Wilson Distorts Reality Again Says Peters

Tauranga MP Rt Hon Winston Peters has described Margaret Wilson’s Easter shop trading comments as a deliberate exercise in deception.

Mr Peters today pointed out that in Parliament on Wednesday the Labour Party voted against his move to allow all New Zealand communities to make their own decisions about when shops could open at Easter.

“Last year when Ms Wilson promised a change to the trading hours laws, all she delivered was a change to the garden centres, as though that would satisfy other retailers, and then she blocked my attempts last year to have local governments decide this issue.”

Mr Peters said that he had been trying since 1997 to amend legislation to allow Tauranga and Mount Maunganui businesses to open in exceptional circumstances if approved by the Tauranga District Council.

“Margaret Wilson, as a Government Minister, could have taken my Members’ Bill and introduced it as a Government Bill. She can still do that before Easter.

“Instead, she argues that I should have gone down the same path as Steve Chadwick, her colleague in Rotorua, and introduced a Local Bill. What good would that be when her colleagues voted down the Rotorua Bill? What chance would mine have?

“Moreover, if every similar community was to demand its own Bill there would be 120 before Parliament, which is clearly nonsense. “All Margaret Wilson is trying to do is mislead the local retailers that she is doing something when she is clearly doing the reverse, and is now promising a review of the shop trading hours legislation, which is shorthand for ‘I am sitting on my hands doing nothing’.”

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