Fireworks will stay on shop shelves this November after the Government turned down a cross-party recommendation from Parliament’s Petitions Committee to ban the public sale and private use of them.
The committee reported back in April after considering three petitions lodged by Animates NZ Holdings, Suzanne Cook and Raewyn Harrison, which together gathered more than 93,000 signatures on their accompanying online forms. It was the first time a select committee had recommended the Government act on fireworks, and the committee said the evidence it heard made it “difficult to do anything other than recommend a ban”.
The Government’s formal response, made public on Wednesday, declines to do that. It says fireworks will continue to be managed within “the current regulatory settings”.
The response accepts that fireworks cause harm to people, animals and property, and that those harms often occur in private and unpredictable settings that are difficult to prevent through regulation alone. It then sets out why the Government is not acting anyway. “While a ban would more directly address these risks, it would also remove access to a long-standing and widely used lawful activity,” it says.
“The Government considers that retaining the status quo remains a proportionate response, balancing the need to manage harm with the importance of maintaining individual choice.”
The response argues the existing rules already do useful work, with “controls at the point of sale and mechanisms to address misuse, while allowing the Government to monitor whether further change is warranted”, as reported by RNZ.
Those existing rules are narrower than most people assume. Fireworks can only be sold to the public over four days, from 2 November to 5 November, but there is no restriction at all on when they can be set off once bought. The sale window was cut from ten days to four in 2007, the same year the minimum purchase age went from 14 to 18. The regulations have not had a formal review since 2006.
The committee heard from Fire and Emergency New Zealand, the SPCA, the New Zealand Veterinary Association and Veterinarians for Animal Welfare Aotearoa, all of which supported a ban. It also heard from fireworks importers, who argued Guy Fawkes was a long-held Kiwi tradition and that organised public displays could not be relied on as a substitute. The committee noted that 14 petitions across seven parliaments have now asked for the rules to change.
In its report the committee said the balance of public opinion had moved. “Our assessment is that public sentiment is shifting. We consider that present generations have more information about, and therefore take more seriously, the effects of fireworks on animal welfare than previous generations may have done.”
The SPCA, which has campaigned on this for years, took the decision badly. Chief scientific officer Dr Arnja Dale said the organisation was heartbroken and outraged.
“This is a profoundly disappointing decision that leaves animals to continue suffering for no good reason. The evidence of harm is clear, the public wants change, and Parliament itself clearly recommended action,” she said.
Dale said the charity was not asking people to give up fireworks altogether. “Professionally organised and notified public displays allow people to enjoy fireworks without the widespread and unpredictable harm caused by private use.” The SPCA says it hears every year from owners whose animals panic and bolt, hurt themselves trying to escape, stop eating, or stay anxious well after the noise has stopped.
The injury numbers are smaller than the animal welfare numbers but they are steady. ACC accepts around 300 new fireworks-related claims a year, more than half of them in November. Burns are the most common injury and hands and wrists the most commonly injured part of the body. Children under ten make up roughly a quarter of the people hurt each year. Fire crews were called to 30 fireworks-related incidents on Guy Fawkes night last year, including a large blaze in Dunedin.
The political arithmetic is where this gets interesting, because the Government’s response does not reflect the view of one of its own coalition partners. New Zealand First leader Winston Peters put a member’s bill in the ballot in November 2025 to ban public fireworks sales, and later withdrew it. Asked about the decision, he said the party would return to it once the election was out of the way.
“I can tell you that’s going to be fixed up as soon as we get the chance, right after the election,” Peters said, telling 1News that “unfortunately, Guy Fawkes is before the election”.
He is right about the calendar, and by a very slim margin. Polling day is Saturday 7 November, a date Christopher Luxon locked in back in January. Fireworks go on sale on 2 November, Guy Fawkes falls on 5 November, and voters go to the ballot box two days after that. The four-day sale window sits entirely inside the last week of the campaign, which means whichever way the argument runs this year, it will be running while candidates are still knocking on doors. If you want to see where the parties sit on this and other issues before you vote, our voting tool lets you compare them.
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said a ban on private sales was “just a common sense position that the Green Party holds”. She said the case rested on both animals and the environment. “If we’re talking about animal welfare and actually also protecting our environment, then it makes sense to ban the private sale of these.” She added that this was “not to say that we’re the fun police” and that better planned public displays should still go ahead.
ACT leader David Seymour took the other side. “It comes up every November, and the truth is that I understand that the harm that fireworks can cause and the worry people have, but just for a few days a year at the start of summer, let’s just keep something of the Kiwi childhood, please.”
For now nothing changes. Retailers will stock fireworks from 2 November as usual, councils and fire crews will issue the usual warnings, and the Government has left itself the option of revisiting the rules if it decides the evidence has shifted. The comprehensive review the animal welfare groups wanted is not happening, and the twentieth anniversary of the last formal look at the regulations will pass without one.
What do you think, should fireworks stay on public sale or is it time for organised displays only? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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