Dialogue: You can get blind drunk at Easter but not buy a Bible

By ROSALEEN MACBRAYNE

Come April 15, when holidaymakers have time on their hands and money to burn, chances are the shops will be closed. Yet again, the inequity of Easter trading makes the law look an ass.

While tourists can shop till they drop on Easter Sunday in Taupo and Whangamata, they can't in Rotorua and Mt Maunganui.

You can buy any number of things at a service station, but garden centres are obliged to shut their doors at a time when their goods are in high demand.

Get drunk in a pub on Easter Sunday if you like, but it's no use trying to buy a Bible because bookshops are not open.

Although it is a sacred day for many people, others have a social need to shop. And why not? This is the 21st century, for goodness' sake. Gone are the days of Monday to Friday, 9 am to 5 pm trading when shopping on Sunday was sacrilege.

We are no longer in an artificially regulated society. It is about choice these days. People don't have to visit stores if they don't want to, nor do they have to work in them on a public holiday. But let us have the opportunity to decide for ourselves.

If it is a wet Easter Sunday, we may well want some retail therapy instead of going tramping or sailing.

For the past decade, retailers keen to open and holidaymakers wanting to spend have been frustrated by silly, contradictory legislation.

The 1990 Shop Trading Hours Repeal Act has a lot to answer for. It locked in place existing exemptions allowing a dozen or so visitor centres around the country to trade on a handful of special days, but revoked previous dispensations for individual stores in other towns.

No further exemptions would be granted, not even at Mt Maunganui three years ago when a cruise ship docked on Easter Sunday. The Sky Princess brought its 1800 passengers to a ghost town.

Although shopping hours have stretched in recent years and liquor licensing hours have been greatly relaxed, there is still this old-fashioned law hamstringing a few public holidays.

Pushed by popular demand and their own need to make a living, small businesses have tried civil disobedience - to their cost.

In 1996, determined Mt Maunganui shopkeepers who thought they had found a loophole in the law challenged it, and lost.

The clause on which they had relied says goods for sale must include nothing that is not food, drink, a household item, a personal item, motor fuel or accessories "of a kind that people may reasonably need to be able to buy at any time."

That hardly stipulates that only the necessities of life can be sold on Easter Sunday. Anomalies abound. Surely the fact that the repeal act does not say what exactly we can buy is recognition that market forces must apply?

Since some of their number were convicted and fined for breaking the law, a few defiant shopkeepers have opened quietly, hoping no complaints will be laid and no Labour Department inspector will cross the threshold.

But not everyone wants open slather. There probably ought to be a few days a year when commerce takes a back seat. Shopkeepers pretty much agree that having to stay closed on Good Friday, Christmas Day and the morning of Anzac Day is not too draconian. But Easter Sunday, the last holiday fling before winter sets in, is where the argument lies.

Individual politicians have tried to address the issue for years, but it always seems to be too little, too late. And it looks now as though 2001 will pass without resolution.

Labour Minister Margaret Wilson favours a law change to allow garden centres to open on Easter Sunday and a blanket exemption for shops in tourist meccas to trade.

That, however, will rely on the cooperation of MPs on both sides of Parliament to approve limited liberalisation urgently.

It is high time politicians stopped dithering. A complete review of the shop trading laws is needed and must apply across the board. It is ludicrous and unfair to allow one town to open on Easter Sunday and not its neighbours.