Daylight saving time shows droll and and dark sides

Dominion Post

OPINION: Urban Kiwis should really give a vote of thanks this week to cow cockies for their ever-so-reasonable reaction to extended daylight saving, which has now given us three summers with an extra three weeks of twilights.

It is a god-forsaken task, getting up in the pitch black of night to milk cows, and the annual daylight-saving-time change does nothing for the disposition of either dairy farmers or their stock. But apart from pro forma grumbling they have gone along with a system that benefits the 88 per cent urban population.


This is in marked contrast to Queensland where the government, heavily geared to the rural vote, still refuses to countenance daylight saving. They carry on in the tradition of legendary Dannevirke-born former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who warned that such a change would fade curtains and carpets.


Queenslanders are slightly cranky on this issue, although they live in a tropical state where the population can benefit, more than most others, from the extended afterwork sports and leisure daylight time the annual  change provides.

It was only five years ago that premier Peter Beattie argued that daylight saving would lead to increased rates of skin cancer.

Others said hens would stop laying and lawns would turn brown.

This brings to mind the American MidWest bible belt which opposed daylight saving, even as a wartime  energy-saving measure, because it regarded the change as being against God and Genesis. They argued that the Germans, who started the measure, had set the seeds for their own destruction.

Ohariu MP Peter Dunne is the Mr Sensible in the latest New Zealand extension, which has now received  general approval over three years and seems destined to stay.

Until Mr Dunne's formula, Nelson was threatening to introduce its own extra daylight saving, out of kilter with the rest of the country. That was a reversal of the stance taken by the small dairying town of Ararua, which did its best to ignore daylight saving in the 1980s.

Mr Dunne's stewardship of the extension was a cakewalk compared to that dogged pioneer Kiwi daylight saving campaigner, Dunedin Liberal MP Thomas Sidey, who had to battle slings and arrows for an astonishing 18 years to finally get daylight saving introduced in 1927.

This was extended in 1940, and again during the 1974 energy crisis by prime minister Norman Kirk, although proof of energy saving in these cases is remarkably flimsy.

Fourteen years later Michael Bassett, as internal affairs minister, extended daylight saving again, ostensibly to benefit urban dwellers.