SEEING THE LIGHT
It’s an issue that divides Queenslanders like few others, should we move the clocks forward an hour like the rest of the east coast or continue to go it alone?
Daylight saving. Introduce these two words into conversation and, just like that, you have a lively spar of opinion. It’s the great Queensland debate. Are you for daylight saving or are you not? Long a vexed issue, those for and against are mostly divided between the state’s more populated southeast corner and the state’s vast west and north.
An incredible array of pros and cons come into play – from annual time zone anarchy at the Coolangatta-Tweed Heads border and the reported billions of dollars in lost business revenue, to health and lifestyle factors.
Depending what research you are looking at, or who you are talking to, daylight saving gets people out playing with their kids, away from the TV and spending money at local businesses; or it isolates farmers who work until dark regardless of the time on the clock.
It is good for energy consumption because we turn our indoor lights on later but does this mean we use airconditioners more?
It has been attributed to an increase in heart attacks and sleep disturbances and causes anarchy when putting young children to bed. Conversely, it may also lower obesity rates, result in fewer car crashes and animal strikes and less crime.
It is also a simple matter of geography. Young children (and consequently their parents) are up with the birds that start chirping and squawking at a sunrise that hits Brisbane in December from 4.44am (with an uncivilised pre-dawn glow from 4.18am); while Mount Isa in the state’s north west corner doesn’t see sunrise at the same time of year until almost 6am.
Simply, daylight saving gives us a better quality of life or a worse one. It is to be welcomed; or avoided at all costs.
Whatever your view, this contentious and ongoing debate rears its head almost every summer when the rest of Australia’s east coast winds forward their clocks by one hour. Can the Sunshine State ever find its way to a resolution?
Daylight saving was first used in Australia in
1917 during World War I as an energy-saving measure, and again during World War II.
Tasmania introduced daylight saving in 1967, and in the Australian Capital Territory and all states (except Western and South Australia), it was trialled from October 1971 to February 1972.
All states – except Queensland, WA and the Northern Territory – then adopted it, with three time zones becoming five from the first Sunday in October to the first Sunday in April.
The Summer Time Act introduced daylight saving to Queensland again in 1990 for a threeyear trial, with a referendum on February 22, 1992 resulting in a 54.5 per cent “no” vote.
There have been several petitions to the Queensland parliament lobbying for daylight saving or for another referendum on the issue to be held. The most recent petitions were lodged in September 2021 by former political party, now Facebook advocacy group, Daylight Saving 4 South-East Queensland (DS4SEQ) requesting the introduction of DST to Queensland or at least in the southeast, on the basis that the state is “economically and socially disadvantaged by not having daylight saving’’.
Principal petitioner and DS4SEQ chair David Jones, of Wynnum, on Brisbane’s bayside, argued the 30-year-old referendum result was now irrelevant and not reflective of the state’s current demographics and community sentiment and was costing the state’s economy in excess of $4bn annually due to “business inefficiencies, and missed tourism and retail opportunities’’.
But less than three weeks later, in response, Robbie Katter, the Member for Traeger and Katter’s Australian Party leader, representing local government areas including Mount Isa, Cloncurry and Carpentaria, submitted his petition (Say no to daylight saving time in Queensland). He argued it would “erode liveability’’ in rural and regional communities and would have an “unacceptably negative and unfair impact’’ on the people of north, central and western Queensland. And just because 73 per cent of Queensland’s population lives in the southeast corner, he says, doesn’t make it fair for the “overwhelming geographic majority of Queenslanders” who would suffer artificially lengthened working days and an additional hour of oppressive heat and sunshine.
“DST is widely considered unsuitable for Northern Australia, and any decisions to introduce it in Queensland would further the cultural, economic and political divide that already exists between the southeast corner and the rest of the state,’’ he wrote.
To Angus Emmott, daylight saving will always
be known as “mongrel time’’ – an inconvenient, frustrating, unnecessary and isolating construct of the southern states.
Emmott, 60, who has lived his whole life on a 52,000ha property southwest of Longreach, in central west Queensland, well remembers Queensland’s three-year trial of daylight saving in the early 1990s and, speaking plainly, it’s an experience he never wants to repeat.
“I remember the trial well. I called it mongrel time,” he says.
“On the land, you work dawn to dusk or dark. With daylight saving, by the time it gets dark and you get in, have a shower, have dinner, there’s nothing left on TV except late-night movies, you’ve missed the news and it’s also too late to ring other people.
“Basically, over the summer months, you lose touch with a lot of the rest of the world. Except for the ABC radio, you end up being very cut off from everything. You end up being cut off from society.”
