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If he returns to government, Labor will pass a law banning gay conversion therapy and make advertising, offering, or performing the controversial practice a crime.
Finance Minister Grant Robertson suggested that Labor tried to make the switch during this period in office, but failed to gain the support of their coalition partners, New Zealand First.
Conversion therapy seeks to change the sexuality or gender identity of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) people using therapy, drugs or other methods, and Labor said it was “relatively common.”
In 2018, after 20,000 signed two petitions calling for the ban, Labor MP Marja Lubeck put a bill on the members’ ballot that sought to ban the practice.
Last year, the Justice Select Committee recommended delaying a decision last year due to concerns about the rights to freedom of expression and religion.
Robertson said Lubeck’s bill would be adopted as a government bill if the Labor Party was re-elected and suggested that NZ First did not support a ban on the practice during this last term.
“Obviously it has been a policy of the Labor Party … but what we have not been able to do is get the full support of the government for that.”
Robertson confirmed that the Greens supported the bill.
The ban on conversion therapy is part of the Labor’s Rainbow policy that was revealed by its spokesperson Tāmati Coffey at a cabaret bar on Cuba St in Wellington.
Coffey said that conversion therapy was based “on the misconception that people are wrong or broken because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
“This is fundamentally wrong,” he said.
Coffey said the practice has been linked to serious adverse mental health problems, such as depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts.
“It is a practice that causes harm and is out of place in the friendly, inclusive and modern country that we are,” he said.
The ban would make it a crime to advertise or offer to undergo conversion therapy, undergo conversion therapy, and knowingly remove someone from New Zealand for conversion therapy.
The alleged crimes would be investigated by the police and the culprits would be punished with a fine or imprisonment, depending on the severity.
Labor has also committed to:
• Invest $ 4 million in existing Rainbow youth mental health services
• Work with schools to provide gender neutral toilets
• Ensure that health care meets the needs of trans, intersex and gender diverse people.
• Review adoption and surrogacy policies with a view to eliminating discriminatory practices.
In 2016, the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that New Zealand develop and implement a child rights-based health care protocol for intersex children.
About one in 2000 children are born intersex, roughly the same proportion as children born with red hair.
Labor pledged to do this in his next term to prevent unnecessary medical interventions on intersex babies and to ensure that binary gender assignment was not automatically presumed as the best case outcome.
Coffey said there are still many difficult processes and outdated assumptions in adoption and surrogacy for Rainbow families.
“I know from my own experience that my partner and I had to formally adopt our own biological child that we need to modernize the law.”
