Thanks to the Broadcasting Allocation for election advertising, women’s voices will finally be heard on mainstream TV.

By: Jill Ovens - Women’s Rights Party co-leader and national secretary.

28 July 2026

On Sunday night I joined the Women’s Declaration International Conference by Zoom. The conference was being held in London and our session included a woman from Australia, plus a recorded video by a woman from Germany. All three of us are regular attendees of WDI Activists meetings held every week where we report on activities in our countries.

I titled my contribution “We will speak! And the State will pay!” What follows is basically what my presentation covered. This will be available on YouTube on the WDI channel.

Being a registered political party, we are entitled to a broadcasting allocation for the upcoming general election in November to spend on producing promotional ads for TV, radio, and the Internet. Placing the ads we produce on the best slots on TV will eat up most of the allocation of nearly $80,000 by the State.

After three years of being ignored by mainstream media, we will be able to use this funding to get our message out to the people of New Zealand, who, as we know from opinion polls, do not want men in women’s spaces, nor in women’s sports. And above all, New Zealanders value our right to speak, to assemble, and to hear from others.

We started filming the ads last Saturday. We filmed a group of about 40 women and men at the Albert Park rotunda chanting: “We will not be silenced! We stand for women!”

We also held up signs which said “We have the right to speak”, “No men in women’s sports”, “Teach science not ideology”, and “Protect women’s spaces”.

The sun managed to break through while we did our rhythmic gymnastics with the signs, and then a sudden downpour sent us scurrying to the rotunda, signs above our heads.

During the rest of the day, our professional filmmaker also interviewed 10 of our members – some of whom were at Auckland’s ‘Let Women Speak’ event in Albert Park on 25 March 2023. Kellie-Jay Keen’s arrival at Albert Park that day quickly deteriorated into a dangerous situation that had been whipped up over the previous week by media and leaders of both Labour and the Greens.

Those of us who had been involved in Labour or the Greens watched in horror as our leaders whole-heartedly supported the ‘trans mob’ before and after Albert Park. We couldn’t vote for a party in that year’s election which didn’t respect our right as women to speak about women’s rights, of all things! So, we started our own political party, and called it the Women’s Rights Party.

We went on to contest the 2023 General Election with 12 awesome women as list candidates. And we will be on the ballot on 7^th November 2026 in every polling booth across the country so women and men can vote for a party that is clearly focused on protecting and promoting sex-based rights, as well as safeguarding our children.

Some of the women interviewed on Saturday are standing for women as Women’s Rights Party candidates in our Election this year. They will feature in a series on our YouTube channel, as well as in our TV ads and on social media (including Facebook, X, Tik Tok, and Instagram).

Next Saturday we will be filming in Wellington with our flags and banners.

A strong vote for the Women’s Rights Party in the election will show that sex-based rights matter. It is also a strategic vote to send a message to all politicians not to give away hard won rights of women and protections for children.

I outlined our campaign priorities for this election in my WDI presentation last night, and in my interview by our filmmaker on Saturday. If you read our Substack, you will know I have gone through these before, but with additional details.

1. Protect women’s and children’s spaces and safety

We can’t have a situation as in Australia where businesses can’t say they are for women-only, where lesbians are having to go to Court for the right to meet without men, and where women are villified for saying men can’t breastfeed and men shouldn’t be competing in the women’s and girls’ sports categories.

Women’s right to single-sex gatherings includes the right to women-only social media groups. Single-sex spaces preserve women’s and girls’ safety and dignity. These include, but are not limited to toilets, changing rooms, prisons, refuges, rape crisis centres, swimming facilities, hospital wards, and other facilities.

2. Accurately record the biological sex on the birth certificate

Birth certificates should be what they say they are – the baby’s biological sex at birth. The correct sex, usually observed on scans well before the birth and recorded at the birth, should not be changed, unless in the rare instance of a child born with an undetected difference of sexual development (DSD).

Birth certificates should not convey the legal fiction that a person was born the other sex. Having factual information about a person’s biological sex is also necessary for the provision of services and spaces for women and girls, and the gathering of accurate statistics.

Sex self-ID has given men a sense of entitlement that they have a right to access women’s spaces and compete in the women’s category in sports. That’s another reason why it has to go.

3. Leave the Human Rights Act alone

We are clear that including ‘gender identity’ as a protected ground for discrimination in the Human Rights Act (HRA), New Zealand’s anti-discrimination law, would inevitably undermine the exceptions that allow for protections based on sex. That’s because the legislation doesn’t define ‘sex’ as a woman or a girl as a human female, and a man or a boy as a human male.

Indeed, the Law Commission declared in its Ia Tangata Report on the inclusion of gender identity in the HRA that there is “no compelling policy reason to provide a definition of sex in the Human Rights Act.”^[1]

In its report to the Minister of Justice last September^[2] the Law Commission followed up with a recommendation that Parliament should add two new prohibited grounds of discrimination:

• ‘Gender identity or its equivalents in the cultures of the person’

and

• ‘Having an innate variation of sex characteristics’.

The first recommended ground would be a total minefield, given the subjective nature of ‘gender identity’ as a self-identified belief. And what on earth is meant by “its equivalents in the cultures of the person”? If you can’t define the ‘cultures of the person’, how can you possibly protect a person’s ‘gender identity’?

While the second ground can be correctly defined in terms of disorders of differences in sex development, affecting 0.018% of the population, there is a trend by ‘trans allies’ to broaden the definition to include all sorts of other conditions under the umbrella of so-called ‘intersex’ (which many incorrectly identify as a third sex). While DSDs are developmental variations within the two sexes, we agree that individuals may have specific medical and legal needs that should be protected.

