Clark DavidDr DAVID CLARK (Labour—Dunedin North): When I was rudely interrupted I had just read through a letter from the Catholic social justice agency Caritas—and I had to read it quickly because I had only a minute and a half before the House rose—to illustrate the point that this law that we are looking at passing in this House is something that will disrupt family life. It is a change that I do not believe we need to make. Caritas the Catholic agency for justice peace and development sent the Commerce Committee chair and the members of that select committee a letter. I wish to read the first couple of paragraphs. It said: Dear Melissa Lee I am writing to follow up on the invitation I issued last week to you and your fellow members of the Commerce select committee to come to our Caritas office for an Easter Sunday meeting to discuss the proposed changes to Easter trading in the shop hours amendment bill. The meeting is for 10.30 a.m. on Sunday 21 March at the Caritas office in Hill Street Thorndon Wellington. We ourselves have plans to be with family community and church on that day but we are willing to sacrifice those plans to help you understand the impact of having to work on Easter Sunday." As far as I am aware no members—not one—from that committee attended the meeting or even voiced a desire to attend that meeting and I think we have a fundamental problem in this House when we have people willing and able and keen to pass laws that they themselves will not be affected by and that they do not imagine they will ever be affected by. They are happy to dictate that other people should be at the beck and call of their employers on Easter Sunday when they themselves would never undertake such a thing even on a one-off occasion such as that suggested in this letter from Caritas. So I want to say that this particular piece of legislation is a step further down a slope that we have been going down where working people are deprived of the few rights that they have left in this country to enjoy time with their families and to pursue hobbies and to build the social fabric that makes New Zealand the special place that it is which we have all grown up in. I was looking also through the risk analysis prepared on this bill and I discovered that it was limited because the direction had been given by the Minister that this was going to be a very simple way of doing things the way the Minister wanted to do it and to look at no other options. The conclusion we find in this is that there are risks with the proposed amendment. It says the general public businesses and employees could find the changes "complex and confusing". This by-law is complex and confusing. It expects that local authorities will have to make the decision. The responsibility for making these decisions for implementing policy and for writing the policy and all the costs that go with it will be shoved at local government. It does not make things less complex in reality; it actually makes them more complex. It will make New Zealand more of a patchwork than it already is. It does not achieve the stated purpose that Mr Woodhouse has been claiming for the bill which is that it will sort out the issue of Easter trading and we have already seen that members of this House—certainly on the Government benches—have voted against similar legislation. We will find no doubt amongst local governments around the country a difference of opinion and if we look in this House we see that difference of opinion. We see that Mr English has voted three times against a similar bill we see that Mr Brownlee has voted three times against similar bills we see Chester Borrows has voted on four occasions on similar bills and we find that newer members of the House have voted consistently against similar bills. Alfred Ngaro Tim Macindoe and Sam Lotu-Iiga have voted with their consciences against bills like this in the past. It will be very interesting to see whether the Government members vote with a similar conscience this time or whether maybe they have changed their minds dramatically for some reason now that this has become a Government bill. I certainly have been consistently opposed to this kind of change in our legislation and I shall be voting against it because I believe that New Zealand families do not need that limited private time that they have that limited time they can plan to be together eroded any further than it already is. It is very limited in this day and age. When I was a kid Sundays were generally retail-free. Those days are gone. They exist in other countries around the world. Other countries see fit to have days that do not involve retail and they still seem to tick over. Plenty of European countries have very few shops open on a Sunday. But here we are proposing that those last remaining days of the year that people have to spend with their friends and families will be taken away from them so that they cannot plan holidays together out of town and they cannot plan a long weekend and those who wish to have religious observances for example cannot necessarily guarantee to have those. The Minister tried to give us assurances that if employees said they did not want to do it there would be no repercussions but we know what hollow words those were because we know that as workers become more and more vulnerable as more and more of their rights are eroded working people feel the pressure from their bosses particularly those who would want to open 24/7. That is where working New Zealanders are most vulnerable. So I want to contend that it is not just for those workers but also for their families. Those working people have families that depend on them and want to spend time with them and when employers who are not implementing this bill want to spend time with their spouses and families they will no longer be able to guarantee that. I know that when I put a bill through this House that Mondayised a couple of holidays what I was surprised to learn—a little surprised and maybe I should not have been—was that the majority of employers were in favour of an extra public holiday. They were either in favour or neutral towards it—87 percent were either in favour or neutral towards another public holiday—and I think that was in part because the majority of employers are small employers and they also want to spend time with their friends and family and know that that time has been set aside not that they have the time for themselves set aside because they are employers and they can choose and they cannot see their families because they are required to work at short notice. So that is why I shall be standing against this bill and I suspect many of my colleagues will too because they care about working New Zealanders unlike the crowd opposite who are happy to see wages eroded year after year for working New Zealanders. We on this side—at least those I have spoken to—will be opposing this bill. We want to see New Zealanders with more rights more opportunities for leisure time better incomes and the ability to pursue the Kiwi Dream of owning their own home bettering their lot through education and so forth. That is why I shall be opposing this bill. I think it is a bad bill. It is bad law and I think those opposite who support it but who are not themselves willing to give up their Easter Sundays should be ashamed."