Turner Judy: Easter Sunday Shop Trading Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Turner Judy: Easter Sunday Shop Trading Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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JUDY TURNER (Deputy Leader—United Future) 
: 
 I just want to say as I talk to the Easter Sunday Shop Trading Amendment Bill that United Future has decided to treat this issue as a conscience vote. So my comments today are just that—they are my comments my position—and I will be opposing this bill. 
I want to make it really clear from the beginning that although I am a Christian and Easter is an important festival for my faith that is not my reason for opposing this bill. My concern is that we have whittled away at public holidays—from when I was a child when I do not think we had any trading on Sunday at all—until they are down to 3½ measly days a year. I think if members had asked me a few years ago about this I would probably have been less concerned about that because during those days I had my three children at home and we had lots of time together. 
 But as our children grow up and become teenagers—even before they leave home—and they start to get weekend jobs and holiday jobs most of which are in retail facilities suddenly our chances of spending time together start to disappear. Once children leave home it gets harder and harder to spend time with them. As my family has grown older I have come to appreciate the 3½ days of commerce-free public holidays that we have left and I feel a sense of needing to protect them. 
Someone who has really influenced my thinking on this is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who is the Chief Rabbi in England. In his book  
The Politics of Hope 
 he devotes a whole chapter to what he calls “public places”. He uses the example of public parks. The point he makes is that public parks make no economic sense at all. We leave a whole lot of space unbuilt on and not capitalised in any way but that is not the reason we have them. We have parks because they do us good. That is how I feel about public holidays. They do not make economic sense but they do us good and we are in grave danger as we pass these kinds of amendment bills of losing them and losing sight of what they are all about. Let me read a portion from his book: 
“Every age has its characteristic preoccupations. For the past century and a half one of the leading concerns of thinkers in the West has been to preserve for individuals the space to be themselves without interference from others. When that case was first made in 1859 by John Stuart Mill it had a mild and limited objective. Mill felt himself surrounded by the suffocating proprieties of Victorian England and felt that human creativity—what he called ‘experiments in living’—needed more room in which to develop. A century later when Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper came to formulate their views the subject had become more grave. The enemy was now no longer Victorian busybodies peering into other people’s windows but the totalitarian state and its crushing sacrifice of liberty and lives. As the twentieth century drew to its close however it would be fairer to say that we stand in the opposite situation. In today’s liberal democracies it is not that we are too much together but that we are too much alone and seek to learn again how to connect with others in lasting and rewarding ways.” 
It is in this context that some of us in this House see value in protecting the remaining 3½ days of commerce-free public holidays so that getting together with friends and family is at least on 3½ days given a higher priority than commerce. The argument is that business folk have a right to conduct their activities when they please. Some of us however think that if we in this House are truly serious and sincere when we wax eloquent about crime rates family breakdown antisocial behaviour and the absence of consistent values as we all do at times then we will all need to acknowledge that nothing will be resolved if we all act alone as individuals. Sometimes just occasionally we need to agree to put down our own agenda for the common good. It is the reason that we have conservation estates and marine reserves. It is why we have road rules. They are designed for our collective good; so are our remaining few public holidays. 
The interesting fact about this proposal is that it pretends to be about creating exemptions for towns that have strong visitor and tourist components to their activities. However it is very unclear which towns this does not apply to. As New Zealand promotes itself more and more as a tourist industry—and the town I live in is desperate to attract tourism dollars—it is very easy to see that this will be just a very blanket provision.