hold onto power.
I will only make one of the many points you could provide about why this is terrible. Social issues like this are commonly booted to a “conscience vote”. She could benefit from adopting such an approach in her caucus: not whipping the vote, and instead letting the liberals vote one way and the conservatives another. Everyone’s somewhat happy, and National takes a step towards rehabilitating its image as a “big tent”, “broad church”, “liberal-conservative party”, or whichever other political cliché you feel like tossing about today.
Okay, I’m done savaging National. Just like everyone else gabbing in my social media bubble. You know who they’ve stayed conspicuously silent on? ACT. Yes, ACT voted for the first reading. They are approaching this with more maturity, a greater respect for Parliament working effectively, and have avoided the bad-communication shitstorm Judith has unleashed.
They are still already on record as being likely to vote against. And the kicker is that their stated reason for opposing the Bill as it stands is the exact same reason National opposes it. National voting against the First Reading is a silly and stupid move that they deserve derision for, but ultimate moral condemnation belongs to them equally. National is hogging the spotlight because it feels like a lot of people were keener to jump on them for their vote rather than examining what they’re trying to do.
What’s the why of the right bloc? National and ACT ostensibly oppose conversion therapy because the definition may be too broad and it’s unclear (with apologies to Minister Faafoi for beating this dead horse). In their eyes, that could lead to the criminalisation of parents who try to prevent their children from accessing hormone blockers and hormones. The same new dog-whistles about the “huge toll it takes on bodies” that I’m used to only hearing from Very Online transphobes and conspiratorial boomers are being trotted out.
These are nasty for two reasons. Firstly, they ignore the harm "natural" puberty does to trans people. Secondly, they imply that, statistically, any child who jumps through all the hoops to be verified by the medical system as a dysphoric trans child - i.e, the smallest, most evidently, obviously trans children - are still almost certainly not transgender, and will regret taking hormones.
Words cannot express how this attitude is at the core of harms wreaked upon our community. The persistent denial of medical care as our bodies change in front of us against our wishes; the years of doubt and agonizing and self-invalidation; the championing of the voices of those few detransitioners who are malicious and irresponsible, at the expense of keeping all of us muffled - this is the culture war on trans people, and it has come to New Zealand in these words from Simon Bridges and David Seymour.
Every response I have seen discussing the conversion therapy ban has missed this. This is somewhere where I damn will #DemandTheDebate. Is a parent stopping their child getting hormones or blockers conversion therapy or not? Personally, I firstly believe it’s heinous. I struggle to see how legal intervention would work, or if it’d be helpful to legally penalise a parent in an already-tense family situation. However, outlawing such behaviour could be an effective legal deterrent, depending on where the balance is struck.
Either way, whether Labour finds it in them this term to make Bills on social issues that actually make sense (and how the party who legalised abortion so well so shortly ago came to this point, I don’t know); whether you think it should be illegal or not; how you’d behave towards your questioning child, and what role the parties believe they, and government, should play in this - that is what needs to be plastered all over social media.
Conversion therapy, as we commonly understand it, is torture where authority figures try to coerce you into believing you're not a rainbow person. I've leaned into that conceptualisation throughout this entire piece. Every party at least claims to be against that, and, with Labour holding a majority and birthing this bill, it is guaranteed to be banned; the worst that could happen is some caveats being carved out, such as around nuances in religious communities and households, which I haven't seen enough debate about yet to comment on. Advocates can rest easy that finally, at long last, they will get what they want. This horror will be banned and there can finally be some peace.
This bill may also include parents denying questioning children medical care as conversion therapy. Do we consider that conversion therapy or not? Is this the way to address it, or should it be split out into a separate bill? This is what National and ACT have stated they intend to debate. We do trans people a disservice when we focus more on National-bashing than getting ready for that battle. Select Committees and Parliament are going to decide whether or not this is part of the Bill, and that will affect trans lives. That is still up in the air and that is where rainbow advocates need to be paying attention, to see if it’s just conservative scaremongering that vastly overstates the reach of the Bill, or if there’s really something here.
This whole situation is sickening. It’s the fifth year running of being dazed and confused at how Labour’s well-meaning principles and policies often fail to connect with real-life people - though usually they get stuck at the delivering-their-vision step, not as early as merely articulating it. Nearly a third of the elected members of our Parliament made the wrong decision today. The stigma of that deserves to stick with National for some time. And, while far less important than that, my unease is only rising at the possibility that too many would-be allies, and too many members of my community, are more interested in dunking on the relatively powerless opposition than paying attention to what they can change.
I want to close on a personal note, because I'm tired of being angry about issues I can't change. I can at least share how I feel. The answer to the question of if I have personally been through conversion therapy is that I truly don't know. I don't know because of how this episode has shaken up the hormones question yet again. I don't know because I have had some weird and unhealthy counselling over my years, and no frame of reference for if it crossed the line.
Conversion therapy is dead and gone in Aotearoa in 2021. Huge props to the advocates who are going to bury it. What I want to know is if, in 2022, and 2023, and on and on, I’m going to have to be who politicians make people scared of so they can get power. I don't want to listen to that. I want to be heard. Today, the voices of Rainbow people have been heard in Parliament. When this latest legislative battle dies down, will we continue to be heard, in classrooms, in hospitals, in the media, in our communities?
I want to say "Yes", but I'm so scared. The march of a somewhat amorphous progressivism (exemplified by the TERF-TIRF schism) is too often seen as inevitable. That leads too many would-be advocates to lay down the pitchforks and let injustices be. Maybe I just need to unplug from social media, but I was aghast at recently seeing fellow rainbow people think that hate speech laws mean the end of homophobia and transphobia in this country. It's not that easy, and we cannot make false promises to each other that the long struggle is over soon.
There is no natural guarantee that, to quote Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., "the arc of the moral universe...bends towards justice". I don't want to look back on today as the peak of rainbow rights and lives in my lifetime, or to settle for it. I want 2022 to be better, and 2023 to be even better. And on, and on. What do I want? I want to be able to say that it gets better and to tell the truth at the same time.
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