Holidays in New Zealand

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in New Zealand

A New Year Set by a Star Cluster, Not a Date

On 24 June 2022, New Zealand observed its first Matariki public holiday, marking the country's first entirely new public holiday in more than forty years and, by most accounts, the first public holiday anywhere in the world set by the heliacal rising of a star cluster rather than a fixed calendar date. Matariki is the Māori name for the group of stars known elsewhere as the Pleiades, and its reappearance in the pre-dawn winter sky has for centuries signalled the start of the Māori new year, traditionally a time to remember those who have died, gather with family, and look ahead to the season's planting.

Because the holiday is tied to an actual astronomical event rather than a set day on the Gregorian calendar, New Zealand's parliament had to solve a genuinely unusual legislative problem when passing the Te Kāhui o Matariki Public Holiday Act in 2022: establishing a dedicated advisory body to calculate and publish the correct date years in advance, since the holiday always falls on a Friday in June or July but shifts by several weeks from year to year depending on the star cluster's actual position and the lunar month in which it appears. Some iwi mark the same season instead by the rising of Puanga, the star known in Western astronomy as Rigel, reflecting the same underlying pattern: a new year defined not by where the calendar happens to fall, but by what is actually visible in the sky.

The Country's Own Forty-Five Minutes

About 850 kilometres east of Christchurch, the roughly 700 residents of the Chatham Islands keep a clock the rest of New Zealand does not. Chatham Island Standard Time runs a full forty-five minutes ahead of the mainland's, an offset so unusual that it is one of only a small handful anywhere in the world not measured in whole or half hours, alongside Nepal's UTC+5:45 and an unofficial time zone used in a corner of Western Australia.

The gap traces back to the islands' isolated farming and fishing communities, who for decades simply kept their own local time rather than adjusting to whatever the mainland clock said, reasoning that the sun over Chatham did not rise or set on Wellington's schedule. Rather than force the islands into line, the government eventually gave up trying and formally recognised the local practice, and the Chatham Islands have observed their own standard time, currently UTC+12:45 with a shift to UTC+13:45 during daylight saving, ever since, a rare case of an entire jurisdiction's time zone being set by what its people were already doing rather than the other way around.

Eleven Days for a Signature

By September 1893, New Zealand's women's suffrage campaign had built a petition carrying nearly 32,000 signatures, close to a quarter of the country's entire adult European female population, physically pasted together into a roll long enough to be unfurled dramatically down the aisle of the House of Representatives. The bill it supported passed the upper house on 8 September by a margin of just two votes, 20 to 18, after Premier Richard Seddon's own attempt to sabotage it backfired: two councillors, offended by his manoeuvring against the measure, switched their votes in its favour out of principle.

What followed was eleven more days of uncertainty. Suffragists, wearing white camellias as a symbol of the campaign, waited on the colonial governor, Lord Glasgow, while opponents petitioned him separately to withhold his assent entirely. He signed the Electoral Act into law on 19 September 1893, making New Zealand the first self-governing country in the world where all adult women, including Māori women, won the right to vote in parliamentary elections, a full twenty-seven years before the United States and thirty-five years before Britain granted the same right in full. At the general election that followed on 28 November, 82 percent of the newly enrolled women cast a ballot, a turnout that quietly answered the campaign's critics before a single vote had even been counted.

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