A Canadian study shows the accident rate goes up by about 8 per cent on the day after daylight saving is introduced.
It is not an argument against daylight saving, because the study shows the rate falls by the same amount when daylight saving ends. It is more an argument about sleep deprivation and driving.
Anyway, people are probably more sleep-deprived all round in southern mainland Australia in October, as it gets light at impossibly early hours.
Daylight saving illustrates, perhaps more than any other issue, some of the defects in the Australian federation.
All the polling and referendum results show that a significant majority in more densely populated areas of south-eastern and south-western Australia want daylight saving and want a full six months of it, not four months and three weeks we get now.
Further, those polls and referendum results show that a majority of people in the north and west of NSW, Queensland and Western Australia do not want it at all.
Yet for all the poll-driven politics these days, the simple wishes of the people of Australia cannot be delivered because of the nature of our federation and the nature of single-constituency political system.
Earlier this year the Premiers of NSW and Victoria and the Chief Minister of the ACT informally agreed that daylight saving would begin on the first weekend in October, not the last.
Yet NSW – with election looming – unilaterally ignored that and announced it would change the clocks on the last weekend of October as usual. Victoria and the ACT had no choice but to follow suit.
The trouble is that passions flare over daylight saving, especially among those opposed to it. It is a vote changer in the bush. No state government – particularly a Labor Government with a lot of marginal rural seats as in NSW — dare mess around with god’s time.
But someone should check how much unnecessary energy has been consumed this October because we do not have daylight saving and we turn our lights on an hour earlier than need be – maybe several kilowatts per household which adds up to millions of kilowatts, or the annual output of a hugely expensive small solar power station.
Australia lets state politics and a few people in sparsely populated areas override the national energy question. Not so in Europe and the US.
The EU has seven months of daylight saving.
The US will increase its daylight saving next year by four weeks to seven months and three weeks (give or take a week in some years depending on how many Sundays you get in changeover months).
The US change applies across the country with the exception of Hawaii, Arizona and the US territories. It came into force with a federal law, when George W. Bush signed the Energy Policy Act of 2005.
Why on this one useful occasion does Prime Minister John Howard not slavishly follow President Bush?
He has the constitutional power. The Constitution gives the Parliament to make laws with respect to weights and measures. The Founding Fathers obviously saw the logic on having a national approach.
This Federal Government seems prepared exercise power into all sorts of areas usually regarded as state matters – education, water, crime, health and so on. Yet on a matter where it has the specific power and good national reasons for action it sits back.
Why? Voter backlash.
It was not a problem in the US because the states are geographically smaller and nearly all of the mainland falls outside the tropics.
In Australia our huge states straddle areas where daylight saving is not appropriate – in the tropics where the number of daylight hours in a day is fairly even through the year.
But no Queensland, Western Australian or NSW Premier is going to allow a time zone to run through the middle of their state – because they will get the political blame for it.
(True, Broken Hill runs on South Australian time, but the people there want that and it happens throughout the year.)
Nor will a Federal Prime Minister cop the blame for doing the sensible thing by establishing national time zones. There are no votes to be won in it, only votes to be lost, despite popular desire for it.
People drinking chardonnay al fresco in the evening light are hardly light to swap their vote because of some extra daylight saving.
But given the sun does not respect state boundaries, the national government should act in the national interest – as it proposes to do with the education curriculum and water.
It could draw a line that includes south-eastern Queensland, the east and south of NSW, all of Victoria and Tasmania, all or most of South Australia and the south of Western Australia. The time zones would go through sparsely populated bushland and overall would be must less inconvenient than the Queensland-NSW summer time divide we have now.
We could have a full six months of daylight saving where it is wanted and no daylight saving where it is not.
But it won’t happen. The best we can hope for is that a post-election NSW Government honours in the informal agreement made this year.
Victorian Premier Bracks and ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope should act early to make sure the arrogant NSW Government does not pre-empt them again.
In the meantime, drive carefully tomorrow.