Greg Fleming

We wondered if that was a halfway recommendation that we could make and maybe that would be more achievable.

But yeah, for exactly the reason that you just outlined, we figured that that was probably somewhat naive to suggest that.

I do have sympathy for those people who are defending the use of private fireworks and saying, well, yeah, in that case, let's move the time of the year that we do it and maybe it doesn't have to be associated with Guy Fawkes.

So I've sort of steered away from that, you know, of having a problem with fireworks because it's associated with an odd thing that we're celebrating.

If the problem was just its association with Guy Fawkes, then, you know, we could separate those two things.

Actually, honestly, there's some days.

I've only been an MP for 10 years.

There's some days.

I think we should celebrate that.

So you can put those things apart and then you can just have a conversation about do we want fireworks?

I remember one of the submissions made that point was, well, let's move fireworks to being around Matariki so we could make fireworks.

The four days of private sales of fireworks would line up

with Matariki and the advantage of that would be that people would be letting off their fireworks at 6 o'clock in the evening rather than 9.30, which is part of the problem with having it nearly November.

And the example given, and again I think we spoke about this in our report, is that in Australia...

The private sale and use of fireworks has been banned across all of Australia for a very long time.

They think we're quite an oddity having it here in New Zealand.

There's two exceptions in Tasmania and I think it's in Northern Territory.

There's one day of the year.

One of them has Cracker Day.

That sounds like a North Australia thing, eh?