Six months of topsy-turvy times for those along border
IT’S OCTOBER and that means one thing, daylight saving across the nation and New Zealand.
Well, except for Australia’s most eastern state Queensland and too-far away WA.
On Sunday at 2am, those states and territories will push their clocks forward one hour and won’t push them back for six months thus creating havoc for Queenslanders travelling, trading, communicating and commuting.
I feel sorry for the workers along the Qld/NSW border, from the coast to Goondiwindi, who will face six months of topsy-turvy start and finish times.
It’s just so blessed inconvenient for us to be aligned with the nation for half the year and unaligned for the other half.
We had a daylight saving trial a generation ago at a time when Paul Keating was Prime Minister and Bill Hayden was Governor-General. Long ago.
The trial lasted three years and a referendum was held with the simple question, “Are you in favour of daylight saving?”
The result was tight with 55% saying no and 45% saying yes – defeated.
Ten years ago, Premier Anna Bligh, who shortly after moved to NSW presumably for the benefits of daylight saving, introduced a “community consultation process” under which 74,000 citizens would be canvassed.
That’s a decent sample, all right. Sixty-four per cent said they wanted daylight saving as well as a referendum.
They got neither, and I can only add what a funny little community consultation process that was.
It’s estimated 90% of Queenslanders want to be aligned with the nation all year round and not just for six months.
The silent majority, Prime Minister Morrison’s “quiet Australians,” quake in fear at the thought of confronting an anti-daylight saving devotee – they can be quite nasty and even physical.
Read The Chronicle letters and muse at the reasoning.
Sure, you’ll hear about cows not milking, curtains fading, latitude/ longitude and children not sleeping, but there’s a whole range of new ones like “everyone down south hates it” and “I’ve got a cousin in Woop Woop and her kids cry at night” and “why don’t you all move back to where you came from?”
But what if most of the supporters came from here, what should they do?
The two biggest misconceptions are, (a) daylight saving makes the days longer, namely 25 hours, and (b) daylight saving makes it hotter.
Please be assured, there’ll still be 24 hours each day and temperatures will be unchanged.
Comforting for opponents is knowing that neither side of politics will ever introduce daylight saving, unless we get a Green parliament because “green” means less reliance on energy by cleverly using natural light instead.
Anyway, I reckon we should have a long overdue referendum and resolve the matter once and for all.
What do you think?