Editorial: Political empathy is performative and temporary

EDITORIAL | AROHA / LOVE

Written by Liam Hansen (they/them) | @liamhanse.n | Editor-in-Chief

Illustration by Stella Roper (they/she) | @dodofrenzy | Arts Editor

I attended my first Pride event in 2018, standing on the side of Ponsonby Road with a rainbow flag I’d bought from Look Sharp Westgate wrapped around my shoulders as the Auckland Pride Parade marched along in front of me. You can easily guess the organisations - and corporations - that were publicly declaring their support for the LGBTQIA+ community. Institutions that have been fighting for queer and trans rights for decades, such as Rainbow Youth, The Burnett Foundation, were plopped alongside international conglomerates eager to slap a pride flag over their logo and skive off any goodwill they could muster from being a progressive organisation. 

Keen to run Aotearoa like a business, the National Party grabbed some rainbow balloons from the storage closet and followed suit, with their usual coalition comrade David Seymour dawdling around in the back of the TVNZ broadcast as they marched along. You could tell he was there to support the gays because he was wearing pink. 

There was an awkward silence from my cohort of queer teenagers as they walked by. We obviously didn’t know all the details of which MPs voted for and against the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2013, but we knew most Nats weren’t keen. To be fair and clear, the issue wasn’t across party lines - the late former National MP Nikki Kaye had every right to be at that parade in 2018, given her mahi in reviving the Auckland Pride Festival and integrating updated adoption and surrogacy laws into Parliament in 2012. Besides, there are Labour MPs who voted against the legalisation of same-sex marriage that remained in Parliament until 2024 - or, in the case of Damien O’Connor, to this day. While researching, I discovered an old scandal of his where he called those selecting the Labour Party list as “self-serving unionists and a gaggle of gays”. When centre-left politicians are slinging out new satirical group chat names for communist polycules just as often as their populist rivals, the problem at hand can’t be defined by unanimous party stances. 

Regardless of Nikki Kaye’s work or David Seymour's shirt colour, the presence of Aotearoa’s right-wing parties at events they used to diminish felt wrong. 32 of The National Party’s 59 MPs at the time voted against the Marriage Amendment Act in 2013, amongst them being brief party leaders Bill English and Simon Bridges and ministers who remain part of the current coalition government; Louise Upston, Melissa Lee, and Speaker of the House Gerry Brownlee. The majority was slim, but non negligible - The National Party, as an organisation, did not support the right to marriage for queer individuals. 

If that’s the case, what was the point of pulling out the National banner at the Pride parade? Why did the MPs that supported same-sex marriage feel the need to publicly declare party-wide support for the rainbow community, despite the numbers showing otherwise? Ultimately, a decision had been made that the risk of alienating voters against gay marriage was better than losing the opportunity to use the #LoveIsLove hashtag and support queer people while public opinion was in their favour. Jacinda Ardern attended that pride parade, being the first sitting Prime Minister of New Zealand to march alongside the queer community, and the same cohort of tweens that was silent for the Nats were screaming for Jacinda to come and say hi. It was the right time for the right to distance themselves from homophobia and to support the LGBTQIA+ community - but even then, one letter of the acronym was muttered more quietly than the rest, leaving the door open for it to be silenced, ignored, and vilified. 

Nats spent the years between the 2018 parade and their return to power in 2023 doing fuck-all for queer and trans people of Aotearoa. The departure of their most queer friendly MPs, like Kaye, left the voices for queer communities in the conservative space silent, allowing space for the unnecessary and ruthlessly hateful remarks to come out of Winston Peter’s mouth on a weekly basis. The NZ First leader’s stance on queer people has remained consistently hateful across his time working with both major political parties as Deputy PM; Peters voted against the Homosexual Law Reform Act in 1986, against the aforementioned Marriage Amendment Bill in 2012, and has spent his last year and a half of power taking every opportunity he can get to performatively squeeze trans rights to a crowd of Facebook troglodytes keen on an opportunity to control all women's bodies. The last few months have seen consistent and blatantly homophobic attacks on queer Green MPs - namely Ricardo Menéndez March, and especially Benjamin Doyle. 

While the National Party were happy to dance in the pride parade and claim that they supported LGBTQIA+ rights in 2018, the party will easily slip from their current ignorance of their coalition partners' discrimination back into their former homophobia and transphobia if the voice of hatred becomes louder in Aotearoa. Just as the right will use faux support of queer people to seem virtuous, they’ll throw them under the bus for a lick of power. Trans lives, and queer love, are under attack in Aotearoa. If the National Party doesn’t care about us now, they didn’t care about it when it was convenient to pretend to. Please stay vigilant, queer and trans friends.