The Australian system of government is an odd one at times. Our country is effectively under English rule, and our ‘at home’ leader is the ‘Prime Minister’, so named for his role as the Queens’ ‘prime’ representative in Australia.

One would assume that this means that the Queen has some say in the appointee to this role, yet, not only is this not so, the only recent interaction I can recall between an Australian Prime Minister and the Queen resulted in a (British) newspaper report entitled “Aussie PM Gropes Queen”.

To complicate matters, every few years the Australian Republican Party rears its bloodied head to attempt once more to convince the Australian masses to seek emancipation from Britain and become a republic.

Despite generally gaining early support, the Republican Party suffer sharp dips in popularity every time the Prime Minister reminds the Australian public that if Australia becomes a republic, they won’t get a day off work for the Queens’ birthday holiday weekend.

The only unwavering support for the Australian Republican Party comes, unsurprisingly, from the state of South Australia, whose (rumoured to be pro-republic) leader refuses to acknowledge the Queens birthday holiday and makes his state go to work, so they don’t care if the old luv in the tiara gets to rule us or not.

Under the Australian system of ‘State’ governments, each state leader, (as an elected representative of the Prime Minister), may govern each individual state of Australia basically as they see fit.

Whole chunks of Australia are out-of-synch in many vital ways which creates countless difficulties in communication and business. For example, the ‘island’ state of Tasmania, although detached from the Australian mainland, is a territory of Australia and is ruled by a ‘state’ government.

In Tasmania, there is a New Years’ Day holiday on January 1. The remainder of Australia will have a holiday on January 3. How Tasmanian residents are meant to do business on either day is a mystery to me, but the notoriously ‘traditional’ (read: backwards) Tasmanian state government is allowed to stick to its old ways without interference.

Which also means Tasmanian gets a holiday called ‘Eight Hours Day”, which nobody outside of Tasmania seems to understand the purpose of, not to mention the sudden (and unchallenged by the Prime Minister)Tasmanian invention of the previously-unheard-of ‘Easter Tuesday’.

In another odd example of personal preference being allowed to dictate a portion of the country, the state of Queensland was for some years under the rule of a strange little man who resented progress to the point that he disadvantaged the commercial hub of his entire state by refusing to participate in the ‘daylight savings’ scheme.

The ‘daylight savings’ scheme, in which Australians ‘wind their clocks back’ on a certain day each year to allow for more daylight time each afternoon, was loved by most Australians as soon as it was introduced. Not Queensland, though. They hated it.

Every other-state business transaction that Queensland residents were required to make now had a daily cut-off time of an hour earlier. The generally productive business hours of 4-5pm were now closed to them, and they could forget early teleconference-meetings, too. What was the point, when most of the country was still asleep ?.

This trend continues, with individual states following the lead and ‘altering time’ to their preference with no community consultation. In Australia today, there can be anything up to a 3-hour time difference between business associates living within a few hundred kilometers of each other, which is not only inefficient, but also extremely frustrating.

Under state rule, in the coming year of 2005, we have the state of Canberra grating itself ‘Canberra Day’ on March 14, effectively giving the bulk of the countries’ public servants, (and thereby the economy), the day off.

Not to be outdone, the Northern Territory somehow managed to sneak in a ‘Picnic Day’ on the first of August, and ‘May Day’ on May 2. Victoria has ‘Melbourne Cup Day’ on the first Tuesday in November every year, which is, of all things, a horse race.

Not only does the state get the day off for ‘The Melbourne Cup’, they spend it legally gambling an amount of around $4 million Australian dollars and getting drunk ‘at the track’. But here’s the catch: you only get ‘cup’ day off if you live in the area defined as ‘Metropolitan Melbourne’.

Bad luck if you happen to live outside the exclusive area of snobbery and celebration, you can just go to work and keep the rest of us afloat, you peasant, you !.

South Australia quickly rebelled at this cruel act by inventing ‘Adelaide Cup Day’. (No prizes for guessing what that’s about, but at least you don’t have to be geographically advantaged to enjoy it).

After the ‘Melbourne Cup’ ‘posh-only-day-off’ palaver, the state government must have figured that the ‘ordinary’ Victorians deserve some time off too, so they have turned into God and moved the Christmas Day holiday to December 27.

That might even have been a bonus for them if every other state in the country didn’t then declare December 27 another holiday named ‘Boxing Day’ for the rest of the country.

Well, except for South Australia, that is. In South Australia, The ‘rumoured republican’ leader calls December 27 ‘Proclamation Day’, whilst deliberately supplying no clue to the wider population as to what was, or is intended to be, ‘proclaimed’.

This type ‘naming’ or ‘personalising’ holidays is intended to pique the interest of fellow Australians in the significant agendas their sister states, in the manner of making folks say “Oooooh, Proclamation Day ... how very fascinating ... whatever can the history behind that be ?”.

This never works. We Australians just get all confused when nobody answers the phone there, and then we get all cranky because ‘they’ ‘have the day off’ and ‘we’ don’t. The Public holiday is revered in Australia - I know people who have moved states in order to enjoy more of them.

So, if anybody in the Australian government is still wondering why we remain a nation with a reputation for ‘taking it easy’, they may be stunned to realise that there may on occasion be an actual reason why.

But I don’t have time to let them know. See, it’s ‘Daylight Saving Time’, and by the time they get to work in Canberra ...