Melbourne Cup Day set as public holiday

THE City of Ballarat will celebrate its municipally gazetted public holiday on Melbourne Cup Day for the next four years after council voted for the date at its recent regular.

Driving the change was Commerce Ballarat who said the majority of their members supported the first Tuesday in November date.

“Commerce Ballarat’s stance has always been to align our public holiday with the majority of the state,” the organisation said in a statement to council.

“As we have expressed in the past the Friday public holiday is extremely detrimental to our business community.”

“A 2016 survey of our members showed overwhelming support for a Melbourne Cup public holiday with annual negative impacts of up to $700,000 to the local economy resulting from the Ballarat Show Day public holiday decision.

The significant economic loss was calculated from penalty rates and wages, time in lieu and lost revenue, and member businesses said they were concerned about productivity and future business opportunities if the Ballarat Show Day were to continue as the region’s public holiday.

With the exception of 2020, Show Day has been marked as the public holiday since 2013 and Cr Ben Taylor said the process to change it was “hotly contested”.

“The show society have done it tough in relation to where they’re at from COVID last year but they’ve actually made the decision to work with the community broader and to take away that animosity around that competition for what the day is,” he said.

Cr Peter Eddy said he hoped businesses would continue to support the Ballarat Show following the change.

“My hope now… is that the Ballarat business community extend the leadership and direction that it needs to and those 80 per cent of businesses referred to by Commerce Ballarat tonight that they do everything in their power to make the Show an enormous success,” he said.

“This is a two-way street. It’s an opportunity for cooperation and collaboration in our community, not for divisiveness and criticism and… hopefully … we see all the businesses of Ballarat get out, display something in their shop window, offer incentives to the show to be able to promote whatever that may be and really make an effort to make Ballarat Show the greatest thing it can be this year.”