Roche Denise: Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 November 2015. Volume:709;Page:7623. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green): I rise to take the first call for the Greens on the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill. I am really pleased to see that the Speaker has responded to the letter that I sent to him yesterday asking that members be able to exercise a conscience vote on this bill even though it is a Government bill. I am really pleased that he has responded to us and said yes. That is great. I like other people in the House hope that that is what will happen.We have got to wonder where this bill came from. It kind of just got announced and put on to the Order Paper but it came out of nowhere. Even the regulatory impact statement suggests that this bill was scrambled together in a hurry. The covering note from Gerald Clark the manager of employment standards policy for the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment said in his last point that the regulatory impact statement “included consultation with government agencies and Local Government New Zealand.” He goes on to say: “MBIE has not been permitted to consult with other stakeholders or to consult more widely about shop trading [hours].” It seems highly unusual to me to not consult other stakeholders. Business New Zealand for example would be a classic one that you would want to consult with. The Employers and Manufacturers Association would be another group that you may want to consult with and certainly the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions and FIRST Union which represents shop employees—they would be very clear stakeholders that you would probably want to consult with if you were not in a dreadful hurry to get this through and on to the Order Paper. But I would certainly think that the trade unions should have been consulted given that we are talking about workers shop assistants who work on Easter Sunday.Back to the regulatory impact statement—it basically confirms that this bill was put together in a rush. It says that the bill was based on Todd McClay’s 2009 member’s bill. That is quite handy if you are in a rush—there is one just there really handy for you. The fact is though that it failed then. The Government members voted against it and this was in 2009. It was National that was in power and it was a National member’s bill. So it will be interesting today to see whether Chester Borrows Bill English Peseta Sam Lotu-Iiga Tim Macindoe and Jonathan Young actually utilise their personal vote to oppose this bill this time because essentially it is the same bill. One would expect the same response—wouldn’t one—particularly if they voted against their own colleague’s bill because of strongly held Christian beliefs.There is no reason to suppose that this bill will pass its first reading. If MPs across the House do have a genuine personal vote—and given the number of times that this House has discussed liberalising Easter Sunday shop trading hours and voted against that proposition—we may not pass it tonight. The haste with which it was developed really makes me question why it is before the House at all.I think the reason that it has been put is that—really we should go back and consider what was happening at the time that the Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Mr Woodhouse announced the bill to the media on 24 August. Interestingly that announcement about this bill coincided with the debate in the Committee of the whole House on his Health and Safety Reform Bill. In fact just a few days before it the Minister was facing severe criticism with the release of the list of low-risk industries that would be exempt from requiring a health and safety representative. We must remember that those low-risk industries included dairy and cattle farming and high-risk industries included minigolf and worm farming. It was also at this time that the families of the men who had been killed at work in the forests and at the Pike River mine were attending Parliament and were calling on the Government to strengthen the law and deliver legislation that would actually ensure that other people’s sons and partners and fathers would make it home from work alive. If we think of this bill within that context I guess we could say that at the time the Government was really keen to look for a distraction from those crucial and really emotive issues.Let us talk about this bill. This is the 10th attempt since 1996 to liberalise Easter Sunday trading hours—that is once every 2 years on average there is a bill in the House about Easter Sunday trading hours. Green MPs have opposed these bills and we have exercised our consciences because Easter Sunday whether it is observed as a religious holiday or not is one of only 3½ days that gives shop assistants a guaranteed day off and one of only 3½ days a year that gives everyone else a break from the mad drive to consume—goodness knows we sometimes need a break from that.It strikes me as kind of strange that this bill liberalises only Easter Sunday when one could really argue—and I guess it falls back to the argument that Melissa Lee was putting forward—that if the religious ceremony of Easter Sunday can be ignored by commerce then why not Christmas Day or Good Friday. But this bill does not look at those other days. Actually this is one of the comments that was made in the regulatory impact statement—that maybe they should be reviewed really. Where the Greens come from is that we support having more public holidays. We would consider supporting making Easter Sunday a public holiday to increase our annual total to 12 per year and to actually enable those shop assistants if this bill went through to get paid without having to take annual leave. We would support that. We would consider supporting that. But this is not what this bill does.The other thing that concerns us is that this bill essentially gives local councils the bylaw-making power that means they can decide whether they have shops open in their areas if they wish. I have to say that this seems to be a fairly inconsistent approach given the way this Government has treated local government and the centralisation of an enormous number of local powers—things around housing things around annual plans and things around water. Those sorts of decisions seem to be taken away from local councils but hey they can have a say and bear the costs of creating a by-law so that they can have Easter Sunday as a shop-open day.The whole area around Easter Sunday trading hours is kind of a dog’s breakfast. There are already exemptions in place and this bill will keep those exemptions in place for Parnell Road in Auckland the Arts Centre in Christchurch Carnegie Centre Moray Place in Dunedin Market Place only on Collins Road in Hamilton Harbour Market in Napier Nelson Paihia Mariners Mall in Picton Taupō central Richmond Court in Thames and Wānaka—you can shop in Wānaka on Easter Sunday—at Pembroke Mall Stage I only. What I am saying is it is a heck of a dog’s breakfast because these exemptions were not made by local council; these exemptions were made by central government. So you have to wonder whether this Government is abrogating its responsibility about having a consistent approach to shop trading hours on Easter Sundays. I certainly think it is.Finally the other area we are dreadfully concerned about is this idea that employees can say that they are not going to work on Easter Sunday and suffer no consequences for it which is ridiculous in this current environment of industrial relations which has tipped the balance in favour of employers in terms of—