29.03.17
IN 2017, is there still the divide between city and country on the issue of daylight savings or is it now just a matter of personal preference?
If there’s no industry group actively campaigning to extend daylight savings, then why does our state government periodically whack another week on either end?
As the world wars receded and electricity became more plentiful, the argument became that daylight savings makes ‘better use of daylight’.
The annual debate across Australia and around the world, shows that one person’s ‘better’ is another person’s ‘worse’.
The true purpose of daylight savings is more aligned with an old English idea of workers being able to enjoy long summer evenings.
We can assume that Tasmanians (where the trend started in Australia) still love it, and the Queenslanders still don’t.
I suspect it has something to do with the comfort level of your summer evenings.
Just as the idea of Daylight Savings is useless near the tropics, where day and night are more or less an even length year-round, you do wonder whether it makes sense to force it on every person in every type of climate and every type of work environment in NSW.
I’m still waiting for the scientific proof that it saves energy, reduces traffic accidents, improves public health, or helps the economy.
I would be interested to see real evidence of any of these, and I want to see them as they relate to my climate zone.
I’m over sucking up all sorts of things for the greater good.
The ‘greater good’ seems to advantage well-serviced urbanites who live in milder climates with places of recreation that stay open well into the evening.
Daylight Savings steals a slightly cooler morning from me, where I could perhaps go for a healthy mind-clearing walk or clean the house before heading to work, and replaces it with a seemingly endless stinking hot afternoon where I can’t do anything but chew up power using my home air-conditioning while I lie on the lounge and watch TV under the fan.
In high summer, which in Coonamble can start in October and go till mid March, we eat too late, go to bed too late, and get up cranky to do it all again.
At the beginning and end of the extended version of daylight savings, we are further punished by having to rise in the dark, robbed even of the daylight that the scheme was originally meant to deliver.
Perhaps our forebears who sought to be excluded from the scheme, and even Neville Wran who proposed a western NSW exclusion zone, had a point.
Let us get up when we like and leave the clock alone.