Lees-Galloway IainSHOP TRADING HOURS AMENDMENT BILLIn CommitteePart 1 Amendments to principal ActIAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): There is an extensive Supplementary Order Paper in the name of the Minister Michael Woodhouse that I think in total addresses many aspects of Part 1 of the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill. It is a complex Supplementary Order Paper that addresses a number of different matters. I am aware that members have views on different clauses and do not universally support or oppose all aspects of the Minister's Supplementary Order Paper 179 so I intend to begin by working my way through the changes proposed by the Minister and address in particular those that we are opposed to but also pointing out where members will be in support. I want to make it clear that it is a Supplementary Order Paper that has a number of different aspects to it and people have views both for and against different parts of it. The aspect that caused members on the Commerce Committee the most concern was the shift from councils being required to implement a by-law to regulate Easter Sunday shop trading to a policy. The thinking behind this is understandable. Councils came to the select committee and told us that they would much prefer that the Government take responsibility for this issue so that we have one rule across all councils and that by passing this responsibility on to councils the Government was actually generating a lot of cost for councils because with a by-law comes the requirement to consult and to draft the by-law and all those matters. So there is a lot of staffing resource and a lot of time that would be dedicated to essentially doing the Government's work for it. In response to that understandably the Government has proposed through the Minister's Supplementary Order Paper to relax the requirements somewhat by shifting from having a by-law to having a policy. It is doing this in the name of reducing costs for councils. That is problematic on a number of fronts. First of all it does not actually reduce costs for councils all that much. They still have to go through consultative processes and they still have to review their policy. In fact what a number of the amendments proposed by the Minister actually do is they sort of have a policy-plus approach so that it is somewhere between a by-law and a policy. Councils will be required to have a local shop trading policy but will have to have levels of consultation and review that are normally required under a by-law. So actually councils will have to do as much work and bear as much cost by shifting to a policy as they would have had to do under a by-law anyway. However it does reduce somewhat the public's ability to have their say. I know that my colleague David Cunliffe who chairs the Regulations Review Committee will traverse aspects of this change which arguably creates a Henry VIII situation where councils will through a policy-making process and through regulation be able to overrule the primary legislation. It is problematic on one hand in that it creates those difficulties in the legislation but also in that it does not actually achieve the intention which is to reduce the costs placed on councils. Councils were quite clear about this—that they do not actually want this responsibility at all and this is sort of a halfway house approach from the Government to attempt to address that. I will—and I know other members are planning to—oppose those aspects of the Minister's Supplementary Order Paper. There are aspects of the Minister's Supplementary Order Paper that I do support and they are those that refer to basically workers' rights. Although overall I am opposed to the approach that removes one of those family and community days when people can be guaranteed a day off work in the event that this House does decide to pass this legislation—and certainly the vote at the second reading suggests that the House does intend to pass this legislation—there is some mitigation offered by some of the amendments that the Minister proposes. In the name of making a bad piece of legislation slightly better I am interested in supporting that. Subpart 2 of Part 2 refers to shop employee rights and there are some aspects there—clause 5H refers to the provision requiring a shop employee to work or be available to work on Sunday being unenforceable. The original legislation as drafted said that a worker cannot be required to work. Of course earlier this year we debated the issue of availability clauses—being required to be available. Clause 5H actually adds in there the situation where a worker might ordinarily be required to be available for work but with this amendment they would not be able to be required to be available for work. That is an improvement. It is as I say fundamentally bad legislation—anti-worker legislation—but that change which makes it clear that an employer cannot require a worker to be available for work on Easter Sunday is an improvement. New section 5J in clause 15 refers to an employer's obligation to notify the shop employee of their right to refuse work on Easter Sunday. This is important. You know a lot of workers are not aware of what their rights are and it is extremely important that workers are made aware that they have the right to refuse work on Easter Sunday. The amendment there refers to the period of time in which the employer must make the worker aware and what the Minister has done with this amendment is to create a window of time. So previously the legislation said it must be at least 4 weeks prior to the Easter Sunday. That could have been 4 weeks to for ever so he could have been able to give them a warning 364 days beforehand that they needed to be aware. This creates a window of time. So between 4 and 8 weeks before Easter Sunday the employer—if this amendment passes—will be required to inform the employee that they have the right to refuse work. It is important that the employee is made aware of that right and that they are made aware of it at a time that is appropriate when they will be making their decisions about whether or not they want to spend time with their family as they are currently able to do under the current law or whether they will prefer to go into work. The truth is that there will be a lot of pressure applied to workers in this situation and workers will feel coerced into working regardless of what their rights are. Regardless of the fact that they have the right to refuse work the truth is that a lot of the employees that this legislation is going to apply to are on minimum wage or close to it. They have insecure hours and they know that exercising their right to refuse to work on Easter Sunday could very well lead to their not being able to pick up the hours that they would want to ordinarily. So although the right is there and although this is an improvement in terms of how employees will be informed of their right—