The current Coalition Government has shelved the Law Commission’s Report saying the sweeping changes that would undermine protections for women is not a priority for them. But what if there is a change of Government in November? Will Labour and the Greens, potentially supported by the Opportunity Party, resurrect the recommendations and pass these as law? Of course they would – and all the more reason not to vote for any of these political parties.

4. Remove ‘gender’ from the Conversion Practices Prohibition Law

We supported the aim of the Conversion Practices legislation to protect lesbians, bisexuals and gay people from conversion practices and to promote open and respectful discussions about sexuality.

But in reality, the legislation mandates ‘gender affirming care’ under which adolescents struggling with their sexuality are encouraged to ‘transition’ to the opposite sex, medically, psychologically, and socially ironically a form of gay conversion, i.e. “transing the gay away”.

As Family First reports, the fact is that after 4 years, and $2.25 million spent on setting up a taxpayer-funded complaints unit within the Human Rights Commission to generate complaints about ‘conversion therapy’, not a single complaint has gone to the Police.^[3]

According to an Official Information Act response, in the past 12 months, not a single formal complaint was made. This is consistent with numbers before the law was passed. The Human Rights Commission admitted that there had only been one informal complaint and no formal complaints in the past 10 years in relation to ‘conversion therapy’.

5. Ban ‘rough sex’ as a defence to murder

So-called ‘rough sex’, involving strangulation and other forms of violence and sexual abuse of women, has proliferated with the spread of pornography online. It has become normalised even as the forms of sexual abuse have become ever more extreme.

In the past week on Coronation Street, episodes have highlighted the plight of an 18-year-old girl recovering in hospital after two strokes following choking as part of sex with her teenaged boyfriend. It is good to see a popular TV series drawing attention to the dangers of such practices.

In real life, the tragic case of young backpacker Grace Millane in Auckland did not end with her murder by strangulation during sex. At his trial, her killer claimed she died accidentally during a “sex game gone wrong”. Grace couldn’t speak for herself’ after her death, but the man who killed her could simply say “she wanted it”. This is a travesty. The law should be clear – you cannot consent to serious injury or death.

6. Ban puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for minors presenting with sex-related distress

From 13-15 July, the High Court heard presentations from Professional Association for Transgender Health Aotearoa (PATHA) and Health Minister Simeon Brown on the matter of the Minister’s decision to ban all new puberty blockers prescriptions for those with gender incongruence related issues.^[4] The hearing was the result of PATHA’s request for a judicial review of the decision (i.e. whether the decision was constitutional). Enforcement of the ban, that was set to be in place in December last year, has been paused until the decision of the Court.

In her Substack, Garwhoungle reported that PATHA argued the ban was completely unexpected and devastating for trans young people and their whānau. PATHA argued that the Health Minister’s decision was irrational, defied facts, there was insufficient consultation, and the wrong person/people made the decision.

Garwhoungle reported that PATHA claimed the ban was nothing to do with medicine, but rather the outcome of Trumpian style rhetoric espoused by New Zealand’s Coalition Government partners. She said PATHA’s lawyer repeatedly claimed there was nothing controversial about puberty blockers and multiple times talked of the “irrefutable fact that young people were going to be harmed”; and that banning puberty blockers would lead to suicide/suicidality.

Counsel for the Minister of Health argued that the puberty blocker decision was perfectly in line with how decisions are made. Garwhoungle said the Minister’s Counsel argued that the Minister had assessed appropriately, had consulted appropriately and had looked to changes to approaches to puberty blockers in other jurisdictions and the findings of the Cass Review. “The Minister, said Counsel, was acting on findings from systematic-evidence based reviews about puberty blockers and was perfectly entitled to come to a conclusion different to the recommended option put forward by his Ministry,” Garwhoungle reported.

We are awaiting a decision. The Women’s Rights Party supports a ban on the use of puberty blockers (we would include cross-sex hormones) to treat children and adolescents under the age of 18 who are presenting with ‘sex-related distress’.

We would also restrict Government-funded masculinisation or feminisation cosmetic surgery to those aged over 25. Surgically removing healthy breasts of teenaged girls to make them appear to be ‘non-binary’ or to be ‘like boys’, is a form of mutilation with irreversible side effects, not the least of which is the high rate of regret among girls captured by transgender ideology.

7. Use clear language when referring to women in the media, academia, in healthcare, and at work

Early last year Associate Health Minister Casey Costello wrote to Health New Zealand directing the agency to use “clear language” including use of the word ‘women’ in its communications about women’s health issues.

However, Health New Zealand has ignored the directive and goes out of its way to avoid use of the word ‘women’. This matters. It is an inconvenient fact that women have particular health needs that are not common to both sexes, and have been overlooked in health priorities, including funding and research.

Health NZ’s national information system is requiring patients to be recorded by their ‘gender’ rather than their sex. This can have serious consequences as reported in a submission to the ‘What is a Woman’ bill, which related how a woman’s sample tested in a medical laboratory showed a marker for prostate cancer. The lab assumed it had made a mistake and underwent a thorough review of its processes. It turned out the ‘woman’ was in fact a man.

The media, too, goes out of its way to avoid using the word ‘women’, and even uses the pronoun ‘she’ when referring to men who think they are women and who commit sexual crimes against women.

Women are adult human females. A man in a dress is still a man.

^[1] Ia Tangata Report, p187, 7.164-7.169. NZLC- Ia Tangata - R150

^[2] Law Commission recommends Human Rights Act reform

^[3] HRC’s Conversion Therapy Unit Finds… Nothing - Family First NZ

^[4] (2) Puberty blocker ban hearing in the NZ High Court

Website: The New Zealand Women’s Rights Party (membership NZD$5/yr)

Facebook: Women’s Rights Party NZ

X: @WRP_NZ

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