If the experience of Australia's smallest state - the island of Tasmania - is anything to go by, the decision by the High Court last month to strike down Hong Kong's biased law on gay sex will enhance the city's attractiveness as a tourist and investment destination.
In 1994, Tasmania attracted world attention after the United Nations Human Rights Committee ruled that its anti-gay laws, whereby anyone caught having consensual gay sex could be jailed for up to 21 years, were in breach of international law. It has subsequently adopted the most pro-gay legal regime in Australia.
The result has been that Tasmania's image as a conservative, Anglo backwater of half a million people has been slowly transformed into one of a liberal creative environment, which is particularly keen to attract the gay tourist dollar and creative and hi-tech industries.
The struggle to overturn Tasmania's sodomy laws began in the late 1980s when a gay lobby group established a stall at a Saturday market in the state capital. The Hobart City Council banned the stall and 130 protesters were arrested. In 1991, the state parliament's conservative upper house overturned a reformist minority government's attempt to abolish laws outlawing gay sex. It was at this point that gay activists took their case to the UN.
In 1994 the UN found that the Tasmanian laws discriminated against gays and recommended they be abolished. It was then that the world media began to focus on Tasmania. It was presented to the world as a bigoted island where time, it seemed, stood still. There were international boycotts of Tasmania's prize exports - fine foods and wines - and the island's international tourist trade, worth over A$150 million ($900 million) a year at the time, began to suffer as a consequence of the adverse attention.
But three years later, political opposition to repealing the laws was dropped.