The NSW government’s decision to extend retail trading hours restrictions past 1 pm until midnight on Anzac Day from 2025, but only for some retailers and not others, is as confused as it will be ineffective. NSW Premier Chris Minns has defined the objective of the policy ‘to make sure our veterans are recognised and free to take part in services throughout the day’.

However, a further stipulation that ‘the restrictions do not apply to small businesses and businesses not considered retailers or with exemptions such as markets, cafes, chemists, news agencies, and takeaway restaurants’ completely undermines the policy’s rationale. If the goal is to create a unified sense of respect for, and attendance at, Anzac Day, selective discrimination of Australian businesses that employ hundreds of thousands of Australian workers is not the place to start.

Closing major retail outlets does not cultivate respect for Anzac Day. Instead, it disrupts the daily routines of citizens adding to their time and monetary costs and undermining their sense of freedom. And ‘just one more regulation’ will yet again add to the enormous productivity sapping weight of business compliance costs in Australia.

The NSW government is using a stick entirely unrelated to the issue it wants to address – being the cultural significance of Anzac Day to Australians – rather than a carrot to encourage a positive engagement with the day’s significance.

From 1916 until the introduction of the Shops and Industries Act in 1962, all shops were closed for the whole of Anzac Day. Partial deregulation in 2008 allowed shops to open from 1 pm, which boosted consumer choice and economic activity while allaying the fears of those worried about the previous night’s revellers interrupting the Dawn Service. Similar rules apply across the Federation, although the ACT seems to manage without these restrictions, proving that economic freedom can coexist with cultural observance. For generations, hundreds of thousands of people across NSW have attended Anzac Day ceremonies while supermarkets continued to trade.

In any case, it is foolish to equate citizens’ commitment to the ‘Australian way of life’ with Anzac Day attendance figures. Participation in Anzac Day events has always been cyclical, rising after the two world wars and Korea, falling in the 1970s, rising again towards the 100th Anniversary of the Gallipoli landings in 2015, and declining significantly since (even before the Covid cancellations).

Not only are these restrictions using the wrong tool to attack a non-existent problem, they are also really bad public policy based on confused economics.

To start with, it is well known that the restrictions will lead to increased costs for consumers who are forced to shop at pricier retailers with significantly less product variety. Recent evidence suggests that many consumers will simply shift to online shopping and home delivery, or endure the longer queues at supermarkets before or after Anzac Day instead of paying higher prices with less product variety at the less preferred shops that are allowed to remain open.

The National Competition Council, in its assessment of restrictions on retail trading hours all the way back in 2002, concluded that:

Such regulations are out of step with social and demographic characteristics of modern economies where many people reside in two income households and desire flexibility in where and when they make their purchases of goods and services.

And in 2011, the Productivity Commission found: ‘In Australia, deregulation of trading hours does not appear to have had a deleterious effect on the viability of small retail businesses.’ The Commission noted the tendency for small retailers to co-locate with large retailers to garner increased foot traffic. Customers who have decided to visit a supermarket can optimise their travel and time-use costs by also undertaking other activities located adjacent to a supermarket, including buying other goods and services.

A confident open society should empower individuals to choose how they honour their history without sacrificing their economic rights. This stupid policy will have the opposite effect that the NSW government intends. Restricting trading hours on any day of the year worsens the cost of living by reducing the real incomes of the very citizens the NSW government seeks to engage in Anzac Day ceremonies. Self-serving virtue signalling by government ministers that hobbles efficient businesses that millions of Australians rely on, prevents workers earning good money on a public holiday and, more broadly, undermines the efficient operation of the economy, not to mention personal freedom and living standards, is not the path to good public policy. You don’t make people more respectful by taking their rights away from them.

Joe Branigan is an economist