Will it be a weaker or a neater Easter?
So this is the bright Parliamentary solution to confronting our Easter trading laws shemozzle - ’’It’s a rotten job but now someone else has got to do it’’?
The inconsistencies that bedevil the nation’s rules about which shops can and can’t open on Easter Sunday are only partly Parliament’s fault.
What we’ve been living with is a reflection of something that people tend to speak of in high-minded terms: a Parliament that is truly representative of the people.
This is an issue in which communities disagree with communities, businesses disagree with businesses, households with households, individuals with individuals.
On many matters Governments are only too willing to wade in and declare, in effect, who are the winners and who are the losers. Not this one, though, arguably because the conflicts cut through the support base of too many parties.
Invoked are the religious sanctity of the day itself; the cultural sanctity of family holidays; the legitimate rights of businesses and their employees to earn an honest buck; of consumers to consume; the benefits of traditional values and harm of stultifying inertia.
The political solution in this case has been to invoke the, ahem, flexibility and reactivity of local government, and enable councils to decide what’s best for their own patches.
By ‘‘enable’’ they of course mean require decisions for which someone else can be held accountable by the reproachful ranks of the displeased.
Some councils will say thanks a bunch and genuinely mean it.
In tourist destinations the case for Easter trading is compelling. Take Wanaka, which for no good reason has been forbidden from operating under the same rules as Queenstown.
In Palmerston North, Manawatu and Rangitikei, however, the choice may well be one of the status quo or a mirror image of Anniversary Day confusions. Because the councils can permit businesses to open but not, of course, require it. For sound commercial reasons some would decide that the council’s OK is an offer they can refuse.
Supporters and opponents of liberalised Easter trading will now lobby councils good and hard.
The law allows individual staff members to decline to work Easter Sunday without being required to explain why.
Admittedly, entitlements like that can be hard for individuals to invoke on their own behalf; let alone pursue through legal challenges if there’s resistance from the boss.
The outcome won’t be consistency. But if the councils get it right, the inconsistencies will at least be a more tolerable in the areas in which they occur.