Easter’s end

It’s the end of this year’s Easter holiday weekend, and today, like last Friday, is a public holiday like all other ordinary ones, with shops and cafes able to open. Easter Sunday was the second and last of this holiday weekend’s days with trading bans in place (in most places in New Zealand…). I’m glad that’s over with—for now.

I came round to the idea that it’s time to end the trading bans on Easter weekend, but it was only this year I the effects of a technically unrelated ban that, in a perfect world, would be easily repealed. We don’t live in that entirely imaginary perfect world.

As I’ve said many times, there are three and a half days in which it’s illegal for shops to open—depending on where they’re located and what they sell. For example, in areas deemed to be tourist areas, most shops could open, but shops in areas not designated by the government as tourist areas, cannot, no matter how many tourists they get. Similarly, hotel restaurants were allowed to be open and to sell alcohol to hotel guests as long as it was with food, but an ordinary, independent cafe or restaurant right next the hotel cannot.

Throughout the country, another weird exception used to exist (and still may, though I’m not certain). Places offering services could trade, but couldn’t be sold goods. So, for example, a hairdresser could style people’s hair, but it was illegal to sell them hair products. Back when we still have video stores, it was legal for them to rent movies, but they couldn’t sell any.

The reality is that the rules for what businesses can open, where, and what they can do, has been a confusing mess for decades, but it got even worse in 2017 when the National Party government of the day decided to legislate to allow local councils to choose whether shops could trade on Easter Sunday only (they don’t get to decide that for any other of the trading ban days). I wrote about National’s idiotic law change at the time, and the utter stupidity of that change is still obvious. As far as I know, no city has allowed Easter Sunday exemptions, but several mostly rural districts have.

What makes all of this even more stupid is that Easter Sunday is NOT a public holiday, so none of the usual rights workers have on public holidays apply (higher pay and a day off in lieu), however, if a business is legally allowed to trade on Easter Sunday, there are special rules, such as, workers have the legal right to refuse to work on Easter Sunday without needing to state a reason, and the employers are required to tell them they have that right (I wonder how many employers actually do tell workers…). The public holidays for Easter weekend are Good Friday and today, Easter Monday. I would hope that shops allowed to open on Easter would treat their workers as if it was a public holiday, but there’s no legal obligation that they do so.

Given how utterly daft the Easter trading laws are, some businesses decided to defy the law and open anyway, like some supermarkets. If the government decides to punish a shop for opening, the maximum fine is $1,000, which is so low that I wonder why more shops don’t ignore the law an open. I did notice that supermarkets in the linked article said they weren’t selling alcohol, which makes sense: If they sold alcohol when it’s prohibited, they might lose their liquor licence, and that’s a MUCH bigger deal than a $1,000 fine.

And the final level of stupidity—and the thing that ought to be easy to repeal—is that all TV ads are banned on trading ban days—but the bans don’t apply to ads on any foreign streaming service, like YouTube, for example. New Zealand broadcasters are struggling to survive as foreign online companies—Google (including YouTube), Facebook, etc.—are getting most of the available ad revenues, and our current laws make that bad situation even worse because the Broadcasting Act of 1989 mandates that no ads can be run at any time on TV or radio on Christmas Day, Good Friday, or Easter Sunday, and television may not run ads on Anzac Day morning and all Sundays until noon, but radio may run ads on those days for some bizarre logic lost in the dust of time. Self-promotion ads (like for upcoming shows) are okay, though: The brodcaster just can’t make any money from ads—though, again, foreign content providers can make as much as they want from viewers in New Zealand.

The current broadcasting minister, a former TV show host of dubious ability as a minister, has blandly promised a re-write of the Act (written way before the Internet or streaming services were a thing), but given the chaos under our current three-ring circus coalition government, I doubt it’ll actually happen. I think that ending the ad bans ought to be done as quickly as possible: They make absolutely no sense, deny NZ broadcasters revenue that foreigners still get, and has nothing whatsoever to do with New Zealand workers and days off.

Having said all that, back in 2011 I first called for an end to the trading bans, and since then I’ve made clear several times that it’s mainly the Easter Weekend bans that I think must be repealed, and I can certainly live with the bans on Christmas Day and Anzac Day morning—though I’m pretty sure that even if all of the trading bans were repealed, many—probably most—retailers would still observe them on those two days. The advertising bans are a completely separate issue, and one that makes even less sense than the nonsensical trading bans.

No government led by either main party has ever been willing to end the trading or advertising bans, and the only time in decades a government did something it was the utter lunacy of National's kinda, sorta, almost like a repeal of the trading ban for Easter Sunday only. Some day, maybe our politicians will finally do what should have been fixed long ago.

But today was a normal public holiday and I’m sure lots of people headed out the shops and to bars, cafes and restaurants. Even though some hospitality venues charge a surcharge on public holidays, many in that struggling sector will nevertheless get business they were denied on Friday and yesterday. It’s time to make the rules for this weekend—and for television advertising—finally make sense. I’m not holding my breath, though. Meanwhile, it's only three and a half weeks until the next trading ban…