Historical Narrative of the Shop Trading Hours Legislation in New Zealand

This historical narrative analyses the changes in shop trading hour laws in New Zealand, to explore the reasons behind the acceptance of Sunday trading. Sunday trading is seen as out of the ordinary in many parts of the world and New Zealand was one of the earlier countries to introduce it. The narrative uncovers that New Zealand more closely mirrors the experience of the United Kingdom with Sunday trading laws, however less emphasis on religious aspects of the law may have contributed to its acceptance of the law before the United Kingdom. Deregulation of shop trading hours in a country like New Zealand is hard to think amazing in retrospect, but at the time was a relatively forward law in the world. The United States was one of the first countries to deregulate trading in some of their major states (Ingene 1986). It does not seem intuitive, however, that New Zealand should be one of the first countries to follow in the footsteps of the United States. So how did a country like New Zealand, which valued weekend sport and family time (Gerbric 1980) as well as the 40 hour working week, void of hypermarkets and megamalls, come to a 24 hour, seven day, retail trading situation? This is the question that this historical narrative wishes to answer. This historical narrative of the shop trading hours (S.T.H.) in New Zealand works through each of the major changes in S.T.H. laws with particular attention paid to the introduction of Sunday trading – through The Shop Trading Hours Act Repeal Act (1990). Table One gives an overview of the changes in opening hours as well as the changes in decision making power regarding flexible aspects of the law