An article about possible health problems caused by daylight saving.
At least us healthy Queenslanders don’t need to worry.
From the article:"Changing the clock alters the body’s production of melatonin, "
Really? What about the clocks that change themselves, will they have the same effect? So it’s actually the software in my devices that alters my mood.
What if I don’t know those clocks have changed, will the consequences slip around my consciousness and still seep into my brain somehow?
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Not yet, perhaps, but there’s no cause for complacency:
It isn’t so much the change in the clock as the change in timing.
I’m not at all convinced that daylight saving is worth the trouble.
One thing I’ve noticed is that timepieces tend to fail when fiddled with. It seems to me that they fail most often when they’re being turned back at the end of daylight saving. It’s all an evil horologist’s conspiracy!
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Living near the border of daylight savings & no daylight savings causes an increase in stress levels for everyone, as it is necessary to constantly corroborate which time system is being used when making arrangements or appointments.
Oh the headaches.
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Thanks @meltam, I do empathise, however you could just get Northern NSW to move to Qld time. They all come to your side to shop anyway.
Not an aspro in sight?
We might need two if we realise that daylight saving is due to the earth falling over in summer by approx 23.5 degrees. Perhpas one day it might just keep going and we could all fall off?
It is good to see the pickup by @Fred123 on the ABC article, although now that I know the cost of getting up an hour early I will be able to look to claim compo for every 5:30am flight that I made previously for work. A bit rough given work was a kinder 7am gig.
p.s. I’m a morning person and not inclined to go out in the extra heat of a Daylight Saving afternoon in a baking Qld summer to train for a marathon across Death Valley or the Simpson. I lived in NSW for some time previously and wondered why the 6pm news was never put back to 7pm while daylight saving was in place, along with number 96 being on before the sun had set and everyone was still at the beach?
What ever the outcome there will always be a time zone change somewhere in QLD if DS does come in in the future. For the north and west it is a simple astronomical fact they receive a shorter day in mid summer (nearly an hour less total daylight and the sunrise is genuinely later by 30 mins up to nearly an hour for Mt Isa. BrisVegas and the SE is stuck somewhere in the middle and tracks closer to Adelaide mid summer than the might of Sydney and Melbourne.
Noting that Adelaide remains disconnected from the east by half an hour still, should SE Qld also move 30 mins to allign with SA?
To date there is no economic data such as GDP or gst returns graphed over the year that show Qld has step changes in economic activity during daylight saving down south. The science behind this remains elusive.
We might put any desire for a change down to a difficulty of the Federal Parliamentary members from Qld having problems working out the time difference when they escape their electorates to go to Canberra. Is there any hope?
Optimistically we might be glad that we have different time zones. The ultimate solution to confusion, inconvenience and economic penalties (perceived anyway) is to put all of Australia on the one time zone from Lord Howe to Perth and adopt full time daylight saving. But should that be based on Canberra or an average approximating Alice Springs or Uluru? It will at least save our Pollies from missing flights because they can’t sort out time differences.
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Take Broken Hill as an example. It’s on SA time. I can see that for many reasons BH deals with SA more than NSW, Adelaide is much closer than Sydney. Still it isn’t easy as it is just a chunk of NSW around the town itself, perhaps a parish or similar mapping region, so the nearby town of Menindee is on NSW time, if you miss the roadside signs you are out of luck.
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Possibly, but I believe SEQ and Brisbane does more business with NSW & Victoria than FNQ, so they should be time aligned. I know from experience how problematic it is having Brisbane, and Qld, an hour behind the rest of the eastern states.
Therefore, it would be more logical to move the daylight savings north past Brisbane, maybe even past the Sunshine Coast.
This is why I think that at least as far north as Brisbane should be on EDST. Carve out the SE corner if need be and include it into EDST.
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I empathise, the boarder is definitely in the wrong place. NSW made that decision 160 years past.
No doubt we could even move all of SE QLD to NSW permanently. Might make Bob Katter happy.
I doubt the time difference has any real effect on interstate business beyond Outlook learning to set itself for the relevant time zone. I’ve worked running back and forth across the border and with businesses that have teams on both sides. The days of most of these businesses having a rigid 9 to 5 culture are long past, Retailers can open and close to suit their customers. General shopping hours have been deregulated for decades. Yes it remains an issue between the Tweed and Coolongatta if you live or work or shop there.
How much of it is a state of mind, a state of origin or only really limited to those living on the boarder who knows. It is clearly a genuine problem for some. Logic might suggest the change in time zone is placed somewhere there are minimal inpacts. Somewhere near Coffs or Nimbin might work too. At a rough guess 99% of the shoppers and office workers in Brisbane have little to do routinely in their daily life with what is happening south of boarder. They are more likely to have relationships to manage in the rest of QLD from my time working around the city and in NQ. That’s why previously the vote divided the state. It’s not that simple. Perhaps the Gold Coast could move to NSW DST for commercial outcomes, however that is the bigger population moving to match Tweed Heads the little cousin.
Considering the need for Qld to move it’s time to DST because it is inconvenient for NSW and Vic might be logical, but not if it then moves the problem from NSW and Vic to one between North and SE Qld. The only winners in that might be NSW and Vic.
p.s. Looking at the comment on the situation with BH, you might think Northern NSW does more business with Brisbane and the GC than Sydney. It can’t be that hard for NSW to fit in for the Tweed can it?
