The hobby horse is a bit bleary eyed. It was utterly dismayed at being dusted off a month early for its bi-annual trot around the block. Readers who are familiar with this hobby horse will know what is coming and can turn the page.
Daylight saving.
Has there ever been a policy in Australia more riddled with petty interstate jealousy, power hunger and political grandstanding that resulted in so much inconvenience and dissatisfaction? If the power-hunger and grandstanding were put aside it would be quite easy to deliver a system of daylight saving that satisfied far more Australians and inconvenienced far fewer of them than what we have now.
This week we see the absurdity of children going to school in the dark, unnecessarily so. It seems people in this country will do anything for sport. The horror of this year’s premature daylight saving is that it will enrage people so much that any further changes (including sensible ones) will be seen as political dynamite and not touched. It was the same when then NSW Premier Neville Wran extended daylight saving into April one year to save electricity.
The political lesson is a thousand years old, as Canute explained to his followers that he could not order the waves back, but it was beyond Wran, NSW Premier Bob Carr, and Olympics Minister Michael Knight to see it: political leaders cannot change the laws of nature.’
Daylight saving will only work well when there is enough hours of daylight in the morning to move to the evening. Daylight saving will only work well at latitudes where the difference in the length of the day in summer is more than an hour and a half longer than the length of the day in the winter.
As you travel west, times moves back because the sun rises earlier and sets earlier. This is because the world spins clockwise and the eastern part of the continent spins into the sun before the western part. Daylight saving works best where people work to a clock (the towns and the cities) rather than work to light (rural areas).
Notice how these geographic facts have nothing to do with human-made state boundaries. Yet times zones and daylight saving regimes are foolishly based on state boundaries. Each Premier (especially Queenland Premiers) imagine the world begins and ends at their state boundary. The sun takes no notice of state boundaries, however.
Each Premier has set daylight saving according to some state agenda. This year NSW set it early because of the Olympics, and Victoria copped it. In the past Victoria has insisted over NSW objections that daylight saving remain through March because of its Moomba festival. It is so petty and absurd.
We should have a national approach, with a daylight saving zone in the heavily populated south-east and south-west of the country. The boundary could be drawn from somewhere north of Brisbane, through the middle of NSW and across to Whyalla in South Australia. In the west it would go from Geraldton to Esperance. Then the whole of western NSW, western and northern Queensland, all of the Northern Territory, the north of South Australia and all but the very south-west of Western Australia would be free of daylight saving forever. And that is what the vast majority of those people want, for very sound reasons. Then Brisbane and Perth could join daylight saving, which is probably what a majority of their people want, and it would be more commercially convenient not to alter time differences between major cities in Australia.
And when do we have daylight saving? It should be set around the equinox when the day gets to be 12 hours long. This means it should start on the last weekend of September or first weekend in October and end on the last weekend in March.
Only Tasmania has got this right. It was the first state to bring in daylight saving in the post-war years. It did it, very soundly, to conserve electricity when drought caused concern about hydro generation. Who needs light at 5am? Why turn on electric lights at 7pm when it can be light till 8pm?
Incidentally, the Federal Parliament could set daylight saving nationally because it has constitutional power over “”weights and measures”, but I doubt if they would enter the fray.
The main obstacle to a sensible national daylight-saving regime, is that state premiers will set it according to voting patterns. Opponents of it in the bush feel more strongly than proponents in the cities. They will change their vote on this one issue. That is why Queensland will not have it. And state Premiers will not allow their states to be divided into two zones because blame for the inconvenience of the few people near the zone boundary will be visited on the Premier. If there is a vastly great inconvenience visited upon the people and businesses of Brisbane, however, the blame can be shifted to NSW. Premier Peter Beattie was at it last week, suggesting that northern NSW keep Queensland time in summer. Childish.
A national zone would have the time border run through very low population areas where there are much fewer movements and transactions than between Brisbane and other capitals.
It is not too difficult. Such a time border exists now. Twenty kilometres east of Broken Hill you drive on the highway through virtually deserted bush and you come across a time-zone sign saying you are now on NSW time. Broken Hill runs on South Australian time because it is so far west. And it is running on South Australian time – rather than NSW Knight-time – now. It is a much less inconvenient place for a time zone than the busy Tweed River part of the NSW-Queensland border.
But all this is far too sensible for our state politicians who live in the boxes of their state boundaries.
I’ll put the hobby horse back in the shed, now – at least until October.