Cross the South Australian-NSW border near Broken Hill something remarkable does not happen.
You do not change time zones. If you drive into Broken Hill, about 50km inside NSW, the clocks are all on South Australian time. Business opens and shuts at the same time as Adelaide.
If you leave Broken Hill and drive towards Canberra, after about 20km in dead flat country with virtually no habitation, you come to a sign telling you to wind your clock forward half and hour to NSW time.
Basically, the people of Broken Hill have told the centralist Government in Sydney to stick their time zone and that it is more convenient for them to be on South Australian time. They told their MP, if you don’t allow us to be on South Australian time, watch out next election. So the Standard Time Act has a special provision for Broken Hill.
The people of Tibooburra in the far west of NSW have not been so lucky.
Moreover, daylight saving is added to their woes, which gives them impossible temperatures at impossible times for schoolchildren and farmers.
And now the centralist government in Melbourne wants to extend daylight saving an extra three weeks. That is fine for the people of Melbourne, but what about those who live in the north-west of the state who object the heat and daylight at the end of the day?
The main difficulty with daylight saving in Australia has been centralist remote state governments in capital cities have tried to impose their will on people everyone in their state (with the exception of Broken Hill). Mostly, they are imposing on the people in the bush. Sometimes it works the other way. A couple of years ago a few people in the bush in NSW elected a few National Party politicians who imposed their will on the Government to get daylight cut by three weeks, to the displeasure of the vast majority of the people in the cities and on the coast.
Victoria and the ACT Governments then felt they had to follow NSW, so even more people were dissatisfied. Autumn festivals in Canberra and Melbourne suffered.
The trouble is the people in state governments thinking about daylight saving are narrow people who think narrowly instead of laterally. Their narrow thinking is bounded by state boundaries.
It is time for a national solution.
Essentially a nation-wide approach would recognise that urban areas in the south-east of each state (south-west in Western Australia) like a lot of daylight-saving. They like the light after work. But rural Australians and those in the small towns in the west and north of each state do not like daylight saving.
The solution is obvious. Two boundaries would be drawn across the continent. In the west one would go from Esperance to Geraldton, carving out the more populated south-west corner. In the east one would go from, say, Port Pirie to Horsham to Forbes and up to the Queensland coast at Bundaberg One, carving out the more populated south-east corner. These areas would have daylight saving for six months (October-March) and the rest would not have it. There would be no need for the present four-month compromise.
The precise boundaries can be worked out along various shire boundaries. It may, at first, seem an awkward solution. But as the Broken Hill example shows, it need not be. Indeed, the Broken Hill time zone is defined in the Standard Time Act as the County of Yancowinna.
There are probably more transactions and people movement across the time zone between NSW and Queensland under present arrangements than there would be under the ones I am suggesting. The new arrangements would provide a full five-month daylight saving period where it is desired and no daylight saving at all where it is generally detested.
How can this national approach be adopted when jealous Premiers squabble with petty parochial pride as they have in the past couple of weeks? The Consitution gives the Commonwealth Parliament power to make laws “”with respect to weights and measures”. It does not take Einstein to tell you time is a measure.
And if the NSW Act can make an exception for Broken Hill, the national Act could list a string of local-government areas defining a daylight-saving area contiguous with people’s wishes not state politicians’ egos.