Ward Mike: Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal Act (Abolition of Restrictions) Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Commerce Committee 
Ward Mike: Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal Act (Abolition of Restrictions) Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Commerce Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11979] 
MIKE WARD (Green) 
: 
 The purpose of this bill is to abolish shop trading hour restrictions on Easter Sunday. I see no reason why it should stop there. It has not managed to even slow down. I remember some years back that an American arriving in New Zealand on a Saturday was reputed to have said that he found the place closed. He might have said that he found us sleeping in gardening watching our kids play sport or relaxing with friends on the golf course the rugby field or the netball court. Many visitors arriving in New Zealand today after 20 years absence lament the fact that New Zealand now is not the way they remember it. We have lost something of our easy-going and laid-back manner. 
Retailers justifying the change to 6-day shopping said they were responding to consumer demand. The reality was that Saturday shopping was not an immediate success. Indeed it took some time and many advertising dollars to convince New Zealanders that they wanted to shop on Saturday. The change was driven by businesses with little connection or commitment to local communities. Initially small retailers resisted the change but the chain stores persisted and slowly but surely the habit took on. 
At the time I was a very small retailer selling my handicrafts on a Friday afternoon and watching my daughters play netball on a Saturday morning. Those of us who were concerned that we would have little choice but to open on Saturday morning were told that there would be no compulsion but eventually Friday shopping became a non-event. It was killed and my children had to get used to playing their sport on a Saturday morning without their father watching. 
Years later folk who remembered my opposition to Saturday shopping would say: “See Mike you had nothing to worry about. The world hasn’t fallen apart.” I am not sure where they have been because the world is a decidedly different place now. The world has changed. Shopping is now the preferred recreation for more New Zealanders and while we have never had so much stuff we have never had so little time to spend with the people we like or to enjoy the experience of living in this lovely country. We are also more violent and more neurotic our families fall apart more frequently and more regularly we spend more time at work gamble more take our own lives more often and—while it may be unfair to blame all of that on Saturday shopping—it would be extremely short-sighted to ignore the impact of consumerism on the quality of our lives and on the destruction of our environment. 
I have to concede that Saturday shopping has more elements of community and family than shopping at any other time of the week but that does not alter the fact that we now have less time to be family or to unwind after a week’s work. I have trouble getting to harriers on a Saturday afternoon and when I do fewer of my friends have managed to make it. Even fewer stay around to socialise afterwards. It is more difficult to find someone to coach the children’s teams or to turn up for the school working bees on a Saturday morning. While Saturday shopping is unlikely to be the day with which we would dispense adding Easter Saturday feels like the coup de grâce to a society that is in need of life support not putting out of its misery. 
Is it not already too late? What difference will an extra day’s shopping make? Saying no would signal that at least we are aware of the problem and out of our awareness might grow a willingness to show a genuine concern for family and community—an awareness that might extend not to increasing shopping hours but to clawing back a little of the family time that we have lost. 
Steve Chadwick 
: What about the gardening centres? 
MIKE WARD 
: It is not only the gardening centres. It is the thin end of the wedge. They will all be open. 
A recent news item declared that New Zealand is the third least-regulated country in the world. I am sure there are still New Zealanders who see that as high praise despite 20 years of deregulation—a couple of decades demolishing a quality of life that was once the envy of the world. 
All the Green MPs will be opposing this bill. We would urge all our colleagues in this place to think carefully about the kind of New Zealand we are trying to create and then work out what we have to do to get there. The deregulation model has not made us wealthier happier or more contented. It has certainly not addressed our environmental concerns. We throw away 10 million kilograms into holes in the ground every day—much of it toxic all of it valuable. We source our products from all over the world with little thought about the possibility that we may be degrading other people’s environments or lives and we do that through our shopping. We manage to do it very well on 6 days and we managed to do it quite well on 5 days. We will do extraordinarily well on 7 days. 
Those who advocate for extended shopping hours do so on the grounds that the present limited restrictions curtail freedom of choice. I say tell that to the small retailers who are working longer hours than ever before—frequently for smaller returns. If they want to stay in business the only choice they have is to open on Saturday mornings. With additional Sunday opening opportunities they will eventually succumb. Do they have the freedom to choose to watch their children play sport? Unlikely. Do they have the freedom to spend the morning in the garden? Not if they want to stay in business. Are the people who drove the retailing revolution the same individuals who serve in the shop? Unlikely. They have lackeys to do that for them. Do we not need the extra work? Not nearly as much as we need the time—and rather than providing extra work extended shopping hours have simply contributed further to the casualisation of retail trade. 
Far from providing choice Saturday shopping has undermined the opportunity for many New Zealanders to do many other things that once characterised what it meant to be a New Zealander. I recall an interview that Kim Hill did with a researcher who had concluded that 25 percent of rural Australians were clinically depressed. When Kim Hill asked how that compared with urban New Zealanders the researcher replied: “They are catching up.” So why are we such an unhappy lot? In spite of too many people having too little work too many of us are just working too many hours—more hours per man woman and child than ever before. While homelessness and inadequate housing are very real problems many of us have never had such large homes or so little time to spend in them. 
It is perhaps unsurprising that a party that sees us merely as consumers and taxpayers is unaware of the many other vastly more interesting and important elements that it takes to be a human being most of which take time. It takes time to be a friend it takes time to be a parent and it takes time to make the first XV or to get to my harriers on a Saturday afternoon. There was a time when New Zealanders enjoyed 4 days off at Christmas another 4 days off at New Year and the really smart ones knocked off on the Friday before Christmas and stayed knocked off until some time around the middle of January. All that and unemployment was virtually unheard of. 
Looking for extra days on which to sell people more things—that they probably do not need and probably will not get a lot of pleasure out of—is so extraordinarily unimaginative. So what should we be doing? New Zealand First’s minority view has some appeal. It says that the power to make decisions should lie with local rather than central government and should be seen as a result of community action. To date the decisions have been made by a tiny minority of business interests ably supported by sympathetic Governments. 
Has there been a community in recent history that has sat down and rationally decided how long its weekends ought to be; how many long weekends it would like to have; whether perhaps Sundays and Mondays should be holidays; and whether it has the right to make those decisions for itself. I would have thought that communities have at least as much right as business leaders or politicians in Auckland or Wellington. Although I would be deeply disappointed should they decide to open their stores on Easter Sunday they would have the responsibility of taking measures to avoid remedy or mitigate the harmful consequences of their decision by compensating—not simply by adding another day off but by adding another long weekend perhaps. That would give time for communities to do the community thing and for families to spend time together doing other things than accumulating. 
In the interests of community—and family and the environment—the Green members of Parliament will be opposing this bill. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Clem Simich) 
: Before I call Paul Adams United Future has two speakers with 5 minutes each. I will give the members a bell on 4 minutes.