Opinion
What happens to the Queen’s Birthday holiday when we no longer have a queen?
Helen Pitt
JournalistWherever you are reading this, on the Queen’s Birthday long weekend, you are likely recovering from or readying for a long drive.
After the saccharine-soaked celebrations of the platinum jubilee for Queen Elizabeth II last weekend (thanks, Prince Louis, for some light relief), we now get to celebrate her 96th birthday this weekend with a weekday holiday. Yay!
Queen Elizabeth II stands as Prince Louis covers his ears on the balcony of Buckingham Palace after the Trooping the Colour ceremony at Horse Guards Parade, last weekend.Credit:AP
A holiday we usually spend in cars, planes and, less frequently now, trains, exiting lemming-like from our major metropolises. Not so yay!
Despite soaring fuel costs (hovering above $2 at most places these days), we sit in SUVs and such in the conga-line of traffic on the edges of our city as part of a great exodus.
Why? When there are double demerits for speeding, RBTs everywhere and slow roads packed with snow bunnies seeking the white stuff on the slopes to slide down. Or the holiday-homers making the most of their coastal COVID-19 property purchases, before interest rates and lower prices for overseas airfares entice them back to sorties on foreign soils and out of the regional NSW property market.
Or we line up in queues to get on planes to fly interstate all at the same time. The cars/taxis/Ubers snaking around the block on Friday at the domestic airports in both Sydney and Melbourne were a testimony to our collective stupidity. That’s before they even got to the lines for check-in or security. Not to mention the masked-up flight itself. Not at all yay!
Then, for the less-organised overseas travellers among us, there is now the line-up for passports to contend with. There have been lengthy delays due to a blowout in processing times, given the number of applications has doubled from pre-pandemic levels. People are paying up to $150 an hour outsourcing to Airtaskers to avoid the chore of waiting for the official documents they need to leave the country. It’s enough to make you turn right around and curl up in the foetal position, and vow never to leave Australian soil ever again.
People, what’s our problem? It’s not like we didn’t have two years to plan for all of this. To do the paperwork, while we waited in lockdown patiently at home, while the pandemic prevented overseas travel. Papers sent through the post, old school snail mail, trumping the day like Aesop’s fabled slow and steady tortoise beating out the fast and bragging hare still lining up at the passport office.
Sure the coronavirus pandemic upended our best-laid plans, and taught us to live in the moment more than before, but it seems the frontal cortex of our brain, the one responsible for planning has been impacted too.
I just don’t understand why the Queen’s Birthday and long weekends are always like this? Now that many of us work from home or remotely, surely this could lead to a more orderly retreat for leisure. A few days before or later perhaps? Staggered starts to our downtime, just like staggered starts to the latter years of high schooling to deal with the teenage circadian rhythm. Seems they remain a suggestion still.
Even retired people are in the rhythm of retreating to the regions on long weekends.
Mental health and behavioural experts tell us time and again that scheduling helps reduce stress through a cognitive process known as “proactive coping”.
Perhaps as we head towards the prospect of a Republic of Australia, with Anthony Albanese’s new ALP government appointing Matt Thistlethwaite as assistant minister for the republic, we need to rethink the Queen’s Birthday long weekend – and do a bit of “proactive coping”.
Although the Queen’s actual birthday is in April, we celebrate it in June. When Prince Charles becomes king, will we stick with this practice or move the celebrations closer to the November date of his birth?
If we do away with the monarchy what happens to that long weekend? Will it be celebrated on our first president’s birthday? Or held in late June, to celebrate my colleague and tireless Republican champion Peter FitzSimons’ birthday?
Do we decree it to be a three-day public holiday with a floating start to avoid the traffic bank up?
There’s a lot of fat to chew on as we celebrate the 70th year of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign. Perhaps it can be a conversation topic in your car, as you hurtle home tomorrow.
It’s great to have a plan as we look to an Australia without the queen. If this weekend teaches you anything, it should be that failing to plan, is planning to fail.
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