SpeechVANUSHI WALTERS (Labour—Upper Harbour): Thank you Mr Speaker for the opportunity to take a call in relation to this bill this evening. Like some of my colleagues I'll just start by congratulating Chris Baillie for having his bill pulled from the tin; that's not something that I have had the excitement to have happen to me as yet but I do congratulate the member. But as others have on this side of the House have spoken to this evening it's not a bill that I will be supporting this evening.It's a bill of course that seeks to remove restrictions on trading and selling of alcohol on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. A number of my colleagues have spoken about the fact that really what we're trying to protect here is wellbeing. There are only 3½ days when people are not expected to sit in to many of the roles that they hold for the rest of the year. It is a very slim line but it is so powerful for families and for individuals.I wanted to speak about a particular group of workers we don't always talk about but who I have done a lot of work with. For about nine years of my life I worked at YouthLaw Aotearoa. We were in the business of giving free legal advice to under-25-year-olds. One of the biggest areas of law we advised on was education law and that's perhaps something that you would expect. But what you might not expect is that about 50 percent of our work was related to employment law.Often what the young people would come to us with were situations where they had felt really bullied into saying yes saying yes to additional hours saying yes to working at hours where they didn't feel safe doing so saying yes to working in conditions that they felt were unsafe. And that was only part of the problem. What we started to understand was that these were the young people who were coming to us they knew a whole cohort of other young people who simply would never ask for help they would just subject themselves to conditions that were not fair. And it wasn't necessarily that they didn't have those legal rights in play they just wouldn't call on them and they were very aware of that sense of being almost bullied into having to say yes.So I think from this side of the House there's an acute awareness of what it is like to work with some parts of our community who are often subject to overt pressure to take on those extra duties and they simply don't feel empowered to be able to say no. Their mental wellbeing is worth protecting as well.I do think that we've all just been through this unusual experience that is COVID for the last two years. Every time I think about that experience I think of that beautiful T S Eliot quote where he talks about the still point in a turning world … where past and future are gathered". It was a time of extreme stress yes but was also a time that gave us the opportunity to reflect on what matters. New Zealand responded well we put people first but we also started to get an understanding that people's wellbeing is complex—it is complex—and it needs active attention if we're going to protect it. So we cannot support this bill on this side of the House this evening.I also recall just a couple of weeks ago visiting the Salvation Army near my electorate office where the lovely team there talked about the impacts of COVID on people's wellbeing and that sense of pressure acute pressure that they were under which meant that one problem led to another problem led to another problem. Sometimes there were addiction issues. Sometimes there was a need for food bank. And what they found was that as soon as they were connected to people that they had active time to be connected that wellbeing radar shifted.It is worthwhile protecting those 3½ days when people can actively reconnect where there is no pressure overt or otherwise for people to compromise their family lives and their wellbeing for work. I do not support this bill this evening."