The daylight saving fiasco is on again.The ACT, NSW, Victoria and South Australia began daylight saving yesterday. It has already been running since the beginning of the month in Tasmania. In the ACT and NSW it will run to the first weekend in March and in Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania it will run until the last weekend in March and Western Australia, Queensland and Northern Territory will not have it at all.
The differences have nothing to do with geography or the wishes of the people whose clocks and watches are being wound forward and back. They are set according to the parochial intransigence of state politicians. It is blatantly silly to set time zones along state boundaries, which in some places have high population centres.
It is time the state and territory governments sat down and took a national approach. The national approach should take into consideration several well-known factors about daylight saving. Urban and the more populated south-east and south-west of the nation are generally in favour. Rural north-west and the western parts of the eastern states are generally against. Different time zones along the NSW-Queensland and NSW-Victorian borders are very inconvenient, both for business and ordinary people. There is no reason why times zones have to be contiguous with state borders as the local time zones around Broken Hill and the eastern part of Western Australia on the Nallarbor show.
There is no reason why a daylight-saving line could not be drawn from, say, Geraldton to Esperance in the west, and from, say, Port Pirie across to Parkes and up to Maryborough in the south-east. The precise boundary could be worked out by a meeting of all the states.
Such a boundary would leave the north and the western part of the eastern states free of daylight saving, as their population generally desires. It would give the more highly populated area and the major capitals the daylight saving they want. In that environment there would be no need for the four-month compromise and daylight saving could go six months October to March inclusive.
Further, though such a border might seem a little incohate and novel, far fewer people would do business or travel across such a border than do business across the whole NSW-Queensland or NSW-Victorian borders, so it would be far less inconvenient than the present muddle. The time-zone border 20km east of Broken Hill and nowhere near a state border seems to suit the inhabitants there.
It requires co-operation, lateral thinking, imagination and common sense to deal with daylight saving: all attributes conspicuously missing in Australian state governments which are better known for intransigence, tunnel vision and pig-headedness.
If the states fail to act before the summer of 1995-96 the Federal Government should consider using its “”weights and measures” power in the Constitution to deliver a daylight-saving regime more responsive to people’s wishes and sensible business practice.