He says because of the vast size of Queensland, residents in Mount Isa are already nearly an hour behind Brisbane in pure geographic terms, and so already exist in a state of daylight saving year-round. For Professor Cole, the daylight saving debate ignores the reality of people living in regional parts of the country.
Despite the negative effects of daylight saving, there are some benefits to the annual changeover. An extra hour of daylight at the end of the day, one of the main arguments in favour of daylight saving, especially in parts of the country where there is a noticeable difference between winter and summer daylight hours, has obvious social benefits. Having an extra hour of daylight also seems to decrease crime in certain areas , as well as improve some local economies.
One unusual side-benefit of daylight saving is there are fewer instances of wildlife killed by cars. A research paper in found there were noticeably fewer wild animals killed by cars after daylight saving came into force in a given year than when people were operating on regular time.
One of the authors of the paper, Griffith University behavioural ecologist Darryl Jones, said the change in human behaviour caused the difference. The big problem with daylight saving appears to be the shift forward and back itself, with most of the ill effects observed by researchers happening in the first few days of the change.
But as a chronobiologist, Professor Cain says the permanent change should be to leave daylight saving time in the past. Please try again later.
Brisbane Times. Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. But that has not stopped the annual debate about whether it's worth changing the clocks or not, particularly in the places that do not observe it. But it seems Professor Thomas's fellow Europeans disagree or don't care.
Under current EU legislation, all 28 EU countries must move their clocks forward one hour on the last Sunday in March and switch back on the final Sunday in October. The European Commission conducted polling that showed the majority of its citizens want daylight saving extended to last the entire year, and the EU is seriously considering the proposal.
The polling showed 84 per cent of 4. In Queensland, there has long been a push by groups in the south-east corner for the daylight saving to be introduced. Queensland's biggest newspaper, the Courier Mail, has been pushing for another referendum on the issue, arguing that the state has changed.
After the newspaper published its own polling in August, showing strong support for introducing daylight saving, it posted the article on Facebook, and readers left comments strongly in favour of the proposal. But Queensland is an enormous state, and outside the south-east corner, communities tend to be against daylight saving. A thousand kilometres north of Brisbane, the Townsville Bulletin posted its own article on Facebook and the feedback was very different.
And heading even further north to Port Douglas, with its tropical climate, the winter provides months of glorious warm sunshine and people are not pining for the extra hours in summer. The whole of Australia gave daylight saving a brief run in , and then again in Since then, Western Australia has trialled daylight saving numerous times and held four referendums on the issue, the most recent in when voters rejected the concept.
Queensland trialled daylight saving again in the s and then for three years from , ending with a referendum in when the proposal was again rejected. The Northern Territory hasn't trialled daylight saving since the Second World War and the prospect doesn't seem to have generated much interest there.
In the middle of summer, Brisbane, squeezed towards the leading edge of its time zone, witnesses sunrise at 4. Of course, Melbourne and Sydney — and Adelaide — have the benefit of daylight saving in summer; it shifts their clocks forward an hour. Despite being hundreds of kilometres east of Melbourne, Brisbane slips an hour behind the Victorian capital in summer.
He points to recreational and economic benefits daylight saving time DST would bring, shifting unused light early in the morning to the end of the day. For almost half the year, an extra hour of daylight would provide more time for tourists to explore and spend more money … that is bound to generate several hundred million dollars per annum to the economy. The cost of doing business in a different time zone is another issue.
Then there are the energy savings. That it gets dark earlier also means more peak-hour road accidents. A University of Queensland-led study found that adopting DST in south-east Queensland would lead to a decrease in car collisions with koalas, and potentially other nocturnal or crepuscular animals such as kangaroos and wallabies.
He has fond memories of playing outside in the daylight, until late on a summer evening. Moving to Brisbane proved a shock to someone unaccustomed to life without DST. Or just sit on the veranda and watch the sunset.
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