Public Holidays

The distribution and designation of public holidays in Australia is terrible, and I know exactly how to fix it.

First, of course, we have to do something about Australia Day. So lets move it to the 1st of January and commemorate the actual beginning of Australia as a nation.

Of course, this presents us with the problem of New Year's Day, which was previously on January 1st. You can't just move that one because it would make no sense to call it New Year's Day if it's not the first day of the new year, but it's an easy fix: call it New Year's Eve and put it on December 31st.

Next on the list is Labour Day. Currently every state and territory has it on a different day, Tasmania calls it Eight Hours Day, and Northern Territory doesn't even have it. So let's just make it a standard national holiday on the 1st of March. The queen's birthday is in a similar situation, so we'll standardise that one as June 1st.

ANZAC Day is good as it is, on the 25th of April.

All that's left for the national holidays now are the Christian ones, and they've clearly got to go. Between Christmas and Easter there's six holidays to distribute (including the Easter weekend), so let's put one on each solstice and equinox, March 20, June 21, Sept 23, and Dec 21. Yeah, I know solstices and equinoxes move around a bit, but that's annoying so I'm not going to acknowledge it.

Now we've got two left, one somewhat questionable as it was a Saturday and one that is definitely questionable as it was a Sunday, but holidays are great so I'm going to use both of them; one for Remembrance Day (November 11), and one that I'm just going to arbitrarily call "Spring Day" and put on the 1st of September.

All that's left now is the mess of state-specific holidays. I'm not going to mess with those too much except to say that each state and territory gets two of them, one to be used for entertainment/tourism and the other for some sort of historical thing. They mostly already fall into these categories anyway, but it would force Victoria to ditch either the grand final holiday or the Melbourne Cup one, and I'd like to see the Melbourne Cup holiday used for something better.

I don't think anyone would have a problem with this, right?