Gosche Mark: Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal Act (Abolition of Restrictions) Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Commerce Committee 
Gosche Mark: Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal Act (Abolition of Restrictions) Amendment Bill — Consideration of Report of Commerce Committee 
[Volume:616;Page:11983] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 I have found this an interesting debate and I want to go back to some comments other speakers have made. In respect of the issue that this bill needs to be debated and passed by Easter Sunday—as though Parliament has not dealt with it ad nauseam for years and years; it has—sadly for those people who have been proponents of it they have not won enough votes for it to be carried and that is why the law still offers 3½ days’ respite for those workers who work in an industry that requires staff to work on all the other days of the year. 
It is interesting to look at the Standing Orders for this place and I suggest that members who are not familiar with Standing Order 46 should go to page 28 where it states that there is to be no Sunday sitting at all ever. This is not just Easter Sunday but every Sunday. I am looking forward to a time when the members opposite who say we must sit in urgency start thinking about that Standing Order and about whether they would be in a desperate hurry to have it changed so that members in this House would work even one Sunday a year in this place. 
 One of the other more interesting arguments given the nature of debate in our society at the moment particularly in the media that there must be one law for all is that the proponents of this change to the law say that it should happen because people are breaking the law and they have a right to break it. Those proponents champion their cause of breaking the law. Then they would have us believe that the committee’s work in offering some protection would be worth more than the paper it is written on. I am sorry but I just do not accept that. If these people are prepared to flout the law—and we are in a country that at the moment is saying there should be one law for all—then how am I to trust that those very same people who openly flout the law now would obey this piece of legislation and offer protection to their workforce? 
As a union official I represented workers in the hospitality and health industries for years—people who would have dearly loved to have off any public holiday as of right. They have not had that right for many years. They would absolutely cheer and clap if Parliament gave them that right but it never will because we have gone long past those times when we respected the rights of people to say no to work on a day that they find special—a day that might be a time just to spend with their families. 
I thought it was interesting to listen to the speech made by Mike Ward who reminisced to a degree about what family used to be in this country not so many years ago. In my time as a member of Parliament when my sons were still at school there were very rare occasions when I went to watch them play cricket for the school on a Saturday and I was the only parent there. I was an MP at that time and there were no other parents there. If we contrast that with the days when we were growing up not that many years ago we would recall how many parents would have been on the sideline of every sporting event that their children took part in. Why? Simply because they had the time and they did not have to be at work. 
Have we taken stock of the consequences of that massive change in our society over the last 10 15 or 20 years and asked: “Is this enough?” I say that it is. It is a simple matter for me. It is not a matter of somebody else’s freedom to shop being more important than a worker’s freedom to be at home with his or her family on 3½ special days per year. It is enough. The line has been drawn and I do not want to see it changed any further than it is now. I may be outvoted on that but at least I will have had the chance to stand up for people who do not get a voice in the workplace. One need only have worked as a retail worker at any time in one’s life to know that the powerlessness of those people is at the extreme end of powerlessness in terms of their relationship with their employers—be they good or bad—because the competitive pressures in that industry are particularly severe. It is not easy for a largely young and female workforce to have power against not the local mum-and-dad employer as was the case when I was growing up but the enormous multinationals. 
Most of our shopping chains are not owned by citizens of this country so workers do not deal face to face with their boss who may be a nice bloke and be prepared to listen when they want the day off because it is their birthday. That is not the retail set-up in New Zealand any more. It is just romantic nonsense to believe that the power relationships are what they were 10 15 or 20 years ago in most workplaces. It would not be sufficient to say that this legislation offers protection to those workers. I know from a great many retailers themselves that those days off are about the only respite many of them get from running their businesses—those that are still small-business owners. We hear a lot about championing the cause of small businesses and I think that in rejecting this bill we would be championing the cause of many small businesses and those retailers would say: “The law says I don’t have to open and thank goodness because that gives me 3½ days off this year.” That can be a reality for many of them. Small-business people do not get any time off other than 3½ days a year. 
 So the points others have made is not enough to convince me that this should be sufficient to allay our fears about those who wish to have the day off. They will get the pressure. They will feel the pressure in many and subtle ways and find that it is better to give in and work. So I am utterly opposed to extending the line any further than the 3½ days we now have. I again ask people to think about this argument about freedom of choice because there is just no contest. My right my freedom to shop is not equal to the right and the freedom of workers to spend some time with their kids their partners their grandparents or their grandchildren. That is a far more important thing to stand up and defend than my right to go out at my convenience and buy something that I could easily have bought the day before and will still be in the shop tomorrow. It might be slightly less nice than it was on the Sunday if I have to buy it on the Monday but the retail sector has worked out how to overcome these difficulties and I congratulate the sector on that. 
We are not talking about going back to the days when we did not have Saturday shopping or the ability to go to the supermarket at midnight. All those things are available in New Zealand. What we are talking about is a very valuable remnant of some sort of decency in this country when it comes to many many thousands of workers. I repeat that members go into those shops and see who we are talking about. We are talking about a largely female and largely young work force and it is their right in my view to hear Parliament offer some leadership and some guidance through the law and say: “Yes we think it is our right as elected parliamentarians to use our judgment and offer some last vestige of protection for those people.” So I do not support this bill. 
It was good to hear from some of the people on the committee. I refer in particular to one of the speeches—I think it was the third—made by Brian Connell. I thought it was a very good speech. We are on different sides of the argument on this one but Mr Connell has obviously worked through the issues. He came down on one side of the argument I came down on the other but it was important for that select committee to do its work and it is important for this House to have these debates from time to time. But I certainly think we need to take stock of the consequences of what has happened in New Zealand with all the liberalisation and deregulation that has gone on and start to think about family values now not just at election time when it is a slogan.