Yvonne van Dongen
Veteran NZ journo incredulous gender ideology escaped the lab. Won’t rest until reality makes a comeback.
Sometimes it feels like every day is dedicated to rainbow something or other.
There’s Pride Day, Pride Month, Trans Visibility day, rainbow poppies for Anzac Day and even rainbow messaging for Pink Shirt Day next month, a movement intended to promote anti-bullying. These days I can’t even walk the dog along Ponsonby Rd without copping an eyeful of rainbow ticks plastered all over the window of a vape shop.
Some of us are beginning to feel bullied by the rainbow. Women based in material reality know that rainbow is a by-word for gender ideology which erases women and girls and bends the world to accommodate the fetishes of a few men.
So how did the jolly rainbow become so ubiquitous?
About a year ago I wrote a story highlighting the woke charities receiving public money despite many peddling the increasingly unpopular DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) as well as ideological untruths that harm women and children. (I’ll put the original story on this site later since the Platform link is available only to members.)
Twelve months on I thought I’d check in to see whether anything has changed. If public opinion is any gauge, it should have. Surveys and polls have repeatedly shown New Zealanders do not support gender ideology so dismantling the structures that support this belief system should be an easy win for a bold politician.
Little has altered. In fact further investigation reveals that the rainbow industrial complex is going nowhere thanks to the existence of an organisation called The Rainbow Wellbeing Legacy Fund (RWLF). The fund was founded in 2019 through a one million dollar endowment from the government in recognition of the men convicted for consensual homosexual sex pre-1986.
In 1986 The Homosexual Law Reform Act decriminalised sexual relations between men aged 16 and over. Before that men having consensual sex were liable to prosecution and even imprisonment. The minister of justice apologised to these men in 2017.
The idea of the fund was that the suffering of the criminalised men would be turned into positive outcomes for others in the rainbow community. It was agreed that this money would be held and administered by The Rule Foundation due to the overlap in purpose.
One million dollars was just the start. In 2021 an extra $800,000 was made to the foundation by the New Zealand government. That was the year the government announced it would provide four million dollars to services that provide mental health support to young members of New Zealand’s rainbow community. Most of the money – 3.2 million dollars – would go to expanding mental wellbeing services focusing on young rainbow New Zealanders. The rest ($800k) would top up the RWLF.
Announcing the fund, the then Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern referenced the widely discredited suicide myth promoted by the Counting Ourselves survey.
Participants in the Counting Ourselves survey who are trans or non-binary were twice as likely to have attempted suicide in the past year than participants who did not report that discrimination.
Public money continued to pour in. A year later, Foundation North, the community trust for Auckland and Northland, made a contribution of $99,000 to the 2022 round of the Fund. In 2023 and 2024, they contributed an additional $200,000 to each round of the fund.
The government wasn’t done giving to the rainbow community yet. In 2023, the Ministry of Youth Development (MYD) made a contribution of $100,000 to the fund in order to provide support for initiatives contributing to the wellbeing and resilience of rainbow young people, aged 12–24 years.
This is how the Rule Foundation acquired a four-plus million dollar capital base. About two-thirds of its capital growth is distributed to community groups annually.
In 2023 up to $400,000 in grants was distributed to the rainbow community. All the gender crime organisations were rewarded. That year InsideOUT and Rainbow Youth received $80,000. Others like PATHA (the Professional Association of Transgender Health Aotearoa), Gender Minorities Aotearoa, Outline and the Human Rights Commission also benefited from the fund. As did a group called Utu-Ā-Matimati: Five Finger Discount Zine, described as “a nationwide, decolonial, artist-infused magazine by and for tangata takatāpui, embodying takatāpuitanga within Māoritanga”. They got $50,000.
In 2024, the RWLF received a record 65 applications, seeking over $3.6 million in funding requests. The fund reports that this demand is triple the amount of applications since the first round of the RWLF in 2020.
Co-funded applications through the Rainbow Funders Ropu are encouraged. Funding no longer relies on the government. Current funders include the JR McKenzie Trust, the Tindall Foundation, Wayne Francis Charitable Trust and Nikau Foundation.
The cross-over of the various rainbow groups is exemplified in the person of Duncan Matthews. Duncan Matthews (he/him/ia) was recognised in the 2025 New Year’s honours list for his work in the rainbow community. Matthews is treasurer of the Rule Foundation, an associate at Community Think Ltd, is on the funding unit of Foundation North and was an associate with their Centre of Social Impact from 2022 to 2024.
So while many of us would like to see the rainbow industrial complex defunded, the way the RWLF is structured it would appear that the government-initiated pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is here to stay.
This article was originally published on the author’s Substack.
