Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

PUBLIC HOLIDAYS AMENDMENT BILL 2011
Thursday, 2 June 2011 COUNCIL 1679
have two or three members of the family having
different public holiday entitlements.
The purpose of the legislation introduced by Mr Helper
in 2008 was to pick up the people who were falling
through the gaps and missing out on the 11th public
holiday. The councils that had not up to that point in
2008 gazetted a public holiday and were able, through
the passage of that legislation, to celebrate Melbourne
Cup Day or have a substitute day included Alpine,
Ararat, Bass Coast, Baw Baw, Benalla, Campaspe,
Colac Otway, Corangamite, East Gippsland, Glenelg,
Golden Plains, Greater Shepparton, Hepburn, Indigo,
Loddon, Mansfield, Mitchell, Moira, Mount Alexander,
Pyrenees, South Gippsland, Southern Grampians,
Strathbogie, Surf Coast, Towong, Wellington, West
Wimmera and Wodonga. Quite a number of those
councils are in my electorate, and I am sure many other
members of this house represent regional communities
on that list that will have benefited from that change.
I will take a moment to mention that in that same year,
2008, arrangements were made to provide a substitute
public holiday for Anzac Day in circumstances where
Anzac Day falls on a weekend or, like this year, when it
falls on Easter Monday.
I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge
and credit Esmond Curnow, a former colleague of
mine, for his involvement in — in a quiet,
behind-the-scenes sort of way — and contribution to
that change from which many Victorians benefited for
the first time this year, with Anzac Day falling as it did
in the middle of the Easter weekend. We commemorate
that day of great national significance on 25 April, but
the public holiday calculation, as part of people’s wages
and entitlements package, is the same for people year in
and year out, no matter what day Anzac Day falls on. I
would like to pay tribute to Esmond Curnow for his
role in that and for a life of service to the labour
movement. As always, I wish him well.
I was interested in the way in which the legislation at
the time was affecting my electorate, so I availed
myself of the wonderful services of the parliamentary
internship program, which many members would also
have done. I had a parliamentary intern, a young man
by the name of Terrence Wu, undertake some research
work for me. He travelled the length and breadth of my
electorate to investigate and document the impact of the
Public Holidays Amendment Act 2008 on the many
municipalities in Western Victoria Region that were
impacted on by this legislation. Such was Mr Wu’s
diligence in applying himself to this task that he even
went over the boundary line of the vast area that is
Western Victoria Region to have a chat to the people of
Yarriambiack as well. Twenty-two municipalities in
regional Victoria were not quite enough for him. The
residents of Yarriambiack had a lot to say about this
issue at the time, and Mr Wu had a good chat to them
about their situation. I will come back to that.
In his report Mr Wu found that the majority of
non-metropolitan municipalities were reasonably
indifferent to the legislation, but there were a handful of
municipalities for which this legislation created some
difficulty and, in some places, community angst. That
is, I think, where the government’s policy and approach
and indeed this legislation had its genesis.
Mr Koch talks about Golden Plains, which is in our
shared electorate. Golden Plains is probably the best
example I can think of. Golden Plains Shire Council is
a municipality that is located between Ballarat and
Geelong. Residents there, as Mr Koch would well
know, were concerned about how they would choose
one day. If members are unfamiliar with the Golden
Plains shire boundaries, they just need to grab a map
and have a look — —
Mr Ramsay — Are you familiar with the Golden
Plains shire boundary?
Ms PULFORD — Mr Ramsay is no doubt also
aware of this. There are a number of communities
which are much closer to the regional city of Geelong
and which access a lot of the services there, while at the
other end of the shire there are a number of
communities which access a lot of their services in
Ballarat. The Golden Plains shire does not have a
secondary school. A great many of the services
accessed by people who live in that shire are in
Geelong or Ballarat. This means that when
communities in the Golden Plains shire are forced to
make a decision about whether to pick Geelong or
Ballarat there is a massive conflict.
At one end of the shire the decision seems terribly
obvious: of course you would choose the Geelong Cup
Day holiday. At the other end of the electorate it would
be a terribly logical and obvious thing to celebrate the
Ballarat Cup Day holiday. The Golden Plains shire, as
my colleagues from Western Victoria Region well
know, is a particularly good example of the difficulties
of having a municipality pick one day.
In Yarriambiack the issue was even further
compounded because the shire has five days of
significance, and people were even more conflicted.
Mr Wu’s report — —
Honourable members interjecting.