Easter in Melbourne this year was a throwback to the 1970s, with closed shops and empty streets. Interstate visitors looking for bargains in the city's fashionable precincts had to settle for a cup of coffee.
Effectively outlawing shopping on three of the year's prime trading days has a particularly adverse effect on Melbourne's attraction as a tourist destination. Enforcing shop closures considerably reduces the city's draw as a visitor destination, undermining a considerable amount of economic activity.
Easter shopping has returned to a past of highly restrained opening hours that prevailed in Victoria prior to the Kennett government.
Kennett's short six years of office until 1999 brought about reform on a wide front. Deregulating shopping hours in general, he also designated only two days of forced closure -- Christmas Day and Easter Friday. The unions spat chips, but they had little support.
The Labor government has chiselled away at the Kennett reforms. In 2003 Easter Sunday was added to the forbidden trading days and the Saturday was declared a public holiday, guaranteeing shop assistants a ferociously expensive wage loading.
Characteristically, the trading restrictions have been accompanied by a plethora of rules and exceptions. Easter is boom time for the grocery shops with fewer than the regulatory threshold of 100 employees -- and the IGAs and 7-Elevens have a field day.
But this is at the expense of the consumer, who is denied choice and often forced to pay a premium price.
Preventing the major retailers from trading means that the shopping malls cannot justify opening.
Compressing shopping hours means an inefficient use of space, and an inferior shopping experience as people queue to be served and for parking.
The way the government sees it, shops are there for the employees, not for the customer. And employees, at least according to the union, don't want to work when everyone else is holidaying.
But preventing consumer needs from being met comes at a price. Cafes, footy clubs, nightclubs and amusement parks are most in demand precisely when most people are not working.
Labour matters are at the cutting edge of the backsliding from reforms introduced in the Kennett era in Victoria and by the Howard government nationally.
The Rudd Government has made it more difficult for firms to sack workers, even those who are casuals. It is giving extra privileges for unions to enter workplaces and claim representation of workers; it is preparing us for discriminatory pay increases for women, overturning the existing requirement of equal pay for equal work.
Labor in Canberra and in Spring St often claims to be deregulationary. But both are introducing measures that would convert private firms to the sort of low-productivity, high-cost outfits that are government departments.
While such measures confer advantages to some workers in the short term, they eventually backfire on efficiency, thereby blunting the ability of firms to respond to consumer needs and opportunities.
We are all worse off as a result. But for the politicians, the decay is a long time coming so they catch the applause of those gaining short-term benefits without paying the eventual price. Nice work if you can get it.
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