Chapter 1: What are the recent developments in fireworks legislation?
Every November the 5th, the fireworks go off. Every year, for decades now, there's another petition calling for it to stop. This year, there were three with similar wording, with a total of nearly 100,000 signatories. And in an unusual move, Parliament's Petitions Committee recommend the Government overhaul the laws on the public sale of fireworks.
I reluctantly concluded that there was just no other I could land, really. I would have had to have just ignored the evidence to have concluded anything different.
I'm Alexia Russell, and today on The Detail, the fireworks debate and petitions. How do you start one? What happens to it? And what role does the petitions committee have? Plus, a story about exploding kaupu. Stay tuned. But let's begin with Dr Alison Vaughan from the SPCA. She's an expert in applied animal behaviour and welfare.
Chapter 2: Why are petitions gaining momentum against fireworks?
This interview didn't take long. She's been saying the same thing for decades and her appearance before the Petitions Committee was not the first time. I asked her what she told them.
To be honest, a lot of the information has been shared before. So in terms of the level of harm to our companion animals, a lot of people are only too aware of this. But another angle that the committee might not have considered is the impact on wildlife, especially given the time of year. I'm from the UK. Guy Fawkes was always a very wet evening.
Here in New Zealand, it's dry, so it's very prone to fires, but it's also when our native birds are nesting.
Were you encouraged this year when the Petitions Committee actually came out with a recommendation to back your petition?
Yeah, we were hugely encouraged. So many people listening will have signed petitions over the years. There's actually been 14 petitions, including the three that were considered by the committee. And this is the first time ever the committee has come out in favour in recommending the government take action and ban the private sale and use of fireworks. What's changed, Alison?
I think there's been a real shift in the public opinion. We just don't need to be doing this. What do you think comes next?
What do you hope comes next?
Well, the government have 60 working days to respond to the committee's recommendation and we will be following that very closely. We also, as we do every election, we will be asking the different parties where they stand on key issues and fireworks is one of those key issues.
New Zealand First has had a members' bill in the ballot on this. Leader Winston Peters saying the issue will be a bottom line in any coalition negotiations. Here he is talking to TV3.
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Chapter 3: How does animal welfare factor into the fireworks debate?
We see the same harms. It's documented in the scientific research. We've got police, vans, veterinarians. Everyone is saying we really need to ban this. SPCA is very concerned about this issue and we keep pushing and we keep trying to look for new angles to approach. And obviously when that members bill came out, we were heartened to see renewed interest.
So we have commissioned a survey of the public and we found that 63% of the New Zealand public support a ban on the private sale and use of fireworks while still allowing professionally run public displays. So that's equivalent to about 2.4 million New Zealanders. So this is very encouraging.
And we're very grateful to the petitioners and everyone who signed, but we were also really grateful to the Petitions Committee for really engaging with the information that was provided. Is that a change from how it's been in the past? I think it's a mixed bag, but that was definitely a very positive experience we felt in terms of the committee engaging with the issue.
We have been frustrated in the past.
What, just by sort of a wall of, yes, we'll take your petition, goodbye, kind of thing?
Well, so the last time that we presented in person, along with many other organisations and presented the same very compelling evidence, and when their committee report came out, it was that they were just okay with the status quo. And that was enormously frustrating to everyone who had signed and provided evidence.
And it's sort of hard to put your finger on what's changed other than possibly we've just hit a tipping point.
I think that might just be it. We've finally reached a tipping point. We've seen enough fires. We've seen enough antisocial behaviour. And we've definitely seen enough of our animals suffering.
I think fireworks suck. We've got an animal and every time we have Guy Fawkes Night, he's just quivering, hiding, running away. We have an old dog, she's absolutely destroyed.
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Chapter 4: What evidence supports the call for a fireworks ban?
We had a goat and horses. But I don't know. I guess it was just back in those days, if you're not aware of something, you don't know any different. But now we do. And that's what's changed for me. Now that I'm aware of it, I can see. I think we really should change it.
And then probably one more issue, not quite so major, but it is a big one, which is the distress to families, particularly in cities. There's no regulation around when firecrackers can be used. There's the potential for halfway legislation.
So rather than going with what we recommended, which is ceasing the sale and use of private fireworks, we could potentially move to restricting the use of fireworks to be, for example, the same four days that you can buy fireworks. So you could say that at the moment you can buy fireworks, I think, what is it, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th of November.
We could change the law to say, and those are the only four days that you're actually allowed to let them off. And then there'd be four days of the year that animal owners and small families would have to... you know, put up with that kind of noise and the distress that noise causes.
Can you really see that working, though? I mean, you know, the sort of people who are letting fireworks off at 3 a.m. on their birthday because they squirreled them away from Guy Fawkes time are not the sort of people who really care that it's now against the law. And you can't phone them. You know, who's going to find these people?
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Chapter 5: How has public opinion shifted regarding fireworks?
Yeah, potentially. And that's my concern. Yeah, I agree with you, absolutely. And that's why we did have a discussion about that. 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.
There's an argument that fireworks night should be moved to Matariki in the middle of winter. That celebrating Guy Fawkes is a random note in history connected to our colonial past.
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.
Have you got an objection to celebrating someone trying to blow up Parliament, Greg?
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?
And then I think Tasmania might have Sparkler Day or something. And anyway, I think if I'm remembering this rightly, but the day that they have is in the middle of winter.
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Chapter 6: What role does the Petitions Committee play in this issue?
It's all very much specialist advice. But the hearings themselves are public, so it's still on Zoom like any committee hearing is. People can Zoom in and watch it, or they can come into Parliament and watch it live. And then at the end of all of that, we then work with the clerks of the committee to draw up a report which summarises all of the findings, and then we make a recommendation.
So we have to write a report back to the House, and the report back either says that we asked the House to take note of our report, and that's simply our way of just going, here's all the stuff we've got, we don't have a particular opinion on it, But, you know, this might be helpful for future related policy and legislative discussions to this subject.
Or we can actually make a recommendation with this current report around fireworks. That's what we've done.
Within reason, any petitioner who asks to be heard by the committee generally is.
That's probably the best part of the petitions committee because, again, we run quite a collegial and consensus-driven approach. So often we'll even get the petitioner and those who are opposing it or putting it out to all sit at the table together and we'll have a really good discussion.
And then at the end of that, we get the clerks to write the report up and then back, as I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation. So we would go through that whole process, yes, several times. Several hundred times in the term of Parliament.
All up, the three anti-fireworks petitions had 96,389 human signatures.
And the other thing that was cool about the Animate petition is that in addition to all the human signatures, I think they had something like 90,000 paw prints that also signed it.
So presumably they weren't done electronically.
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