On August 27 this year the sun rose at 6.30am and set at 5.40pm.
Next year it will be Olympic Games time. For some reason the Games organisers thought it would be a Good Thing to have daylight saving during the Olympics.
NSW, Victoria, the ACT and Tasmania have agreed to this absurdity.
It will not be daylight saving so much as a foolish and premature winding on of the clocks by one hour.
The sun will rise at 7.30am. It means everyone getting up to go to work and school will be doing so in darkness and will have to turn on lights to eat breakfast and read the newspaper.
The reason we have daylight saving is to capture early daylight (5am to 6am) which would otherwise be “”wasted” as we stay in bed. This saves electricity. Daylight saving was introduced as a wartime measure precisely for that purpose.
If daylight saving starts too early in the year that purpose is defeated. Indeed, it is daylight wasting. We would have to turn on the electric lights in the morning whereas without the movement of clocks we would not.
Daylight saving only works well when the day is longer than 12 hours. At the time of the special Olympic time, the day will be but 11 hours and 10 minutes long.
But in the name of the great Olympic God we are all to get up in the dark so that Olympic spectators will be able to go home from events in the light.
Don’t get me wrong. Daylight saving is of great value, but this Olympic time change is preposterous. Premier John Olsen of South Australia quite right sent the Olympic people away with a flea in their ear.
There is another argument against it. It will poison the minds of people against a proper reform of daylight saving. And daylight saving can be reformed in a way that would be better for tourism, better for the bush and better for city people.
In the past few weeks, we have been awakened absurdly early. Yesterday we had 13 and a half hours of sunlight. This is and hour and a half more than at the end of March when daylight saving ends.
We should have daylight saving from the beginning of October to the end of March (six months), but that would be unfair to many people in the north and the west of the various time zones.
A solution would be to end the nonsense of running time zones along state boundaries. Instead we could carve a time border in the south-west and south-east of the country, so that western NSW, western and northern Queensland and northern Western Australia would not have daylight saving. The border would run through sparsely populated areas. There would be fewer transactions across it than between the state borders, so it would be more convenient. The bushies would get their way with no daylight saving at all, and the city people would get an extra month of it.
It would certainly be better for tourism in south-east Queensland.
At present, a time zone runs through rural NSW east of Broken Hill all year round so that Broken Hill can stay on South Australian time. Some Barrier Reef resort islands run daylight saving and Eucla in the east of Western Australia runs its own time. It is not difficult.
Time is a matter of geography, not state boundaries.
If the centralist state governments cannot see the point, perhaps the Commonwealth could enact some national time zones (say, defined by a line running roughly from Gladstone in Queensland to Griffith in NSW and via Port Augusta to Streaky Bay and in the west by a line running from Geraldton to Kalgoorlie and down to Esperance.)
The Commonwealth has the power. Under the Constitution the Commonwealth has power to make laws with respect to “”weights and measures”.
If time can be changed for the Olympics, why not adjust the time zones permanently to give more Australians what they want with far less disruption than the present system?