AUCKLAND, NEW ZEALAND – Porn stars are due to parade down Auckland’s Queen Street next week and the local politicos are not pleased.The “Boobs on Bikes” parade, a promotional event leading up to the Erotica Lifestyles Expo (ELE) scheduled to commence two days later, was granted a permit by Auckland City Council officials and approved by local police, but the officials who granted the permit did not ask for the consent of the elected members of the council.

Auckland Mayor Dick Hubbard condemned the parade as “totally inappropriate because it’s shamelessly promoting a pornography trade fair,” according to the New Zealand Herald. Hubbard added that the parade would be “particularly degrading to women.”

Hubbard has obtained the signatures of 13 Council members on a petition asking that the permit be rescinded and Council chief David Rankin is due to report back to Hubbard as to whether there are grounds to revoke the permit.

According to a report filed by one of the council officials granting the permit, local police had no concerns outside of how to manage traffic during the parade and approved the parade plan.

Under the permit, permission was given for a the midday parade, which will feature around 30 topless porn stars in cars or on the back of motorcycles, to pass from Karangahape Road to the bottom of Queens Street.

In the petition signed by the objecting council members, the group says it is “disappointed that the executive did not seek a political view or anticipate the depth of the negative public response,” and that their “deep concern is that this permit sanctions the commercial promotion of a product which is exploitative and distasteful to a large section of the population.”

ELE organizer Steve Crow said the show will go on, regardless of whether the council rescinds the permit, which Crow asserts he does not need. In the past, the ELE has held the parade without a permit, something Crow says he will do again this year, if need be.

“I’ve got no interest in whether Auckland City Council thinks it’s morally acceptable or not,” said Crow, according to the Herald. “It’s legal under New Zealand law. They can basically go to hell; we’re going to do it.”

Crow said that the ELE only sought the permit because last year’s parade drew such a crowd of onlookers that organizers thought it prudent to implement some measure of crowd and traffic control, because at the last parade some people got “over-zealous and silly.”

“I’ve never asked their permission and I’m still not,” Crow said

Hubbard concedes that Crow does not need a permit from the council to hold the parade legally, but said in the future the city would try to ban such events through changes in the governing bylaws.

NZ Police Spent Over $160,000 on Training Seminars for Staff Caught With Porn Email

Meanwhile, in another porn-related story out of New Zealand, the Herald reports that the New Zealand police spent over $160,000 sending staff members caught in possession of “pornographic emails” to training seminars.

Last year, after a search of the police computer system found thousands of sexually-explicit images on the network, hundreds of staff members were investigated for misuse of the system.

According to the Herald, 12 staff members received “adverse reports,” a disciplinary action that is noted on employment records and can negatively impact an employee’s prospects for promotion, and were ordered to attend a training seminar. An additional 351 staff were ordered to attend a seminar, but not disciplined otherwise.

The seminars were conducted by a group called Insight Training, which was formed by Rape Crisis, Safe Network and the Internet Safety Group (commonly known as “Netsafe”), for the purpose of running the seminars.

Documents obtained by the Herald show that police paid $141,619 to Insight Training to run the seminars between June 2005 and May 2006. An additional $22,127 for venue rental and meals at conference centers around the country bring the total sum for the seminars to $163,746.

Wayne Annan, a human resource manager for the New Zealand police, said the seminars were not put out to open bid because police did not believe that anyone other than the groups who made up Insight Training could provide the correct manner of training.

“Confronted with what we were confronted with we had a look around New Zealand to see what sort of people were about who could contribute to the training we wanted to do,” Annan said. “There was no specific group who had any experience or capability in that area.”

Critics of the seminars, however, including some attendees, questioned both the efficacy of the training and the cost involved in providing the seminars.

According to the Herald, staff from the Wellington police attended seminars at Solway Park Hotel, which is billed as one of Wairarapa’s “most attractive conference venues.”

In March, Auckland police officer Mark Riddel told Police Association Magazine that he walked away from his eight-hour seminar “with a feeling that none of the important issues which needed addressing, i.e., a full explanation of the relevant ‘GIs” [general instructions], and a distinction drawn as to what is acceptable and what is not, were dealt with in any way.”

According to Riddell, his offense regarding the email system was forwarding an image called “Bulldogs Training Camp,” which was described by the Chief Censor as “satirical humor.”

“Personally, I would have thought that a 10-minute dressing-down, with an overhead showing the appropriate GIs relating to the use of email explained fully, along with the endorsement of a contract stipulating that they were not to misuse the email system again, would have been sufficient,” Riddell said.