In December, after 60 years on his property, Emmott and his wife of 33 years Karen, 59, made a major life change and moved to a 4ha rainforest block at Lake Eacham in the Atherton Tablelands, in far north Queensland.
Their lifestyle may have significantly changed but Emmott’s opinion of daylight saving has not. Instead of changing time zones, he would prefer schools and businesses simply start an hour earlier in summer.
In October, as daylight saving began and in response to a call by Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner for another state referendum on the issue, AgForce general president Georgie Somerset said it had once more “raised its ugly head”. AgForce represents Queensland’s rural producers with 6500 members.
Somerset, a beef cattle farmer based at Durong, in the South Burnett, about 280km north west of Brisbane, says a long-running joke that Queenslanders rejected daylight saving because it confuses the cows and fades the curtains, only serves to “strengthen the rural stereotype (think flannel shirts and shotguns)”.
“While I can’t speak for everyone, I can say that daylight saving doesn’t benefit the working farm day – and that’s not because it fades the curtains or confuses the cows on
when they need to be milked,” she says in her October statement.
“As a beef producer, it’s hard to support a move that would create longer days for an already tireless workforce. Rural life begins at 4am, regardless of whether or not the sun is up. We don’t wind down at the end of the day and enjoy a beverage in the sunshine, we continue to toil.”
Townsville Mayor Jenny Hill grew up with daylight saving in Melbourne but now, as a 40year Townsville local, she says the issue only serves to highlight a divide between the southeast corner and the rest of the state.
“I was born and bred in Melbourne and I’m still a member of the Collingwood Football Club. Certain things from Melbourne I can’t leave behind but one of them I can leave behind is daylight saving. I don’t think you need it in north Queensland,” Hill says.
“There is a huge difference between sunrise and sunset times between Brisbane and Townsville. And, you’ve got to remember, in summertime, it is very hot here. So (with daylight saving) it would be 7.30pm in Townsville and still be really hot.”
Hill is also not a fan of having another daylight saving referendum or of a proposal to create a separate southeast Queensland time zone. “We’ve had a referendum and if you move to Queensland, it is what it is,” she says.
“I’ve said, jokingly, that if Brisbane wants to be on NSW time, it can become northern NSW.
“If you start to divide the state by daylight saving, you start to separate the state between them and us. And people in regional and rural areas feel there’s enough of a divide already between SEQ and the rest of Queensland. An SEQ daylight saving zone is just going to make the divide even bigger.”
On the flip side of a regional or rural lifestyle,
Debbie Shambrook lives in the heart of the annual chaos when two time zones split the twin border towns of Coolangatta in Queensland and Tweed Heads in NSW.
Border businesses and residents face endless confusion of two time zones in an urban area where thousands of people live and work.
There is also the Gold Coast Airport, one of the fastest-growing airports in the country, straddling both states. Its runway and terminal cross the border and it’s clearly marked inside the terminal’s baggage claim area. The airport runs on Queensland time.
Shambrook, 64, a retired primary school teacher, and her husband Colin, 66, live about 8m from the state border on Thomson St, in Tweed Heads. Daylight saving impacts almost every part of their lives.
“We constantly have to say, ‘Is that Queensland time or NSW time?’ Everything you do – restaurants, hospitals, doctors, gyms – you have to qualify everything,’’ she says.
“Even if it’s in NSW, in this area, not everyone works on NSW time and vice versa. It’s terrible. There are always issues with deliveries, tradesmen, all sorts of things. These things are a constant issue. There is not much of your life that isn’t impacted by the change in time.
“It’s so confusing to everybody and
older people struggle massively with it. They just can’t deal with it. Why can’t we have the same time? As far as I’m concerned, it should be either one in, all in, or one out, all out.”
Ashley Synnott, 46, is part of the great southeast Queensland migration, moving from Canberra to Brisbane with his family in 2019.
Synnott, his wife, Sarah, 44, a primary school teacher, and their sons Angus, 14, and Leo, 12, live at the bayside suburb of Wellington Point, in Redland City, east of Brisbane, and love their new Queensland lifestyle.
However, Synnott, who runs his own business and also works as a program manager for the federal government, admits it was a shock to see the sun set so early in Queensland after living with daylight saving in Canberra.
“We are really enjoying living here but our first year here we really missed daylight saving; it was a bit of a shock at first,” Synnott says.
“And with the birds chirping at 4.30am, it’s a bit tough some days.
