Clark David: Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClark David: Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7630. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): I want to invoke in this debate the famous sermon of Rutherford Waddell known as the sermon on “The Sin of Cheapness”. It was a sermon that transformed working and living conditions for a swath of working New Zealanders a century ago. It was delivered on a Sunday morning in early spring 1888 by a Dunedin church minister who spoke to his congregation about sweated labour and the sin of covetousness.Reverend Waddell was a skinny Irish Presbyterian minister with a slight speech impediment but he brought about some significant social change. He did it from the context in which he worked in an area known as the Devil’s Half-Acre back then. It is actually in my electorate where Princes Street Maclaggan Street and Maitland Street align. It was an area of poverty cheek-by-jowl bars gambling opium dens and the like. People were brought together by poverty—that was what they had in common. In 1880 he started work in that area and set up a food bank—an association to run a food bank. A decade later he had set up a free library a savings bank and New Zealand’s first free kindergarten with the help of a parishioner. He was a man who talked but his actions spoke louder still.It is his spirit that I believe was captured in what the founders of the Labour Party called applied Christianity. He was concerned particularly about the wages which were less than subsistence wages that were being paid to seamstresses in his area and they were the topic of part of his sermon. He believed that there was both a spiritual and a moral imperative to fight against the evil of forcing down wages below what people could live off in order to ensure the profitability of manufacturing.The claims he made in his sermon were picked up by the Otago Daily Times. The editor of the day sent along his chief reporter who investigated those claims and found that they were perfectly true. From there a royal commission was established—or subsequently at least—and Mr Waddell was appointed as one of its members.The reason that I bring this up here today is that he challenged the working conditions of the day that were driving down and down and down and down and were not allowing for sufficient income for those families living in poverty to live in dignity. This is part of an ongoing battle in our society. Back then Mr Waddell recognised that New Zealanders did not want the wealth and poverty extremes that they had experienced in the countries they had come from but that is the direction we are heading in again and with much of the legislation coming to this House we see employment conditions further undermined.With that invoking of “The Sin of Cheapness” sermon in mind I see that today we have a bill before us that wants to promote consumerism at any cost. It wants to make everything available all the time at no extra cost and those who will be forced to respond as workers to the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill—the people who work and live on low wages in New Zealand—will have few choices. We know that is their reality. They have to work the hours that their employers ask them to to meet rent to meet power to preserve their employment to meet family obligations and so on.We have a problem ongoing in this country. There is a cost from this kind of legislation that falls on families that falls on human dignity and that falls on social engagement and social capital. We as New Zealanders I believe have to challenge this kind of legislation when it comes to the House. This is not the New Zealand that we want—the New Zealand that undermines the few days that are left for people to be sure that they can spend time in common with friends and family that they can maintain social bonds that they can build social capital and that they can create the kind of society that I wish to live in and that I am sure many New Zealanders wish to live in.In the 1950s an ordinary storeman—and they mostly were—on the shop floor could earn enough with a weekly wage packet to support a family on his own and also to hold down a mortgage. A storeman in Mitre 10 I suggest today would not be able to manage that. We live in a society where zero-hour contracts are maintained and where precarious workers are forced to do things they should not do. I will be voting against this legislation and I encourage others to do so.