An issue that just keeps raising its sunburnt head every year.
A referendum several years ago determined that the majority of Queenslanders did not want daylight saving introduced.
It seems simple to me. If some people want to get up and start their working day earlier so they can knock off and sunbake on the beach for longer every afternoon (or whatever), then they should arrange their own life so they can do so, not force the rest of us living in a very hot northern climate to change our clocks just to suit southern lifestyle choices. Or why not just get up an hour earlier so they can have an extra hour with the kids in the morning. If people aren’t able to get up an hour earlier unless their clock tells them to, well that’s surely something they need to get over.
As to the argument ‘it’s all too hard doing business on the border because New South Wales has daylight saving’ – any business that can’t cope with a simple one-hour time difference really doesn’t deserve to be in business. I suppose if these same business people were transacting with people over the other side of the world, they would be suggesting we should all change our clocks to U.S. or British Standard Time? A 12 hour time difference is not easy to work with, but it is entirely do-able. A one-hour time difference is a piece of cake, so they should just get on with it and stop trotting out the rubbish argument that border businesses are losing money due to a one hour time difference.
‘What the people want‘ is a very typical email discussion on the pros and cons of daylight saving, which does of course include a couple of posts that simply call people who don’t want daylight saving ‘rednecks’ (a term more appropriately applied literally to those in favour of daylight saving, surely?) An interesting piece on ‘Civil Twilight Rise’ touches on the fact that there is a lot less twilight in tropical regions (i.e. far north Queensland) than in southern Australia. Many posts are hilarious and very well written. The two at the bottom of this page are excellent.
Wikipedia has a very interesting piece on the history of daylight saving.
ABC has an extremely useful summary of the time zones within Australia and Greenwich Mean Time is useful for calculating times in other countries, right down to seconds.