by Dr Jacob Deem
Remember the scare tactics peddled about daylight saving decades ago … that it would fade our curtains and confuse the dairy cows?
Neither happened. Yet, like clockwork, the annual debate about whether Queensland should adopt daylight saving is back.
As New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia recently wound their clocks forward, Queenslanders, especially those close to the border, considered whether their state should do the same.
Daylight saving was initially introduced in Australia during World War I and II in a bid to reduce fuel consumption.
In the wake of World War II, the southern states, where the difference in daylight hours across the year is more pronounced, progressively adopted daylight saving over summer.
The Gold Coast is the epicentre of the Queensland daylight saving debate.
Being on the border, it is the place in Queensland most likely to benefit from a change to the clock, and the issues with crossing time zones are most pronounced here.
But there is a lot of consistency in the Gold Coast’s 300 annual days of sunshine – on its winter solstice Gold Coasters get about 11.5 hours of daylight and 14 hours at the summer solstice.
By comparison, Hobart gets only about nine hours of light on its shortest day and more than 15 hours on its longest.
Over the course of the year Gold Coasters are getting hours more sunlight than their southern counterparts, reducing the need to manipulate the clock to maximise daylight in the summer months.
Further up the Queensland coast, the effects are even smaller – Cairns is extremely consistent, getting 11 hours on its shortest day and 13 hours on its longest.
The arguments for daylight saving are therefore less convincing in Queensland, and especially so in the north and west of the state.
The evidence for those arguments is itself mixed.
Apples-with-apples comparisons are hard to find, making it difficult to tell whether the benefits of daylight saving are because of manipulating the clock, or simply because of seasonal changes.
* Dr Jacob Deem is Assistant Professor Law at Bond University specialising in public law research on constitutional law and constitutionalism, administrative law and tribunals.