Page 5069 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 17 November 2009
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should be broadened to be available to the population as a whole in the form of Family and Community Day. I note in passing the genesis of the notion of Family and Community Day. It came from submissions, I think, to the Prime Minister a couple of years ago from a Melbourne based think-tank with Labor leanings. I suspect that they did not think about all of these things.
The Liberal opposition has some concern about the number of public holidays that are in effect in the ACT. We believe that our holiday calendar should be more comparable with those in other jurisdictions. We see the government’s performance in this matter as falling short of what is required for a proper and considered policy consideration. We have seen yet another backflip. While the results are welcome in terms of the timing of Family and Community Day, it fails to look at the wider ramifications in the context of the territory’s productivity levels and the economy generally.
That said, Mr Speaker, we will support the bill, but we say to the government that there are lessons to be learned from this case, even from a seemingly simple piece of legislation and associated policy. We hope that the Stanhope Labor government has learned those lessons.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (10.53): The Greens will be supporting the Holidays (Family and Community Day) Amendment Bill. Back in 2006 the Greens supported the creation of a public holiday to replace the abolished union picnic day. We were pleased at the time to see the ACT institute a public holiday that sought to celebrate our families and communities and give them time together. The initial decision to have our Family and Community Day on the same day as Melbourne Cup Day was debatable and we can now say that the consequences went beyond those which were foreseen. As has been noted, these consequences were largely unforeseen.
The Canberra Business Council has quite rightly pointed out that catering firms and the hospitality industry in general lost revenue as workplaces no longer had workplace functions for Melbourne Cup Day. There has also been the problem of people taking a four-day weekend, with no-one at work on Monday and Tuesday. This has had further impacts on businesses in Canberra. The other consequence is that Canberrans seem to be much more focused on the Melbourne Cup than on the celebration of families and communities, so it seems appropriate that we now move the date of the public holiday to a day that gives this issue prime importance.
It is worth noting that when the government consulted on the proposed new date for Family and Community Day 47 per cent chose to replace Family and Community Day with a permanent new public holiday, possibly on a different date, with a strong ACT connotation. Of those 1,100 responses, nearly 21 per cent indicated that they would prefer a day focused on Floriade or the commencement of spring. The bill proposes that Family and Community Day will always fall in the week alongside Labour Day in term 3 of the school holidays, so half the time it will be at the same time as Floriade and half the time it will not. The benefit of having the public holiday in school holidays is that it provides working parents with one less day that they need to put their children into some form of day care or another activity. It is one more day that parents can spend with their children without having to take a day off work.
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