Good morning!

If you find yourself waking up uncharacteristically early tomorrow morning, you have the end of daylight saving time to thank.

The clocks will roll back an hour in NSW, Victoria, the ACT, South Australia and Tasmania in Sunday’s wee hours, giving us back the time we lost in October, but taking away our late evening sunsets.

The incoming months of gloom at 5.30pm are a dire prospect. But there has to be a good reason we do this, right? RIGHT?!

This week, I got out my magnifying glass and my detective hat to solve this mystery for you.

Here’s what I found.

How does daylight saving work?

Daylight saving time literally ‘saves’ an hour of daylight for later in the day, letting people enjoy more sunshine in the evening, during the warmest months of the year.

The sun rises and sets at different times throughout the year as a result of Earth rotating on its axis, as well as moving around the sun. It means there are times when Australia gets more sunshine, and times we get less.

Large parts of Australia lose an hour every October, when clocks jump forward for the start of daylight saving. After about six months, we roll the clocks back and regain that extra hour. If we didn’t do that every April, (when the southern hemisphere rotates away from the sun) by the time winter arrives, many of us would end up heading to school and work in the dark. For example, the sun would rise at about 8.30am in Adelaide in June.

Conversely, in summer, the sun would rise and set much earlier. That’s the case on the easternmost points of Qld’s coast, where sunrise happens well before 5am and sets before 7pm in November and December.

Why does it exist?

Daylight saving time might more accurately be called power saving time, since it was first popularised as a way to conserve fuel in European countries during World War I.

With more daylight at the end of the day, rather than the beginning, people could drive home and cook their dinners by daylight instead of needing to use gas or electric lights to see what they were doing.

Australia followed Europe’s lead, using daylight saving in war and dropping it in peacetime.

The idea stuck around, though, and in the late 1960s, Tasmania brought it back during a drought that left water supplies for hydro-electric energy dangerously low. Tasmania’s had it ever since, and most other regions followed suit.

Not Qld, WA, or the NT, though. Why?

The argument against daylight saving

It’s no coincidence that Australia’s three largest jurisdictions (by land area) are opposed to daylight saving. Their sheer size means there’s a big divide between coastal city-dwellers who want an extra hour of sun to go to the beach in the evening, and rural and farming communities getting up for work in the dark or sweating through the afternoon.

WA, our largest state, has held four failed referendums over the years on daylight saving. In the last referendum, the ‘no’ vote was strongest in regional and rural areas - a whopping 86% of voters in the Central Wheatbelt said no thanks to daylight saving.

Queensland is especially split. Different hours of daylight, different climates, different work - all of these make for very different ideas about daylight saving.

As one Qld MP said when the state debated daylight saving in the 80s:

“If one lived in Cairns in summertime, the two things that one would not want would be more sunshine and more daylight.”

There are plenty of places where residents would like to see daylight saving implemented, though, like parts of the state near the NSW border. Take the twin towns of Tweed Heads and Coolangatta.

When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in Tweed Heads and we’d visit them every summer. Tweed Heads is in NSW, but if we wanted to go for dinner fifteen minutes up the road in Coolangatta, we’d need to leave the house at 7.15pm for a 6.30pm reservation. It was a bit annoying as a tourist - imagine trying to lock in a doctor’s appointment!

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Around the world

As heated as Queensland’s debate can be, it’s small potatoes compared to what happened in Lebanon last year.

Without warning, in March 2023, the Lebanese Government announced daylight saving would be delayed by a month, days before clocks were set to change.

Caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati eventually said the decision was to allow Muslims to break their fast one hour earlier during the holy month of Ramadan.

This was generally pretty unpopular with the Lebanese public, with some people, schools and workplaces changing their clocks anyway. It was also opposed by Lebanon's Christian community.

This meant that despite only having one timezone, the country was operating on two different clocks.

Sleep tight

Love it or hate it, if you’re in a part of Australia with daylight saving, there’s no suggestion we’re getting rid of it any time soon.

Enjoy your extra hour this weekend - you’ll miss it come October!