I agree entirely with her assessment.* You can’t buy alcohol off-license on Friday, you can on Saturday, but you can’t on Sunday.
* Unless you’re at a tavern with the primary intention of dining, in which case they can serve alcohol with your meal.
* But the tavern is only allowed to be open to sell ready-to-eat food, and whether or not that counts as dining is hard to tell.
* If you’re at a restaurant or on a ferry, alcohol is fine. But they can only sell ready-to-eat food, too.
* After your meal, you can visit a hairdresser to get your hair cut, but you can’t buy any hair product to take home with you. Except on Saturday, when you can.
* On your way home you can’t get a takeaway coffee, but you can buy a muffin from a coffee cart.
* Your afternoon plans in the garden are sweet as, no problem, so long as you visit a garden centre for your supplies, and so long as it’s Sunday. On Friday, gardening is right out.
* Even on Sunday you’ll be out of luck at your local hardware store, which can’t open at all, despite being 50% garden centre.
* Unless you’re in Queenstown, where none of the above restrictions apply.
* And this is all in aid of a religious celebration with limited observance even among its followers, who are rapidly falling in importance within New Zealand (from 69% of the population in 1991 to 43% in 2013), and yet who still get to inflict bizarre and groundless religious prohibitions on the majority.This is now a secular country. The 2013 Census recorded more than half of New Zealanders as being without religion. How much longer before we can hope for a referendum to do away with these crazy religious restrictions?
I know the Easter-apologists say it's easy to plan around these bits and that they like it that everybody's forced to have the same day off at the same time where the costs are low by their assumption.
One minor anecdote as counter to that. We went up to Auckland for the Easter weekend, figuring all the Auckland people would have headed north. We rented a holiday house in Eastern Bay that was advertised as having the linens supplied. On arrival Friday morning, we found no towels and no sheets. And it was illegal for anybody to sell us a freaking towel or sheet on the Friday. We made do for the night - luckily, we'd brought a couple of spare towels along for the beach - then bought some on the Saturday.
If you think your god says it should illegal for me to buy a towel on a Friday, or to be able to get sheets for the kids when a rental house screws things up, are you really sure that you're worshipping one of the good deities?
We did enjoy Kelly Tartans' aquarium on the Sunday though. Illegal to buy a towel but legal to look at fish.
Update: A stab at a compromise solution
