The Big Gay Out was Very Big, Very Gay and Very Out. The cruel summer of 2023, when it had to be postponed a month while the council attended to flood damage at Pt Chevalier’s Coyle Park, felt like a long time ago.
Thousands flocked to the park and, in keeping with Big Gay Out’s latter-day status as a sort of Queer Waitangi, the politicians came too. Labour’s Carmel Sepuloni and Deborah Russell walked around in bright dresses, greeting people and posing for photos. Prime Minister Christopher Luxon arrived and walked straight into an ear-bashing. Nicola Willis and Chris Bishop smiled rigidly behind him, but it seemed to wind up amicably enough, with that modern expression of mutual goodwill, the joint selfie.
The goodwill didn’t last long. Luxon encountered a group of young people who followed him chanting slogans about trans rights, pinkwashing and Palestine and he soon retreated, grim-faced, from the park. It seemed a shame, if only because it deprived anyone else of the chance to speak directly to him.
In part because he can struggle to demonstrate any vivid beliefs of his own, Luxon has been plagued by the culture warriors in his coalition. Between delivering his first State of the Nation speech and arriving at Coyle Park, he’d been tasked with questions about the scrapping of sexuality and relationship education guidelines in schools. That was a coalition agreement win for New Zealand First, which has trumpeted it as the removal of “gender ideology” from schools. (The guidelines were introduced in 2020 by then-associate education minister Tracey Martin, a New Zealand First MP.)
Luxon’s answers (“parents should be consulted”) suggested he didn’t understand how the guidelines work and that individual schools are required to consult their communities on what they teach. He seemed to suggest, shortly after a speech in which he spoke about centralisation and regulation as a national crisis, that the rules should be set higher up the chain.
Away from that confrontation, things were much more relaxed. Parents with children mingled with the multiple tribes within tribes of the queer community, the beaming older folk and the groups of teenagers who don’t necessarily express their gender in a binary way. Freak flags were flown and it felt like we were at ease with each other.
Traffic was another matter. The park is at the end of a peninsula and having thousands of people converging on it is a problem at the best of times. This wasn’t the best of times. Access past a major dig down the centre of Pt Chevalier Rd for the central interceptor stormwater separation project was reopened for the weekend, but nearby Meola Rd remained closed for what have become wearyingly controversial roadworks.
We’ve ended up on the front page again, this time in the form of a NZ Herald story implying that this long-delayed road improvement would bring a pestilence of raised pedestrian crossings that would cost up to $500,000 each. The crossings – remarkably, the reporter had this information and chose not to share it – are actually budgeted at either $19,000 or $31,000.
I wrote a response the paper was kind enough to publish in which I expressed the view that in a neighbourhood that takes in three schools, sports grounds, social housing and a large retirement village, it should be possible to cross the road safely and easily. We can’t keep designing neighbourhoods around the imperative of cars going as fast as possible at all times.
I ventured that we would come out of the project “a better-built place, where our diverse and rapidly growing population will be able to move around more easily”.
We should probably try to avoid getting involved in any more culture wars in the interim though.
