Saving daylight

This would provide just over six months of daylight saving time. In 2007, for one time, the end of DST is to be delayed until the first weekend in April. At that time, sunrise will be about 7.10am and sunset at 6.45pm in Sydney, changing to 6.10 and 5.45 respectively after the clocks change. The same sunrise and sunset would occur at the very beginning of September. This would suggest that a better situation might be to change the clocks at the beginning of September and the beginning of April. This would be easy to remember and very logical in terms of the length of daylight.

The combined effects of the time zone change and DST changes are shown for Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth in Table 1.

This would have some useful effects. First, the time difference between Sydney and New York would be nine hours in mid-June, but would be eight hours from the beginning of September, and seven hours from the beginning of November (when the US returns to standard time from 2007). It would remain at seven hours until the US begins DST in March (from 2007), when it would change to eight hours and to nine hours when Australia ends DST at the beginning of April.

In summary, it is my opinion that the federal government in Australia should be responsible for setting the dates for beginning and ending DST; that those dates should be moved back to September or end of August for the beginning and to the beginning or end of April for ending DST; that the individual states and territories should have the right to decide if they will observe DST or not; and that the time zones in Australia should be changed to advance the eastern time zone by one hour, the central time zone by a half hour, and the western time zone by one hour.