“New Zealand’s existing public holidays are an incredibly important part of domestic tourism, which is all we have while borders remain closed to international visitors,” says Chris Roberts, chief executive of TIA. “Our tourism operators report that their takings can be 200% to 300% higher when we have a long weekend.”
Ardern’s administration says extra holidays are still up for discussion, but its populist coalition partner, New Zealand First, is among those opposed to them. Its leader Winston Peters says they will cost small businesses in particular, and risk thousands of workers’ jobs. “[For most businesses] it’s another day of no income when they need it as business owners to pay all their bills,” he wrote on Facebook in mid-May.
Do holidays help or harm?
The idea to add another holiday is not unique to the UK or New Zealand. Other countries have added public holidays including Japan, Malaysia and Italy. But the results have been mixed.
In 2011, Italy added a one-off holiday to mark the 150thanniversary of Italian unification. Analysing the economic data around the holiday three years later, Francesco Maria Esposito, then at the Catholic University of Milan, found a small but positive impact.
Not everyone has seen an upside, though. In 2015, consultants at PwC considering the impact of adding an extra bank holiday in the Australian state of Victoria advised that the costs outweighed the benefits, leaving a hole of A$150m ($104m, £82m) even after increased consumer spending. Similarly, in a 2017 report by the Central Bank of Malaysia, researchers estimated that the small nation’s gross output loss from an unanticipated holiday was MYR3.5bn ($820m, £650m) per day. “Sudden declarations of public holidays can be disruptive and costly to the economy, particularly given the reduced production activity and increased input cost,” they warned.
