Hughes GarethGARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I just want to stop and reflect on what Easter Sunday means to me. I am not a Christian member and we had a bit of to-ing and fro-ing just before. But for me it was waking up with a sense of excitement and it was not just the chocolate eggs you knew you were going to get. It had a sense of family of being a different day where you were at home with your family and you knew that all your friends when you were a kid growing up were at home with their families. They were probably doing the same things you were doing—sitting around in the lounge in your pyjamas maybe eating hot cross buns and then you would go and do a great Easter egg hunt. As a father one of the best moments I have had with my children is inviting around the other kids from school so they can go round looking for eggs in the back garden. These are the things we will be losing if we see a section of our population who let us be frank will be working in the retail sector or in other areas. They are the ones who are going to be missing out on these family experiences and with only 3½ days when shop trading hours are protected in this country it is a big loss. It is a big loss of only 3½ days. I want to point out the irony that right now the Swedish Parliament is negotiating and legislating to move Sweden's working hours to 6 hours a day. We have fallen down the wrong track as a country in the last couple of decades. What has happened is that as we have progressively slipped down the world's economic rankings we have had to work harder and work faster. But instead what we are not doing is working smarter. We are slipping down those rankings yet Kiwis work some of the longest hours for some of the lowest wages and we still pay some of the highest costs of living in the developed world. When you look at the economic literature coming out of the OECD we have a 20 percent productivity gap with the OECD average. If you look at our other economic settings such as the ease to set up a business in New Zealand we should be 20 percent above. It is called the productivity gap and the problem is that we have not worked smarter as a country. This is another classic example of where there is a misguided notion that if we just work more hours for longer during the day we are somehow going to be wealthier as a country. In fact it is the reverse. The longer and the less smart we work the poorer we get as a nation. So what the Government has decided to do in classic National style—there have been 10 attempts over the last 19 years to achieve this—is move in this direction. Obviously there has been considerable pressure from certain lobby groups to get this legislative outcome we see tonight. But the Government has kicked it into touch and kicked it to the councils—yet another example where this Government reduces the powers of councils the democracies of our councils. It sees more of the powers going into these undemocratic council-controlled organisations yet it is quite willing to lump them with further responsibilities. Under this legislation what is going to happen is that councils dozens and dozens of them are going to have to consider and go through their own expensive processes to work out whether they should implement this as a by-law. What we have seen repeatedly in the past in this country is that these by-laws have been judicially reviewed and subject to legal challenges. I have no doubt we will see this again. What we see on the one hand is a metaphor for the not-smart economic practices and philosophies this country has gone down that have seen us slip down the rankings that have seen Kiwis languish in terrible poverty and that have seen a poorer New Zealand. But we also see a classic political example where the Government is quite happy to kick responsibility and risk to local councils at the same time as it is bagging them. I am proud that all of the Green Party caucus will be voting against this legislation. We are pro-worker. We are pro those family experiences. We should be making Easter Sunday a public holiday not weakening the shop trading hours protections that we currently have. But also we need to work smarter as a country. We cannot keep on racing on this treadmill but falling behind. It is a dumb way to run an economy. We need to think smarter. We should be looking at some of the examples from the Nordic countries. It is not just fewer working hours so that there is more productivity packed into those hours; it is also looking at some of their paid parental protections. It is about looking at the way we run these low-value commodity-based exports that drive down our national average. There is a limit to how many cows we can cram on paddocks and how many tourists we can cram into Fiordland. There is no limit to intellectual property software technology patents and services. This is the smarter option and this is what the Green Party is advocating. Weakening workers' rights with this legislation is not the answer.