Daylight savings reminder

[doug3030]

Unfortunately, Australia is a huge place, and adopting time zones by states, while it probably sounded like a sound idea to Federation era Politicians back when Australian was very sparsely populated, doesn't really make sense one hundred and fourteen years later.

I like you way of thinking and research you did Roy. However it needs to be taken a step further. not only are the timezones not properly servicing the needs of he population, neither are the state boundaries.

Imagine:

North Queensland - Capital: Townsville. Cape York to Gladstone. No Daylight Saving.

South Queensland - Capital: Brisbane Gladstone to Coffs Harbour Daylight Saving.

New South Wales - Capital: Sydney (I would like to say Merimbula but it might undermine my case, but a nicer place than Sydney) Coffs Harbour to the existing Vic/NSW border. Daylight saving.

I was considering maybe including some of the southern parts of NSW in Victoria to make Victoria a bit bigger but I seen no sense in punishing them any more than they already are for living in NSW.

That would pretty much leave the majority of the population closer to their own capital city than what we have currently with Northern NSW residents living much closer to Brisbane than their own capital.

It would be common sense but it will never happen because the counter would have to be reset on State of Origin and there would be three teams to contest it each year.

Food for thought.

Doug

[rrich]

What are you going to do when the livestock are all wearing wrist watches?

[Mobyturns]

DST is a dated concept that serves no tangible economic or environmental purpose. Like many I suspect it is now actually counted productive wrt to energy savings as a result of our changing lifestyles which ironically are due to DST.

No matter how “man” describes or defines time & "time zones" for economic purposes there will always be winners & losers. Whether it is the townies or the bush dwellers who lose out is the real debate. Economic markets are dictated by the larger overseas / international markets.

However the Earth’s natural rhythm continues unchanged and those whose lives are determined by the Earth’s rhythms will stay on that cycle. As a surveyor working in central & western QLD my day was determined by sunrise & sunset, not by the clock!

[Boringgeoff]

Daylight saving was trialled in WA a few years ago and being a concrete deliverer where the grano's started at daylight I thought that it would be a good thing. Because we started with the sunrise but finished by the clock my theory was we would work an hour less each day. I soon changed my tune, where previously I had the road pretty much to myself at 4.30 am suddenly I was sharing it with people going to work at 5.30 am. And because of the extended daylight at the other end of the day we were still working well after 5.30 pm.
We had a Pommy manager who bemoaned the fact that when he rang the Sydney office he got no answer after 2.00 pm because they had all knocked off, we pointed out that if he came to work at 5.00 am instead of 8.00 he could have a good old chat to the "t'other siders". He took that advice and from there on was always an early starter, even after the DS trial had finished.
Cheers,
Geoff.

[BobL]

Originally Posted by elanjacobs
WA and NT don't have daylight saving either



.

They're too far away for Easteners to be worried about

Pete.

WA is in the world time zone with more people than any other zone.

West coast WA has ~20 minutes DST all year round.

[Bushmiller]

RoyG

That was an amazing history of DST/BST. I tend to agree that in Australia daylight saving might have gone past it's use by date.

DST is in reality a function of latitude not longitude. The essence was to utilise longer days and this becomes more valid to those living in the higher latitudes. Anybody living in between the two tropics can't see any point and at the other end of the spectrum in the high latitudes it doesn't make much difference either (being all dark or all light).

We don't really have that in Australia (Northern hemisphere only). Whether DST has outlived it's usefulness or not the perennial question is where to draw the line and the possible inconvenience of people living one hundred metres apart but being an hour apart too.

I get caught out every year with an Ebay item ending an hour before I think it should. It got me again last Saturday. However if this is the worst that happens to me, I can live with that. Do we get all bitter and twisted because other countries are on different times? Remember that many of them also have some sort of daylight saving.

Regards
Paul

[Bob38S]

It does need to be sorted, one way or the other.

Trying to do business between Qld and the southern states is a PITA. Many people seem to think that you only "lose" 1 hour out of the business day but this is not the case, it is in fact 2 hours. Think about it.

[Tweedle]

it's actually more like 4.

1 at the beginning of the day, 1 at the end,
then you call them and they're on lunch,
and then they call you back later, and you're on lunch...........................