Jock Anderson
He's only just got into Parliament through what some folk consider the back door but lawyer and out there homosexual Labour-lister Charles Pierre Chauvel has already threatened to sue someone’s “ass,” as GayNZ.com quaintly put it.
According to GayNZ.com Mr Chauvel, 37, a former Wellington partner in major law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts, has warned the Society for Promotion of Community Standards he will sue it if it repeats allegations against him of excessive publicly-funded travel.
A GayNZ.com news item said Mr Chauvel was referring to a press release issued by the Society in which it highlighted in-depth stories published in the National Business Review in 2004/2005 that raised concerns over Mr Chauvel’s apparent over-spending on taxpayer-funded travel while a member of the Lotteries Commission.
At the time the newspaper disclosed that Mr Chauvel had spent more than $80,000 on trips to Europe, the United States and around New Zealand.
The newspaper also questioned whether Internal Affairs minister George Hawkins might have been misled over the actual costs of Mr Chauvel’s international travel.
A might peeved Mr Chauvel, who has his eyes set on the Attorney-General’s job, took no action against the newspaper or challenged what it published.
In July, after it was announced at a Premier House “do” celebrating 20 years of homosexual law reform, that Mr Chauvel, as the next in-line Labour list candidate, would replace retiring MP Jim Sutton, the Society for the Promotion of Community Standards issued a lengthy press release criticizing Mr Chauvel’s homosexual lifestyle and raised a number of matters including his travel spending.
SPCS accused Mr Chauvel of attempting to crush free speech by asking the High Court to ban anti-gay rights videos and censor publications critical of the homosexual lifestyle (the Living Word case).
In a detailed report available on its website –www.spcs.org.nz – the Society, among other things, took issue with Mr Chauvel “trumpeting” on the Labour Party website about his High Court victory in the high-profile Living Word case in 2001.
Two Living Word Christian videos highly critical of gay rights political activism and gay promiscuous lifestyle had been ruled objectionable by the official censor.
According to the Labour Party website Mr Chauvel “successfully defended a censorship appeal to restrict the availability of anti-gay hate literature.”
What Mr Chauvel and the Labour Party still fails to mention on the website about this short-lived “success” was that the High Court decision was unanimously overturned by five judges of the Court of Appeal.
As a result the Film and Literature Board of Review reclassified the Living Word videos as unrestricted publications, collapsing what SPCS claimed was a “house of cards” Mr Chauvel and his fellow gay-rights lobbyists had sought to construct based on trying to define the videos as constituting so-called “hate literature” that needed to be banned.
SPCS also took issue with Mr Chauvel’s assertion that the facts surrounding his “family life” were private and completely off limits to media scrutiny, something most media have meekly gone along with.
Not so compliant was the press release from the Society for Promotion of Community Standards which reckoned the public would take an active interest in any “family life” values Mr Chauvel sought to espouse and promote and how his role as a gay activist would influence his voting record on legislation such as “gay adoption” and “same sex marriage.”
SPCS questioned whether Mr Chauvel and his gay partner would be used by gay rights lobby groups such as GayNZ.com and Gay Express to promote “gay marriage.”
Would he appear on the gay television show “Kiwifruits” to promote gay rights for gay MPs with young children?
And it’s not been all plain sailing for Mr Chauvel in one newspaper.
Veteran journalist and former newspaper editor Karl du Fresne, writing in the Dominion Post, took issue with what he termed Mr Chauvel’s self-serving spin on his promotion to Parliament by claiming he would bring a business perspective to the Labour Party caucus.
Du Fresne questioned just how representative is Mr Chauvel of New Zealand business.
Being a partner in the Wellington branch of global law firm Minter Ellison Rudd Watts (MERW) did not a businessman make, according to du Fresne.
Du Fresne didn’t think that Mr Chauvel being on the boards of Meridian Energy and the Lotteries Commission, state-owned enterprises “stacked with politically favoured appointees rather than people with real business expertise” amounted to much either.
Cutting to the chase du Fresne reminded us that Mr Chauvel “is of course homosexual, which is probably the real key to his rapid ascent in a party whose prevailing ideology now seems to be the championing of ‘oppressed’ minorities.”
Mr Chauvel’s other “sins” include wearing expensive designer suits, living in Oriental Bay, getting around in a Mercedes Benz convertible, living with the same man for 11 years and, as du Fresne put it, fashionably having an ego-baby.
There is no doubt Mr Chauvel’s parliamentary career will be watched with great interest.
Posted August 4, 2006
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