Time is money. Time flies. Lost time is never found again. Time is a thief.
Our obsession and our master, time has reared its head this week as it does every October, with our southern cousins putting their clocks forward an hour this weekend.
That simple act will throw too many things out of whack.
From next week, business meeting times with our interstate stakeholders must be clarified.
TV programming times must be double checked. NSW and Victoria get to mark the New Year an hour earlier than us, even if we are further east than almost all of them.
With most of our out-of-state communications and interactions occurring up and down the eastern seaboard, it hurts to be the maverick. Social and professional jetlag are real.
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Once upon a time, we had a go at falling in line. A referendum of Queenslanders knocked back the chance for change, even though we had trialled daylight saving for a while.
But that was in 1992, when a whole stack of people now calling Queensland home were not born or did not live here.
Last year, the Brisbane Lord Mayor asked for the state government to revisit the issue. And a University of Queensland study found daylight saving was the single-most petitioned topic in Queensland to the state parliament after car rego fees, and that 66 per cent of Queenslanders (70 per cent in the southeast) wanted to line up with the southern states.
The long-running joke is that Queensland rejected daylight saving in the 1990s because we worried it would confuse our cows and fade our curtains.
But everyone knows daylight is a defined commodity, and the ‘saving’ part of the moving of the clock hands means an hour of usable time is taken from the start of the day and tacked onto the end.
That gives us more time to play in the post-work, late-afternoon daylight. I say give us some of that on the Sunny Coast.
The strongest argument against joining in on daylight saving is that is doesn’t suit our far-flung Queensland siblings and everyone knows there is a massive difference in light and temperature between the state’s southeast, west and north.
But other parts of the world embrace different time zones across a single state or territory – so why can’t we? Let’s have daylight saving in the southeast. Let this be the last year we are left behind. It is time.
Dr Jane Stephens is a UniSC journalism lecturer, media commentator and writer.Â
