Editorial: When a holiday is not a day off

Photo / Thinkstock

The American comedian Henny Youngman memorably quipped that he gave up trying to become an atheist because "they have no holidays".

He had a point - never mind that he famously worked 70 years in a row without ever taking what Americans call a vacation: the very word "holiday", a corruption of "holy day", reminds us that days of rest were originally indissolubly linked with religious observance.

In the 20th century, when political fervour tended to supplant the religious kind, national days, often connected with some sort of liberation, began to proliferate. Thus in Kazakhstan, for example, Christians and Muslims are respectively acknowledged with a day off for Christmas and the last day of the annual Haj pilgrimage season. But these celebrations are overshadowed in number by non-religious observances: the Kazakhs down tools for such occasions as the Great Patriotic War Against Fascism Victory Day and International Women's Day. In Japan there are fully 15 national hoilidays including Culture Day and a day marking Respect for the Aged (neither of which seems a likely pretext for celebration in this country any time soon).

Only three of the 11 public holidays mandated by law in New Zealand - Christmas Day, Good Friday and Easter Monday - have their roots directly in religious festivals but that is not to say that all of them are not venerated: with the addition of provincial anniversary holidays they add up to an extra 2.4 working weeks of leave.

Except when they don't. Two statutory holidays - Waitangi Day and Anzac Day - are available as days off in only five out of every seven years. Because there exists no legislative provision to mark them on the next available weekday when they fall on a weekend - a process known as "mondayising" - they are subject to the remorseless arithmetic of the Gregorian calendar.

Last year both Waitangi and Anzac Days fell on weekends. And by the cruel coincidence that Easter Day - the most movable of all feasts - falls on April 24 this year, Anzac Day is swallowed by Easter Monday, and workers are shortchanged by two days yet again.

Unsurprisingly this has led to renewed calls for the mondayisation of the two holidays, but the working group whose 2009 review led to amendments to the Holidays Act 2003 detected no groundswell of public pressure for the change and Prime Minister John Key has ruled it out.

It is understandable that the matter would not be high on the agenda of a Government trying to steer the country out of recession: four extra days off every seven years may not sound like much but that's a lot of productivity down the gurgler. But that does not mean the issue should be regarded as dead and buried.

New Zealanders are not poorly off in terms of statutory holidays: in the US, work-free public holidays are not mandated and are enjoyed only by some - not all - employees of the Federal Government; in the UK they have 10, although royal weddings and jubilees are good for a day off; the Australians get nine.

But neither are we awash, as the Indians and Argentinians are, for example, with days off work. The last time a public holiday was inaugurated - when February 6 was named New Zealand Day by the Kirk Government in 1974 - is more than a generation ago. More pertinent is the observation that a right enshrined in law is a right irrespective of the exigencies of the calendar.

The RSA opposes mondayising Anzac Day, arguing that it would miss the point of a day of remembrance. It's hard to disagree, although times are changing: in all states of Australia except Tasmania it is mondayised.

Waitangi Day presents no such ambiguity. As a gesture to the rights of workers and as a step in the right direction it should be mondayised sooner, rather than later. For our national day to be a day off every year rather than only five years out of seven, does not seem unduly self-indulgent.