“We live in such a beautiful area that you really want to be outdoors in the evening. It’s so nice to sit outside on the back deck or grab fish and chips and go to the point or spend time catching up with your neighbours. It just gives you an extra opportunity to spend more time outside of working hours with your family.
“I work in a state office of a federal department so I spend a lot of time in Zoom meetings and calls and you’ve really got to watch the clock. It’s a juggle. And there’s also getting up at 4.30am to get the first flight out of Brisbane … you can’t really get into Sydney city until 10am. I’d be a massive fan of having daylight saving here …”
As a new Queenslander, Synnott has not had a say in the daylight saving debate.
He is not alone.
Brisbane Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner, a strong advocate for a new daylight saving trial and referendum, says Queensland has a population of more than five million people (with 2.5 million people in Brisbane) but more than three million Queenslanders have never officially been asked their opinion on the issue.
Schrinner, 45, says anyone under the age of 48 didn’t get to participate in the referendum 30 years ago, as well as many people who have since moved to the state. And while he realises he is “not the mayor of Queensland” and there are plenty of reasons why remote and regional residents are opposed to it, he says it comes down to democracy and an estimated $4bn businesses missed out on due to early closing times and a wasted daylight hour in the very early morning when most people were in bed.
“Significant numbers of Queenslanders – the vast majority – haven’t actually been asked whether they support it or not,” Schrinner says.
“There are plenty of arguments on both sides but who can argue against the democratic process to give people a say?”
Each Australian state and territory government determines its use of daylight saving and after David Jones’s 2021 petition calling for its implementation (signed by more than 18,500 people), Queensland AttorneyGeneral Shannon Fentiman responded saying it was “not currently under consideration”.
In response to questions by Qweekend, a representative for the Attorney-General said: “There is no change in the government’s position on daylight saving and it does not have any immediate plans to adopt the change”.
Dr Thomas Sigler is an advocate for daylight
saving, and associate professor at The University of Queensland, who has studied daylight saving through the lens of his expertise as a geographer.
“Statistically, the Brisbane region has the earliest average sunrise time of any large city region on Earth,” he says.
“Having a 4.45am sunrise at 27 degrees south of the equator is not normal. We are an outlier.
“If you compare places at similar latitudes, the best comparison for Brisbane is Florida. It is a subtropical state like Queensland, it is a coastal state, a lifestyle state.
“Tampa (which observes daylight saving) is the same number of degrees off the equator, it’s an equivalent comparison city. The same day in summer (offset by six months because it’s in the northern hemisphere), the sun rises in Tampa at 6.33am and sets at 8.24pm.
“In Brisbane on the same comparable day, sunrise is at 4.44am and sunset is at 6.32pm.
“There are a couple of random parts of the world – northeastern Mozambique and northeastern Brazil are two others that get this weird early shift – but in the developed world, there is no other large city on Earth that has these extremely early sunsets and sunrises.
“The punchline is we’re really in the wrong time zone.”
Sigler has a research paper on daylight saving, published in 2021 in The Professional Geographer. The research paper, Sociospatial Factors Explaining Daylight Saving Preferences in Australia, found geography played the biggest factor in people’s preference and “the idiosyncrasies of divergent geographies and lifestyles in a large geographical territory have produced a political stalemate”.
“Across hundreds of respondents, we found 60 per cent of Queenslanders want daylight saving statewide; with 70 per cent in the southeast,” he says.
“The farther east and the farther south you live, the more likely you are to want daylight saving. While the farther north and the farther west you are, people are less likely to want it.”
Sigler says a South East Queensland (daylight saving) zone would be the most obvious solution but due to the extremely large size of states in Australia, it is “not politically palatable” and that “doing nothing is easier than doing something, even if it’s counter to what their electorate wants”.
However, he points to 14 split time zone states in the US that “work really well”.
David Jones, of DS4SEQ, believes a twozone system is the answer in Queensland, with an SEQ daylight saving zone taking in the vicinity of the Gunalda Range area north of Gympie or possibly as far up to Hervey Bay, and west to a line around Pittsworth.
Schrinner is determined to see another
referendum on daylight saving, influenced in part, perhaps, by his fond teenage memories of Queensland’s trial in the early 1990s.
Living with his parents Yurgen and Beryl and his older sister Marika at their Wishart home, in Brisbane’s southeast (where his parents still live), he recalls those summers as “quite unique” and “something special” when his family spent quality time together during the extra light.
“I remember it to this day, so many residents who were making the most of it …” he says.
“It was fantastic and I’ll remember that fondly for the rest of my life. I genuinely believe it’s only a matter of time – it’s inevitable – before Queensland gives
daylight saving another go.”