"Long overdue but very welcome" is how Rainbow Wellington chairperson Tony Simpson describes the abolition of the 'provocation defence' in a near unanimous vote of parliament sitting under urgency yesterday evening.
"I was watching the late news and it popped up quite suddenly. I knew it was on the Order Paper but I didn't expect it to pass quite so soon. I went out and had a glass of bubbly at S&Ms bar – several in fact."
Rainbow Wellington along with a number of other gay groups have been pushing for the removal of the defence from the legislation for several years, with the full support of the Law Commission and a number of scholars in jurisprudence.
"Every time we went to see the politicians for at least the last eight years it was on the agenda, but nothing ever happened," Simpson tells GayNZ.com.
"Then, of course, long came the Weatherston case and it was everyone's issue. We actually pointed out the irony of this to the Select Committee when we made our submission - that for years people who cared about it had been pointing out that it was used as an excuse to mitigate a death from gay bashing, but no-one took any notice. 'Who cared if a few queers got killed'.
"But suddenly there was all this horrendous evidence on television night after night concerning the murder of a pretty young girl and the whole country was – quite rightly – revolted by someone trying to use provocation as a defence. I guess it's a case of 'any port in a storm' but it's really shameful that it took this particular death to trigger some action."
'A SHAME ABOUT ACT'
Simpson adds that it's a pity last night's vote to abolish the Partial Defence of Provocation wasn't unanimous. "Why ACT voted against it is a mystery to me. I read their reasoning but I can't follow it. They seemed to be saying that it should not be abolished until it had been replaced with something else – but why do we need something else?"
As to the statement attributed to ACT spokesperson David Garrett that there was no such thing as a 'gay panic defence' Simpson finds that "totally bizarre – I mean at almost exactly the same time as the Weatherston trial there was another trial going on Auckland of a gay murder in which the evidence was even more horrendous.
"Where has David Garrett been for the last four decades? Since the murder of Charles Aberhard in the sixties there's been a gay bashing murder trial at least every year and always the same tired old gay panic defence surfaced. Thank God it's now a thing of the past," he concludes.
