Barnett's law a case of conscience

By HELEN TUNNAH

There was one telling image when prostitution was decriminalised this week.

It was Georgina Beyer taking Tim Barnett's hand in Parliament as they waited for the vote, and it would have had Norman Jones spinning in his grave.

A transsexual MP holding the hand of a gay MP, willing that brothels and soliciting be given legal protection. What would Jones, Invercargill's arch-conservative, anti-gay MP, the rabid opponent of the homosexual law reforms passed almost 17 years ago to the day, have made of it?

Barnett, the 44-year-old responsible for the new laws, bursts into laughter when asked about the hand-holding. He admits he didn't imagine a scene like that would be possible.

"Oh, no, no. I never thought I'd ever be in any Parliament, ever. The Labour Party in Britain didn't work in ways that would allow people like me to get there. There was only one 'out' MP out of 600 when I left."

That was more than a decade ago, when Barnett fled Margaret Thatcher's Britain with his former longtime partner for a new start in New Zealand.

The start took a little longer than expected - thanks to the partner being an Anglican priest.

"He wanted a new opportunity in life and saw a job advertised in Christchurch. We came out for the interview and the Church didn't recognise same-sex relationships - so I had to be hidden down the road in a B&B."

As Barnett once said, with apologies to Oscar Wilde, "to be a fairly recent immigrant might be regarded as unfortunate, to be both that and gay looks like carelessness".

In his parliamentary office on Thursday with his partner of two years, Ramon Maniapoto, surrounded by flowers and friends and sporting a hangover from the night before, Barnett admitted to being "immensely satisfied" to have completed what he says was the third trunk of much-needed law reforms.

It began with the 1986 Homosexual Law Reform Bill - which Jones campaigned tirelessly against - followed by changes to human rights laws to prevent discrimination against people with HIV/Aids and has now been completed with the Prostitution Reform Bill.

That the new law tries to ensure the health and well-being of sex workers is neither here nor there to its critics. But to Barnett that has always been the key to the entire debate about a conscience vote.

He says conservative MPs have failed to understand that, perhaps because they just find the entire subject a bit "icky".

"This is about trying to plan good health law, good public planning law, good criminal law, perhaps make a moral statement, and patch it all together.

"But you have to work out within that what is actually the nub of the conscience issue.

"And I think it is accepting the inevitability of prostitution. So do we then have a law that tries to condemn it, and tries to suppress it, or do we have a law built entirely around the harm that it causes?

"This is about dealing with the crimes that happen in the industry that are largely unpoliced at the moment."

Barnett's philosophical stance is a contrast to the anger of talkback callers who saw the vote as a choice between endorsing prostitution or condemning it.

But he shows little outward sign of annoyance with any of his critics apart from the Churches. Although his office was flooded with calls and emails, he says he was never really exposed to any hate-mail or abuse.

But he did hit back when 20 Church leaders sent an open letter to MPs a week ago urging them to vote against the bill. He accused some of the nation's most revered religious leaders of arrogance and of talking utter nonsense.

"Absolutely, and I don't apologise for that at all. What really annoyed me about their intervention was that they came in very late. They had had two-and-a-half years to engage in the democratic process, and then five days before the vote they came out with a statement that was factually inaccurate."

It's not his first stoush with religion. The lobby group Catholic Action tried to get him ejected as chairman of the select committee considering changes to the Matrimonial Property Act, including de facto rights for gay couples.

But it is Barnett's chairing of the justice and electoral committee that has earned the respect of political rivals.

WHILE suggesting that Barnett will never shy away from pursuing his or his party's causes, Act MP Stephen Franks says his handling of the committee is fair and even-handed.

Basic decency and fairness for all has been the focus of the man who has pursued what he terms a social libertarian political agenda.

In England he entered local body politics as a 24-year-old because he was irritated by injustices which he could do nothingabout.

He battled Thatcher, race inequalities and nuclear issues through the turbulent years under the Conservative Party Prime Minister, working with one of his heroes, "Red" Ken Livingstone, now Mayor of London despite Prime Minister Tony Blair's efforts to block him from getting the job.

"Tony does sometimes misread situations," is all Barnett will say about one of the big public spats between old and new Labour in Britain.

He also became active in gay and lesbian politics, in 1988 becoming the first director of the Stonewall Group, now the world's biggest lobby group of its kind, which led the gay media to label him "Britain's first professional homosexual".

"For my mother she thought that meant somebody who sort of stood on the streets plying their trade."

But there was sadness to his lobbying as he watched his father die from an industrial disease after being made to clamber over blue-asbestos-covered turbines.

His mild-mannered mother, outraged by the company's claims that it was not responsible during a coroner's hearing, carried on her husband's legal fight and won.

When Barnett arrived in Christchurch, he began voluntary work with the Aids Foundation, which led to a meeting with Catherine Healy, the national co-ordinator of the Prostitutes Collective, with whom he worked closely on law reform for sex workers.

He picked up the work begun by National MP Maurice Williamson 12 years ago and carried on by colleague Katherine O'Regan until her defeat in the 1999 election.

It was then that Barnett was left to raise the baby of law reform on his own.

He says he never arrived in Parliament with the idea of running one issue. He was elected in Christchurch Central as an openly gay MP, and says he is proud of his voters and those from the Wairarapa for electing Beyer and Te Atatu for electing Chris Carter.

"Under MMP, diversity is recognised as a virtue, but it's interesting that all three 'queer' MPs, two gay and one cross-gender, are electorate MPs. We all got voted in in our areas."

Barnett has used his time in Parliament to work for gay rights, but pursues a social agenda into which he diverts $475 a week out of his MP's salary to pay for research.

Just a day after overseeing the decriminalisation of prostitution, he is already working on his next social project.

"I don't want to frighten my colleagues too much, but the next challenge really is about drug policy.

"What I know is the current law in terms of drugs does exactly what the prostitution law has done until now, which is to drive people who are vulnerable anyway into more harm.

"So there has to be a better model. Most of the MPs around prostitution agreed the laws were a nonsense, but they somehow preferred the nonsensical law to something that is going to work better.

"That's what got me occasionally frustrated."

Tonight Barnett and Maniapoto will be escaping the trials of the week at that bastion of New Zealand maleness, Jade Stadium, watching the All Blacks play France. Of course Barnett will be there.

"I'm from Rugby - it's my game."