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Including those of us with international families where different countries start and stop daylight times on different dates. If you go from Coolangatta Q to the Tweed Heads NSW RSL for lunch and want to ring your family in the UK during certain weeks of the year (or other combinations), the World Time website is a ‘must reference’ resource to see where is when.
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Hope that works for Perth too?
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Why stop there? State boundaries are a historical leftover that is well past its use-by date. Get rid of them. We don’t need three tiers of government.
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This stuff is always a laugh every year.Personally up in Queensland i’m surprised they have never had daylight savings being such a tourist hot spot they would benefit.I bet many of them would hate that at 5AM the sun is already up,after a big night.Anyway you either love or hate it,and i love it
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Queensland did have Daylight Saving for three years from 1989 - 1992.
There was a referendum on it in 1992 which was 55% against. It was noted there was a majority in favour in the Brisbane and nearby SEQ region. The notion of splitting the state along 151E (East and Western Zones) was considered but there was no action to divide the state into two time zones.
The potential of DS aiding tourism seems logical but may not offer any advantage. Peak tourist season in QLD is heading into winter and spring. Summer in QLD has temperatures inland of 40C, high coastal humidity, cyclone season and stingers in the northern waters. It is still an interesting thought that DS might still outweigh these slightly as a reason to go north in January.
Having lived and worked through the north for 20+ years we tended not to take advantage of our great back yard in summer, although there was Barra season and some great locals deals on the islands. Not sure if the Barra wore watches or the tide changed for DS, however when on a break at a resort or island I don’t remember the exact time being of that much importance. Guess you could have DS or not?
Irrespective of any daylight savings considerations Australia is still divided into time zones. The USA has a slightly different take on it.
Few traditions are more maligned than the semiannual switch between standard time and daylight saving time.
On Sunday, we will moan about the lost hour of sleep when we spring forward. In November, we will rend our garments about the months of early darkness to come when we fall back. In March and November alike, we lament the disruption of our circadian rhythms.
Often, these complaints take the form of calls to eliminate daylight saving time altogether. But Florida wants to move in the opposite direction: permanent daylight saving time.
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For anyone genuinely curious about the origins of Daylight Saving the following provides a very straight forward and easy read. Just skip over the advice on the current change over dates for the UK at the beginning.
In particular it’s whimsical that Germany was the first to adopt DS. It was during WW1 and Britain “strategically” followed. You would not want to sleep in on the day of the battle?
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The problem with Daylight saving is that when it first started out it gave people an extra hour sunlight to enjoy themselves. But it has been exploited by many employers to keep you working back an extra hour of unpaid work (slavery). The ACTU published this a few years back confirming it happens a lot.
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That’s good news? So with 52 weeks in the year, DST causes increased heart attack risk for two weeks at startup and another two at shutdown - a total of four weeks. That’s 7.7%, or one thirteenth, of the year!
A hint for those who have to deal with multiple time zones: Windows is able to keep track of multiple time zones as part of its settings. I currently have my main clock set to AEST, but a secondary clock set to PST. A click on the main clock will bring up the secondary time.
I am pretty sure this is also the case for other operating systems, but this would require investigation.
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I recollect that the benefit of an extra hour was part of the discussion for Australia back in 1971. I think you did not mean to say enjoyment of the extra hour of day light is a problem?
The original purpose in Australia during WW1 and in WW2 (in following the UK lead) was more a productivity and energy efficiency drive for the war effort. Yes, a potentially longer working day. The ACTU is arguably a little late to the debate in raising the extra working hours as one possible consequence. Certainly when I lived and worked in NSW none of us were any keener to stay one minute later because of DS. Woolies still closed by 6pm. Most other shops at 5:00 or 5:30pm.
The post WW2 intent in Australia including introduction in Tasmania was not social. In summer by bringing the evening meal forward an hour there is a saving in electricity consumption in the evenings and hence a power saving. For Tasmania at the time of first introduction (post WW2) Tasmania had a water shortage and was running out of hydro power.
Subsequently the happy citizens of Tassie with warm mild evenings, were followed by NSW etc and considered the social benefits of DS were worth keeping, given the further south you are the greater the benefit in summer.
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Despite Wikipedia missing it, Qld actually had daylight savings in 1971 but abandoned it the following year.
It was about as popular as a pork chop in a synagogue.
There was a joke around after that time.
Q. “Why doesn’t Qld have daylight saving?”
A. “Because Joh Bjelke-Petersen thinks the sun shines out of his **** and he isn’t getting up an hour earlies for any b*****.”
How do save electricity if you cook by having a meal an hour forward? Many Government jobs finish on time but the ACTU found more workplaces were keeping people back to work than ones who let people go at the DS time. Modern Daylight saving was sold as an extra hour for families and friends. And the further North you go the less the need for Daylight saving. Nth NSW just across the border could be bought into Queensland but this banal argument that Business finds it so hard to adjust just doesn’t stack up . Australia has 3 time zones permanently and many more with the rest of the world and everyone copes.
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I sometimes think our ‘leaders’ have a big bag of things they distract the peasants with - some are shiny, some are scary - they bring these things out on cue to distract the peasants from what the ‘leaders’ are really doing 
adjusting clocks and its associated confusion twice a year seems to come out of this bag …
I’m glad to live somewhere there is no daylight saving.
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