Chris Allan with his wife Emma Allan and children Jake 7, Monique 9, Lacey 3, and Zac 5. Credit:Steven Siewert Emma Allan remembers a childhood of happily predictable weekends, of Sunday roasts and Yorkshire pudding dished up by a mother who did not work. Today her mother, Wendy, is 68 and has a job, just as the generations that follow her will be expected to work until they are 70. Wendy does hospital clerical work, but not on Wednesday and Thursday nights, when she sleeps over at North Narrabeen to care for Emma's four children, aged 9 to 3. Emma works these two overnights as a rehabilitation nurse. Until recently, she was an emergency nurse, choosing to work Sundays to pocket the penalties, but that clashed with her husband, Chris, a police constable. He works most weekends, in shifts of 12½ hours. It is a constant juggle. Chris volunteered to help coach his son's soccer team but can rarely make it. ''It's a bit debilitating,'' Emma says, ''when he works all day Saturday and Sunday. It snuffs out my social life, I can tell you that.'' Barbara Pocock, director of the Centre for Work and Life at the University of South Australia, says: ''How many people would make the choice to work these unsociable hours if not paid at the premium rate?''

Credit:Sue Carabott Zorzi is adamant: ''I wouldn't be interested, not at all. I've made so many sacrifices for this financial benefit.'' A pharmacist, Carnell opened her first business in the 1970s, when she was 26, and it would shut at lunch time each Saturday. Today Australians expect to be able to shop and dine and buy their pharmaceuticals seven days a week. To meet that demand, about a third of people work on weekends. The weekend labour force has about doubled from the 16 per cent in 1995. And, in multicultural Australia, Carnell points out: ''Sunday isn't the sabbath for an awful lot of people, even for people who declare religious belief.'' Prohibitive penalty rates, Carnell contends, prevent businesses employing the students, for example, who would prefer to work on weekends. ''Sunday penalties, as they stand, do not reflect the society we live in,'' Carnell says.

The debate raises questions about the society we want and about how much we still value the notion, perhaps nostalgic, of the Great Australian Weekend. This is the era of the smartphone, the pocket pal that alerts parents to work emails even as they cheer from the sidelines at their children's weekend sport. It is the era of intensive parenting, of Saturday traffic jams created by adults jostling for a work-life balance, of Sundays seeking pole position in shopping centre carparks. ''We must not capitulate to the 24/7 mentality,'' says the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Glenn Davies. ''We need a day of rest.'' Davies was living in London in 1986 when then prime minister Margaret Thatcher attempted to usher in Sunday retailing. She failed, gathering not enough support from even her own Conservatives. It would be another 10 years before limited Sunday retailing started there, well behind NSW and Victoria, where the sabbath-day traders got their footholds in 1988 and 1991 respectively. ''That was the beginning of the demise,'' Davies says.

Or was it one small step in defeating a great Australian lethargy, a tendency towards leisure rather than productivity? In The Land of the Long Weekend (1978), author Ronald Conway attempted to prod Australians to get off their collective lazy bum (although the average male worker's leisure time that year was well below the world average). Conway echoed The Lucky Country (1964) and its blistering opening salvo from Donald Horne: ''Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.'' In 1988, Sir Roderick Carnegie, then chairman of the Business Council of Australia, called for the abolition of the weekend, arguing Australia could not compete globally while letting its capital equipment lie idle beyond the one shift, five days a week. The bludger national stereotype has faded. While average hours are now slightly below the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development average, they are skewed by the large proportion of women in part-time work, much of it on weekends. Full-time Australian workers put in among the longest hours of the developed nations. Fourteen per cent of Australians - and more than one in five men - work more than 50 hours a week. Half of business owners, 44 per cent of independent contractors and 32 per cent of employees now usually spend their weekends working, the Australian Bureau of Statistics says.

