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National | Takatāpui

Its show time! Auckland Pride kicks off tomorrow.

The biggest Auckland Pride Festival to date will run this month, with over 200 events across the month. But festival organisers say there are still issues that heavily impact the rainbow community that they will be highlighting this month.

“It's all about inclusion. It's about providing a safe space, especially for our rangatahi because our rangatahi find it hard to be able to come out hei puta atu," Auckland Pride Board member Wetini Paul says.

This year's festival theme is ‘Karanga atu, karanga mai." Festival director Max Tweedie says that although progress has been made over the years,  there's still a lot to be done.

"It's a collective call for change on the issues that the community feels are still really important. They can be issues like banning conversion therapy, expanding access to gender-affirming care, decriminalising homosexuality in the Pacific, banning non-consensual surgeries for intersex to decriminalising and destigmatising HIV.”

According to the New Zealand Association of Counsellors, conversion therapy, also known as reparative therapy, is a pseudoscientific practice or treatment that seeks to change, suppress, and/or eliminate an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity and, or gender expression, using psychological and/or spiritual interventions.

Banning conversion therapy was a pre-election promise made by the Labour Party. Board members are now calling for those promises to be actioned.

“The parties that want to ban conversion therapy, for example, are 72 out of 120 in the House, Labour the Greens and Māori Party, so that's an incredibly exciting and presents a lot of opportunities. I hope the government hears our call throughout February for a lot of change in these areas and starts progressing legislation because we’ve waited for too long on these issues and it's time for some action.”

Auckland Pride Board chair Kaan Hiini says the issues for Māori and takatāpui are compounded and he’s keen to shine a light on some of the issues that Māori face two-fold as takatāpui.

“Within urban environments especially it's hard to because you’re disconnected from your marae and your turangawaewae. It's hard to find your identity as Māori and doubly so a queer space but by building a larger representation of Takatāpui within the festival and creating avenues to find a connection then we can find and build our community and strengthen our relationships,” Hiini said

The festival  officially kicks off tomorrow morning with mana whenua and takatāpui will open the festival with a dawn service karakia and mihimihi on Maungawhau (Mt Eden)