Nature of Public Holidays
Traditionally, workers, public or private, were entitled to take off a public holiday with regular pay. In recent years this tradition has changed somewhat. For example, businesses that are normally open on a public holiday may request employees to work on the day, and refusal can only be denied by the employer on reasonable business grounds.
The entitlement to penalty rates was eliminated entirely in many workplaces under WorkChoices; however since the implementation of the Fair Work Act 2009 and the modern awards in 2010, most public holiday penalty rates have increased dramatically. Currently, employees are generally paid at a penalty rate - usually 2.5 times (known as "double time and a half") the base rate of pay.
Besides designating days as public holidays, some of these days are also designated as restricted trading days.
Public holidays are determined by a combination of:
- Statutes, with specific gazetting of public holidays; and
- Industrial awards and agreements.
If a standard public holiday falls on a weekend, a substitute public holiday will sometimes be observed on the first non-weekend day (usually Monday) after the weekend, whether by virtue of the public holiday legislation or by ad hoc proclamation. If a worker is required to work on a public holiday or substituted public holiday, they will usually be entitled to be paid at a holiday penalty rate.
All states have their own public holidays in addition to national public holidays, and in some states public holidays are provided on a local basis, such as Melbourne Cup Day.
Alcohol licenses in many states prevent sale of alcohol on certain public holidays, such as Good Friday.
Read more about this topic: Public Holidays In Australia
Famous quotes containing the words nature of, nature and/or public:
“If the study of all these sciences, which we have enumerated, should ever bring us to their mutual association and relationship, and teach us the nature of the ties which bind them together, I believe that the diligent treatment of them will forward the objects which we have in view, and that the labor, which otherwise would be fruitless, will be well bestowed.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“It would be one of the greatest triumphs of humanity, one of the most tangible liberations from the constraints of nature to which mankind is subject, if we could succeed in raising the responsible act of procreating children to the level of a deliberate and intentional activity and in freeing it from its entanglement with the necessary satisfaction of a natural need.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“For such will be our ruin if you, in the immensity of your public abstractions, forget the private figure, or if we in the intensity of our private emotions forget the public world. Both houses will be ruined, the public and the private, the material and the spiritual, for they are inseparably connected.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)