Cullen Michael: Easter Sunday Shop Trading Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Cullen Michael: Easter Sunday Shop Trading Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 21 February 2007. Volume:637;Page:7597. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN (Deputy Prime Minister) 
: 
 Indeed we finally have a question before the House at the end of the member’s speech. I suppose one thing that I should note about that speech since the member chose to light upon Napier at some length is that I do believe that those who are engaged in such a great deal of phone canvassing and pamphlet distribution on his behalf—that is to say the Exclusive Brethren—will be somewhat disappointed by his voting record on this Easter Sunday Shop Trading Amendment Bill. Mr Tremain’s speech to move Easter Sunday trading—almost the second speech he has given in the House—will come as a terrible shock to the Exclusive Brethren of Hawke’s Bay who spent a great deal of time on the telephone lines attacking the Labour Party as being godless and goodness knows what else. That was about as good as we were as far as the Exclusive Brethren were concerned. 
I have voted in favour of Easter trading on a number of occasions but I will be voting against this bill for a number of reasons and I will make clear why. First of all this issue has come before this House on any number of occasions. On every occasion my friends associated with the industrial wing of the labour movement and my somewhat lesser friends from the religious movement in New Zealand have entered into an interesting coalition in order to defeat moves in favour of Easter Sunday trading in particular. I will deal with Good Friday later; I think that is a somewhat different kind of issue. 
The reality however is that clearly New Zealanders by and large actually support Easter Sunday trading because given the chance to do so they go and trade on Easter Sundays. People vote by going to the shops and every Easter Sunday we have the somewhat farcical situation where some shops open and are subject to the penalties of the law. People wonder quite why we continue to carry on in the way that we do in that particular respect. I do not think that when we have reached the point where the public clearly does not regard the law as sensible in respect of Easter Sunday it makes sense for us to continue to vote as if those views no longer really have any great meaning at all. That is not to denigrate those who hold very strong views particularly on religious grounds about the significance of Easter Sunday and I will come back to that point a little bit later on. 
The issue around workers’ protection is of course a crucial issue. It is absolutely crucial that nobody who holds strong religious convictions about the significance of Easter Sunday or Good Friday should be forced to work on that day. I think it is very appropriate that the Commerce Committee has put into both bills very strong protections in that regard because I think it would be quite against strongly held feelings of conscience for some workers to be placed in the position of having to work on that day. In terms of the general issue around workers’ conditions being protected on such a day of course there is the anomaly around the fact that Easter Sunday alone of all the days that we think of as being a public holiday is not in fact a public holiday and that has implications around the position of workers. Perhaps we might want to consider at some later point how we might rectify that particular position should either of these bills pass through the House. I think it would be appropriate to do that to ensure further worker protections in that respect. 
I have been consistently in favour of the bill because generally speaking I favour liberal laws around shop trading hours in any case. It is very interesting that the United States which is a very very much more religious society than New Zealand and which is a country where regular church attendance is very very much higher than it is in New Zealand generally speaking has much more liberal shop trading rules than New Zealand does including a number of days that nobody in this House would suggest should be open slather in terms of shop trading and we do not seem to find that inconsistent with the dominant Christian beliefs of the United States. I think however it is true that most of us would—perhaps illogically but then most of us are illogical at some point or other in our lives—draw a distinction between Good Friday and Easter Sunday in terms of the depths of religiosity that surrounds those two particular days. One of those days is so absolutely central to the story of Christianity which although it is not our State religion is certainly so crucial to our story for most of us in this nation as a people. I say this as a person who comes from a very long secular tradition. I proudly exited from my secondary school as the only baptised Anglican who was not a confirmed Anglican which took some degree of doing given the level of pressure that came on to be confirmed as an Anglican during those 5 years along with my record in not achieving any kind of status in the cadet corps. But those are my two proudest achievements in my 5 years at that school. There are a few other bits and pieces along the way but in recollection they pale into insignificance compared with those two particular things which says something about where I stand and where I come from. 
But when we face the two bills I think we face an interesting issue. At some point one or other of these bills has to pass. At the end of the day it does not make any sense for both of them to be passed because if they are both passed it will be rather strange. I understand that Jacqui Dean has indicated that she is prepared to move amendments to remove Good Friday from this bill at the Committee stage. Nevertheless the bill we are dealing with at the moment has both Good Friday and Easter Sunday. The other bill deals only with Easter Sunday. 
The reason why I will be voting against Jacqui Dean’s bill and in favour of Steve Chadwick’s bill in particular is because of the structure of the two bills—where they actually come from in terms of their structure. If we go through the Jacqui Dean bill we see that it bears rather too much the pains of its birth in the sense that it went into a select committee to provide for limited opening on Good Friday and Easter Sunday in two places in the country and came out of the select committee providing for full opening on Good Friday and Easter Sunday—the bill provides not just for 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. opening but open slather on Good Friday and Easter Sunday—effectively across the whole of the country by the rather artificial device of tacking on additions to the current very odd rules around visitor centres which no longer bear any great logic anyway. We say that some places are visitor centres and others which like Rotorua clearly are somehow or other are not covered within the current legislation. Napier which is not so much a visitor centre at Easter has its big visitor period during February with three weekends in a row: the Mission Estate Winery Concert the wine weekend and the art deco weekend. Nevertheless we have hopes of becoming a more continuous visitor centre during the year. As Mr Tremain rightly said we are getting more of the cruise ship traffic through the city and it seems strange that when people come in a cruise ship on Easter Sunday the entire city is closed except for a few bits and pieces around the place. That does not make sense. 
But a bill that when one reads through it and imposes it upon the original legislation actually says that shops will be closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday in all these places except for those listed in the schedule which includes every territorial district in the country is not good legislation. It is just a bad thing for Parliament to pass a bill that is so illogically structured as that bill actually is. On the other hand Steve Chadwick’s bill says that shops may open on Easter Sunday if the local authority decides that they should subject to the consultation processes in the Local Government Act 2002. That means then that before that decision is taken the local people have a right to be consulted around that—I think that is a good thing—so that localities can make their own choices in that regard. It is an exercise of direct democracy. And then shops can be open if that decision is made. I am sure that in an area such as Napier the decision will be taken that the shops will be able to be open. Perhaps Hastings may go first and we will follow afterwards which has happened in other areas of shopping in relation to our two cities— 
Chris Tremain 
: And Havelock North. 
Hon Dr MICHAEL CULLEN 
: Well Havelock North maybe but it might be regarded as more for the workers if the shops open. Havelock North will remain closed so that the working-class areas of Hastings and Napier will remain open and “not in my backyard” will operate rather nicely in Havelock North. 
So my view given that at the end of the day the House has to pass one bill or the other is that—although in the absence of Steve Chadwick’s bill with its structure I would actually vote for this bill despite what I think are some fairly strange structures—it does not make sense to me to vote for it at this point. As Leader of the House I am particularly conscious that it will be quite difficult to pass either bill before Easter. Even though they may not be able to come into effect at least it will be a clear signal if they get through before Easter—at least probably only one of these bills can possibly proceed through to passage before Easter because of other business in front of the House. For those reasons although normally I vote always in favour of liberalisation of shop trading hours I will be voting against the Jacqui Dean bill and in favour of the Steve Chadwick bill.