Can You Think Of Any New Public Holidays Worth Celebrating?

Western Australian radio fellow Tom Percy has just written a piece for The Sunday Times (and when I say “just”, I obviously mean “he wrote it on Sunday”) about long weekends, declaring a national rethink may be in order in regards to our public holidays.

Now that the Queen’s Birthday weekend (aka the Grand Final weekend) is well behind us and we are long-weekend-free until Christmas, it might be time to contemplate whether we need to reassess our whole concept of the long weekend, or public holidays generally.

Eeegads! Is Tom suggesting we scrap those deliciously lazy long weekends in favour of work? Sweet merciful heavens above, he is not…

Labor Day and Foundation Day once had meaningful origins. The Queen’s Birthday hasn’t meant anything to anyone since feudal times. Are they any longer relevant? There are a lot of other days when we could really celebrate something worth celebrating, something we would do anyway, with or without an official day off.

Tom goes on to suggest St Patrick’s Day as a fine choice for a public holiday, along with Melbourne Cup Day (Victoria is a few steps ahead on that one…), but I think there’s probably a couple more decent public holidays we could come up with.

ELECTION LONG WEEKEND! Voting on a Saturday gives one plenty of time to enjoy a political knees up, but after last year’s result in the Federal Election, Sunday wasn’t nearly enough to help me recuperate from a night of hard celebratory drinking. Let’s tack on a Monday, which will allow both the victors and the losers to fully celebrate/commiserate using alcohol. Naturally, idiot folk who don’t care either way wouldn’t exactly object to gaining a day’s holiday for simply being inconvenienced by compulsory voting.

That’s all I can think of right now because my three coffees are yet to kick start my noggin, but I’m sure you creative types could muster up a few more public holiday ideas. Jump to it!

MORE: The importance of public holidays