COMMENT: Does this year's award for cocking up, destroying goodwill, and reputation, go to Auckland's Gay Pride Parade organisers?
The police are out, the Defence Force is out, funding is cut. You could not have orchestrated a greater, or more spectacular, undermining of your brand if you were the enemy and had launched a PR jihad.
The Pride Parade has always struck me, especially in recent years, as slightly incongruous. I think it's broadly accepted that the dark days of overt discrimination, segregation and general weirdness around being gay is long gone. And as such the broad based campaign that gay people are regular, everyday people has been won.
In other words the debate is over - so let's get on with it.
But on an annual basis we still needed to have specific, and deliberate events that reminded us that perhaps it wasn't over, that perhaps gay people needed to be seen as different, unique or whatever it was they were parading about.