And 40 per cent of workers say they take work home; about half of that time goes unpaid, according to research by the centre for work and life at the University of South Australia. The centre's director, Barbara Pocock, says: ''We might have led the world in the middle of the 1800s in reducing working hours, but we are now a more harried nation than many others.'' The sacrifices are quantified by Lyn Craig, from the social policy research centre at the University of NSW. ''The research shows that weekend workers don't make up that time during the week,'' she says. Critically, the weekend worker forfeits ''shared leisure'' time.

''If your day off is Tuesday, there are no friends around,'' Craig says. ''If you are also a shift worker, you might be available to see your kids during the day, but they're at school. The family misses out. You endure isolation. You miss out on the social glue.'' Emma Allan and Zorzi agree: a Saturday or Sunday hour is not equivalent to a weekday hour. Canadian economists John Helliwell and Shun Wang analysed a survey of 500,000 Americans, the Gallup-Healthways poll, and found people reported more positive emotions and fewer negative emotions on weekends. Public holidays had the same effect. It was the interactions with friends and family that made the difference. In a connected world, it is not always the manager's fault that work bleeds into personal time, including weekends. A survey for the centre for work and life found many workers checked their phones for work emails, not because the boss demanded it but because they wanted to manage their own workload. ''They don't want to turn up to work on Monday with any surprises in their inbox,'' Pocock says, ''but I think there is a real picture of addiction there.''

But she stresses 70 per cent of the workforce still works Monday to Friday and thousands have demonstrated over the centre's nine years that they still value the weekend as ''a prized household and community time''. ''I think the death of the weekend has been greatly exaggerated,'' Pocock says. By whom? ''By those who want to remove a pay premium for working those unsociable hours.'' Carnell is a former ACT chief minister. In the 1990s, one of her first acts in politics was a campaign to prevent the major shopping centres extending their hours on Sundays - because she wanted to protect smaller businesses. ''I thought the community would support that campaign,'' she says. She was wrong. ''The community just wanted to be able to shop when they wanted to shop.'' Carnell remembers her childhood Sundays: first to church, then the roast with her grandparents. Dining out was a rarity but she remembers her 12th birthday at a ''smart restaurant'' in Brisbane.

''We can all look back at our childhoods and say 'I wish it was still like that','' she says. ''But Australia is a significantly different country now and, I think, a much better country.'' It is certainly better, Carnell says, for its rich choice of multicultural food. Families and friends now spend much of their shared leisure time, she adds, in restaurants and cafes, but too often the proprietors do the Sunday shifts themselves or ring in relatives because they cannot pay the penalty rates. Real jobs go begging, Carnell insists. ''I think we're probably heading towards - I won't say a 24/7 life - a seven-day-a-week approach to life,'' she says. ''I don't think we're there yet.'' But the train has left the station. Cutting penalties would be a slow ''transition'', though a target might be reducing Sundays to the Saturday rate. For retail workers, that would be a cut from double time to a 25 per cent loading on the Monday to Friday rate. And that would be crippling for some of the lowest paid people in the country, says Gerard Dwyer, national president of Australia's biggest union, the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association.

Consumers drive two-thirds of gross domestic product, he says, so the buying power of the lowest paid matters to the whole economy. Business has been emboldened by a Fair Work Commission ruling which - while rejecting a push to cut Sunday penalties for restaurant workers from 50 per cent to 25 per cent - removed an additional 25 per cent casual loading for inexperienced staff. Dwyer says Australia, unlike other countries, already imposes junior rates on retail workers, so while 18-year-olds are paid at only 70 per cent of the adult wage, they get no such discount at the supermarket or cinema - and they still must vote. In any case, Dwyer says: ''We don't live in a 24/7 economy. We live in a community.'' Davies agrees. He concedes that the notion of ''keeping the seventh day holy'' has lost currency in a secularised world. But, regardless of faith, he says, humans require a genuine ''sabbatical'' day.

In answer to Carnell, he says: ''I'm a great believer in the emergency brake when the train is leaving the station.''