Feeding (and feeding off) the multitude
What was it John Lennon said in 1966? The Beatles were more popular than Jesus?
You won’t find Ed Sheeran rushing to tweet a #metoo.
But resurrection of Jesus isn’t looming nearly as large in Dunedin city councillors’ minds as the pending arrival of the world’s most lifelike Muppet. Or more pertinently the multitudes attending Sheeran’s three concerts next year, the third of which is Easter Sunday.
Between 60,000 and 90,000 of the tickets sold are to visitors, so the influx is clearly going to be massive.
The council has decided shops should be permitted to open on the Sunday. You can call this, if you really must, another victory for Mammon. And by no means is it just at the expense of Christian sanctities. If anything, the wider source of lamentation is that it intrudes into ability of families to take holiday together, breadwinners included.
You couldn’t call it the thin end of the wedge because the wedge has already been hammered good and hard into this area, each blow of the mallet accompanied by the explanation that businesses, and staff, who have a living to make are entitled to decide when they work. And that New Zealanders who are taking the holiday might want, and deserve, certain degrees of service from those who would willingly provide it.
Easter has long been one of the holdouts against extended trading, albeit with giddying inconsistencies depending on where you live.
Parliament has now passed the buck to councils to decide, and has done so in the full knowledge that not just MPS, not just councillors, but the wider communities themselves, are quite deeply divided on this matter.
Dunedin’s decision goes against a slight majority of submissions from its community, but the feedback was close enough to make the call defensible, particularly since it’s up for review in 90 days.
This has the twin benefits of affording opponents another chance to rally to their cause, perhaps now more fully motivated, and for the councillors who voted yes to reassure themselves that this opposition is indeed small enough that the council isn’t going to be making making a truly horrible political - sorry, social - mistake.
What’s more, the council has warned that it could always change the rules again if it transpires the bosses, in sufficient numbers, are behaving like jerks.
Easter Sunday is not a statutory holiday. It doesn’t have the protections that attend Good Friday or Easter Monday. But the public, and the council, would recognise employer bastardry when they see it. The three questions are how much of this will arise, how much of that will be found out, and what the trigger-point for the councillors would be.