Did you get the feeling of waking up in the dark in the closing days of daylight saving? Did you think that that did not happen at the beginnig of the daylight-saving period?
It is true. Southern Australia’s daylight daving period is hopelessly out of whack. You would expect that, because it is a creature of political compromise. The result is that daylight saving does not begin soon enough and ends a tad late.
There are a few figures to prove the point, but bear with me.
First, what would happen in a rational world? You would expect that daylight saving would begin and end on days with a roughly equal lengths of daylight. For example you might expect it to begin when daylight got to 12 hours and end when it shrank to 12 hours.
What happened in the past year? Daylight saving began only when the length of the day got to 13 hours 23 minutes. But it did not end until daylight shrank to just 11 hours 44 minutes. These, of course, are Canberra times, but they apply proportionately from the Tweed to the Derwent.
Surely, if it is good enough to apply daylight saving to a day of 11 hours 44 minutes in autum, it should apply to days longer than that in spring?
At the start of daylight saving, on October 28, the sun rose at 5.06am AEST, but at the end of daylight saving the sun rose at 6.16am AEST. This is an hour and 10 minuites difference. Small wonder people thought they were getting up to go to work while it was still dark in autumn, while in spring they thought that the busy old fool unruly sun was annoying them far too early.
If we were to set a minimum of 11 hours 44 minutes of daylight as the base for starting a stopping daylight saving, we would start daylight saving on September 12, during the skiing season, and end it (as we did) on March 30. On the other hand, if we were to set a minimum of 13 hours and 23 minutes of daylight as the base, we would start daylight saving on October 28 (as we did) and end it on February 10, before the first tomatoes had ripened.
Don’t expect any sense from the politicians, though. Notice I did not say “”our” politicians because the ACT lot have little say in this; they are slaves to NSW. It means we have to fit in to the compromises between those who represent cow-cocky Tibooburra and trendy Balmain.
Incidentally, the sun does not behave entirely consistently either. In the past year it rose earliest on December 18 at 5.44 am and set latest, not on the same day, but on January 13 at 8.22pm. There is a solar drag here. It works at the other end, too. Moreover, if you take a day of a certain daylight length in autumn and find the day of the same daylight length in spring, you will find the sun rises earlier and sets earlier in srping than it does in autumn … all the more reason for starting daylight saving earlier and ending it earlier.
It may be that the politicians responsible for setting the starting and finishing dates confuse heat and light. (They do that methaphorically on many issues, but this is for real.)
They associate daylight saving as something for hot days. We know that it takes a while for the oceans which affect our temperatures to heat up in spring, so typically it will be cooler in spring than autumn on days of equal daylight length.
And daylight saving seems to generate far more heat than the light it saves. Every year we have pleas to extend it, shorten it or abolish it. I think we should do all three, but our politicians will not do it. We should shorten it in autumn by stopping it a week or two earlier. We should lenghten it in spring by starting it a few weeks earlier.
More controversially, we should abolish it in parts of Australia where people do not want it. State premiers should bury their petty power-hunger and think nationally instead of along state borders. We could have daylight-saving zones in the south-west from, say, Geraldton to Esperance and the south-east from, say, a line from Port Augusta to Griffith and north to Bundaberg. The rural west and north would be spared and the urban areas would get its benefits. And the time zones would conveniently go through sparesly populated places.
All that is far to sensible to be implemented, though.