New Zealand's centre-right National party will walk a different path to Australia's Liberals at this year's election, opting not to campaign on the divisive culture war issue of transgender rights.
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Societal acceptance of trans rights is threatening to become an issue in the poll, due on October 14.
Populist veteran Winston Peters, who was deputy prime minister under Dame Jacinda Ardern in a coalition from 2017 to 2020, has dialled up anti-trans rhetoric as he attempts to re-enter parliament.
On the campaign trail in Invercargill this week, he unveiled policies designed to keep transgender women out of women's bathrooms and sport.
Both policy areas are lightning rods to the anti-trans movement, which argue that safe spaces for women are under attack from transgender women.
Australia's Liberal party flirted with those issues during the 2022 election campaign, most notably through Scott Morrison's hand-picked candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves.
In New Zealand, the major parties aren't buying in.
On Thursday, National party leader and alternative prime minister Chris Luxon said anyone campaigning on the matter was "on another planet".
In an interview with AAP in June, Mr Luxon went further, saying he believed trans people had the right to live full lives.
"Diversity and inclusion is really important to me. It's a core value of mine," he said.
"I want people to be able to be themselves at work, at home, wherever they are in their community. I want them to feel safe, to be able to express who they are.
"I've always believed in that very strongly and tried to advocate very strongly for that, whether it's gender, whether it's sexual orientation, whether it's ethnicity."
Mr Luxon's views also put him at odds with leaders of other conservative parties in the United States and United Kingdom.
The former Air New Zealand chief executive is Christian but says his faith is personal and doesn't influence his politics.
At the airline, he oversaw a richly diverse workforce, supported staff through gender transitions, and won the Rainbow Tick certification for inclusivity.
He said efforts from the political left an part of the media to paint him as a hard-right Christian conservative were misguided.
"That's a question for you to ask in the media as to why that's happened," Mr Luxon said.
"The point for me is (that) I know what I believe, what I'm about. I just believe that we're all equal. And everybody deserves a chance to express themselves as they are, and to feel free to do so."
Mr Peters' campaigning is likely to heighten pressure on Mr Luxon to rule his NZ First party out of any possible National-led coalition arrangement.
Mr Peters has already ruled out working with Labour, saying he was chastened by the experience of working with Dame Jacinda's party.
Parties need to hit five per cent of the nationwide party vote to guarantee sending MPs to Wellington, and polls put NZ First on the brink of that threshold.
Trans rights are likely to re-surface in the election campaign next month, when self-proclaimed "women's rights campaigner" Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull returns to NZ.
An Auckland rally staged by Ms Keen-Minshull last March which was swamped by thousands of pro-trans rights protesters, producing a number of assaults.
The British national says she is keen to speak at a court hearing in September for a woman who threw tomato juice on her.
Australian Associated Press
