It\u2019s the second time the party has scrapped one of its flagship members\u2019 bills to make way for a new one.<\/p>\n
New Zealand First said it would be a \u201cwin for common sense\u201d to legally define men and women, but the party has now removed its Legislation (Definitions of Woman and Man) Amendment Bill from the members\u2019 bill ballot.<\/p>\n
Instead, NZ First MP David Wilson has submitted an anti-scamming bill, which seeks to mandate banks to \u201cdo more to protect New Zealanders from financially devastating banking scams\u201d.<\/p>\n
Members of parliament, who do not hold ministerial positions, are allowed to lodge one bill at a time under their name in the members\u2019 ballot, in the hopes it will be drawn.<\/p>\n
Winston Peters (standing in front of Jenny Marcroft) called the definitions bill a \u2018win for common sense\u2019.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s the second time the bill has been removed in three months, after it was first ditched for a bill banning the public sale of fireworks.<\/p>\n
The definitions of a woman and man bill was first lodged in April 2025, under the name of MP Jenny Marcroft, who had dropped her Fluoridation (Referendum) Legislation Bill to make way for it. She later withdrew the bill to submit another, and Wilson went on to re-introduce it.<\/p>\n
The Spinoff writer Joel McManus has previously detailed<\/a> NZ First\u2019s members\u2019 bill-go-round, saying it was \u201calmost as if it were just performative virtue signalling and not a genuine attempt at legislative reform\u201d.<\/p>\n Last year, NZ First leader Winston Peters said the bill was intended to \u201cfight back against the cancerous social engineering we\u2019ve seen being pushed in society by a woke minority\u201d. He said there was a need for the legislation which showed how \u201cfar the deluded left has taken us as a society\u201d. The move came after the UK\u2019s Supreme Court ruled that only biological women meet the definition of \u201cwoman\u201d under equality laws.<\/p>\n Peters has frequently criticised his political opponents, namely Labour leader Chris Hipkins, for stumbling when asked the provocative question of what a woman is. \u201cHe\u2019s a sausage eater who doesn\u2019t know what a woman is,\u201d Peters said of Hipkins in May 2025.<\/p>\n Defining women and men as \u201cadult human biological females\/male\u201d is a popular refrain amongst trans-exclusionary advocates and groups. It has been used by the likes of activist Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull \u2013 also known as Posie Parker \u2013 and a lesbian-led advocacy group LAVA, which appeared in front of the Human Rights Review Tribunal<\/a> last year to argue that their trans-exclusionary views should be protected as political opinion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s the second time the party has scrapped one of its flagship members\u2019 bills to make way for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":304780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,166826,137,43,12242,24637,135,40,38,41,39,20359],"class_list":{"0":"post-304779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-members-bills","10":"tag-new-zealand-first","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-nz-first","13":"tag-parliament","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-top-news","16":"tag-top-stories","17":"tag-topnews","18":"tag-topstories","19":"tag-trans-rights"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=304779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/304779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/304780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=304779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=304779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=304779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Members of the public undertook a h\u012bkoi for trans-rights in Wellington last March. (Photo: Lyric Waiwiri-Smith)<\/p>\n