Curran ClareCLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): I am pleased to take a call in the Committee stage of this bill. This is my first call on this bill and I am one of the members of the Commerce Committee which went through an extraordinary process in the discussions and the computations around this bill. I am also one of the members from this side of the House who supported this bill to select committee and exercised my conscience in doing so. I also note that this is the fourth time—is it the fourth or the fifth time—that a bill on this subject has come before the House and I believed that it should have the right to go to a select committee and have the arguments heard again in 2016. I am well aware that there are differing opinions and that there are parts of the country that have got much stronger views on this than others and therefore I felt that it was worthy of a discussion at a select committee. Having sat through the interminable discussions at the select committee I am left feeling horrified at the shambles that is this piece of legislation before the Committee today. I note the Minister has tabled Supplementary Order Paper 179 which is an extensive Supplementary Order Paper that completely changes the original bill but it is a shambles of a piece of legislation and it reflects a pattern of badly drafted bills coming before the Commerce Committee. I think that is a great shame but I feel the need to make reference to that today because it is not a good look for this Parliament and this House for there to be such an extensive Supplementary Order Paper tabled in the Committee of the whole House because the Government cannot get it right in the first place. That is just one concern I have.This bill is the Minister Michael Woodhouse's third piece of flawed and failed legislation to have appeared before the House in recent times. The first one was the workplace health and safety laws. The second was his failed attempt at zero-hour contracts—The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Trevor Mallard): Order! I am going to draw the member—because it is quite a broad bill. But we are discussing Part 1 of this bill and the Minister's—I should stop using my own mike here. The Minister's general record is not part of this part of the bill.CLARE CURRAN: This bill the Shop Trading House Amendment Bill ultimately aims to undermine and will have the effect of undermining the rights of working people. That is one reason to exercise my conscience to vote against it at the Committee stage and I will be doing so but there are more reasons to do so as well.The second reason that I have got major concerns about this bill—which is outlined in Part 1 and certainly evidenced by the massive Supplementary Order Paper before the Committee today—is that the Government has missed an opportunity to show national leadership on this and actually impose a requirement for a policy change across the country rather than leaving it up to local bodies. The original piece of legislation attempted to use the mechanism of a by-law. There was a great deal of opposition to that from individual councils around the country because they saw it—and rightly so—was going to be very contentious in each region and it would cost a lot to impose a by-law and there was the possibility of judicial review. So as a result of that instead of coming back with a policy across the country where the law is required the Government came back with this halfway-house approach of a local policy rule which therefore raised questions—significant and constitutional questions—about the consultation mechanisms that would be used in each region to impose what is in effect a policy change that the Government wants but it wants to put the onus on to local communities to deliver it. Again that is a reason to oppose this bill and to exercise my conscience to do so and that is what I will be doing.The third reason why I have concerns—and this came out in evidence before the select committee—is that this bill is unlikely to be enforced. The current mechanism used by the Government to monitor shop trading on Easter Sunday has very little enforcement as it is and it became clear to the committee that it was a farce and that the process was a farce. Again that was a reason to oppose it.The fourth reason is the dilution of workers' rights and the removal of their ability—and I know a number of my colleagues have already spoken about this—and the dilution of their right to have valuable time off with their families. So this bill—and I go back to the point—is a shambles. The extensive Supplementary Order Paper we have before us in the Committee of the whole House stage comes as the result of the committee not being able to agree on the way forward. We had an unusual step of the bill in its original form being sent back to the House and the Minister being forced into the embarrassing situation of having to table the amendments at the Committee of the whole House that were wanted by the Government side. It is a halfway-house approach to a piece of legislation. It was a shambles from start to finish.There were calls from significant local bodies—the Wellington City Council the Auckland Council and the Christchurch City Council—for the Government to take a national approach to this. If it wants the law to change then it should change it itself rather than requiring local government to take the burden on themselves. That is not what we have ended up with. We have ended up with an inadequate flawed piece of legislation which is the modus operandi of this Minister.