Is it finally time for daylight saving in Queensland?

The Big Question

Daylight saving comes to an end for another year on Sunday 2 April in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT. But as those states once again join Queensland in Australian Eastern Standard Time, some UQ experts say it's time to make it permanent.

While there have been decades of jokes about fading curtains and confused cows, the pros and cons of daylight saving are no laughing matter – especially when it comes to the financial implications for Queensland, the impact on our health and lifestyles, and even the plight of endangered wildlife.

It's been more than 30 years since Queensland last held a referendum on the issue, so Contact put the question to UQ researchers and alumni (including Brisbane's Lord Mayor Adrian Schrinner): is it finally time for daylight saving in Queensland? And, if so, who has the power to make it happen?

Have your say in our online poll

Adrian Schrinner

Lord Mayor of Brisbane
Bachelor of Arts '97, Graduate Certificate of Governance, Policy and Public Affairs '03

I’m firmly of the view that another trial of daylight saving in Queensland is just a matter of time.

Brisbane residents currently endure the earliest summer sunrises of any major city on the planet, while the annual cost of not having daylight saving has been estimated at a staggering $4 billion. 

Daylight saving would add to Brisbane’s already fantastic lifestyle and most importantly, it doesn’t cost anything. 

Daylight saving would deliver a bonanza for our local tourism and hospitality industries, as well as the many businesses that operate across borders.

Queensland’s last referendum on daylight saving was 30 years ago. That means no Queenslander under the age of 48 has ever had the chance to have a say on this issue. Nor has anyone who has moved to Queensland since 1992.

With Brisbane being the fastest-growing capital city in Australia, and South East Queensland being one of the fastest-growing regions in the world, support for daylight saving will continue to grow.

Dr Thomas Sigler

Associate Professor in Human Geography
School of Earth and Environmental Sciences

To save, or not to save, daylight has divided Queenslanders for generations.

What is clear is that Queensland has a ‘daylight problem’. Today’s sunrise time in Brisbane was 5:54am. Civil twilight (when it gets light outside) began at 5:32am, and nautical twilight (the time at which daylight begins to appear on the horizon) kicked off at 5:05am. In December, these figures are roughly one hour earlier. Likewise, our 5:49pm sunset doesn’t do us any favours – by the time most of us are home from work, it’s getting dark. This compares to a 7:30am sunrise and 7:18pm sunset in Melbourne today.

What’s less clear is how to fix Queensland's daylight problem. Finding a solution is perhaps most confounded by the fact Queensland is geographically enormous. In Mount Isa – 1600 kilometres northwest of Brisbane – the sun rises and sets an hour later, and politicians are reluctant to divide the state into 2 time zones.

Although 69% of Australians observe daylight saving, Queensland, Western Australia and Northern Territory do not, meaning that the Australian mainland observes 5 distinct time zones in the summer months.

Those in favour of daylight saving typically leverage one of 2 arguments. The first is that the sun rises and sets too early, waking us up at unreasonable hours and preventing us from certain after-work activities in daylight. The second argument is the fact that Queensland is out of sync with southern states is detrimental to business interests. One estimate calculated that Queensland loses $4 billion a year, and others cite the impacts on cafes, golf courses and other businesses.

Those supporting the status quo argue that the time change is difficult to manage and that it has sleep implications, or that morning sun is preferable to evening sun.

In Queensland, the ‘yes’ camp tends to be more urban than the ‘no’ camp, but perhaps not for the reasons we assume.

My research has found that 60% of Queenslanders support daylight saving, but few factors were statistically significant in explaining daylight saving preference, aside from latitude and longitude. The farther south and east survey respondents were, the more they preferred daylight saving. We found minor lifestyle-related preferences, but these paled in comparison to the effects of geography.

In my first-year Time Geography lecture, we discuss daylight saving and I gather students’ opinions on the matter. Many seem to be unaware of the acrimonious debate surrounding its implementation or have yet to give the issue much thought.

I suggest they would be some of the primary beneficiaries of daylight saving in Queensland. To test this, I devised an experiment in which I asked students to list key times of day – when they wake up, when they get to university, etc. The results are surprising: the average student in my first-year geography course wakes up at 7:28am, and the middle of their waking day is 3:34pm. In other words, the sun is up for roughly 10 hours before the middle of their day, but only 2 hours after it!

So how do we save daylight?

While I believe that daylight saving is the best option to solve Queensland’s ‘daylight problem’, other potential solutions include splitting Queensland into 2 time zones, or implementing daylight saving only in the south-east corner. Permanent standard time and permanent daylight time both have merits, but the advantages vary greatly from east to west. Neither solves the problem of extreme winter sunrises or summer sunsets though, which is why daylight saving is still useful between about 20 degrees and 55 degrees north or south latitude.

Dr Oliver Rawashdeh

Senior Lecturer and Group Leader
Executive of the Australasian Chronobiology Society
School of Biomedical Sciences

Dr Pureum Kim

Postdoctoral researcher
School of Biomedical Sciences

Daylight saving can negatively affect our health.

Some studies suggest that the sudden change in our sleep patterns due to daylight saving can disrupt our circadian rhythms, including the body's natural sleep-wake cycle. This can lead to a range of adverse health effects, including:

1. Sleep disturbances: the sudden change in our sleep schedule can lead to difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up feeling rested.
2. Mood changes: disrupted sleep patterns can lead to irritability, fatigue, and mood swings.
3. Increased risk of accidents: lack of sleep can impair our cognitive function and increase the risk of accidents while driving or operating heavy machinery.
4. Increased risk of heart attacks: studies have shown an increase in the risk of heart attacks in the days immediately following the switch to daylight saving time. Waking up one hour earlier adds stress and sleep deprivation, which might contribute to increased heart attack risk.

Our biological clock uses light to maintain a stable relationship to solar time, with morning light advancing and evening light delaying the clock. The extra time gained to spend outside in natural sunlight after work is central in the argument to justify daylight saving. However, the consequence of more evening light exposure is that it delays the clock such that we become even later in our rhythm, rather than adapting to the advanced social schedule. By delaying our sleep-wake cycle, we accrue even more sleep debt.

It's worth noting that not everyone is similarly affected. Depending on our chronotype (lark, dove or owl), some people may experience strong negative effects.

Night owls, who tend to stay awake longer and consequently wake up later, are significantly affected. Indeed, Roenneberg and colleagues’ recent study showed that for extreme owls – those often diagnosed with one of the most common circadian sleep-wake disorders, ‘Delayed Sleep-Wake Phase Disorder’ – daylight saving further increases their sleep debt by around an hour a week.

Early risers or larks, of whom there are fewer in the population, are less affected.

What are the implications of daylight saving for UQ students? Our education system has been optimised (lectures starting at 8am) to favour the early and, to some extent, the in-between chronotypes. The disadvantage of night-owl students has been well-documented and demonstrated poorer academic performance from primary to tertiary schooling. A major culprit is the accumulating sleep debt resulting from the misalignment between the sleep-wake cycle and their academic schedule. Daylight saving amplifies this misalignment, likely resulting in the growth of the student population joining the academically disadvantaged late-chronotype student cohort. This also begs the question: could daylight saving negatively impact UQ’s student lecture attendance?

For those who experience adverse effects, it's important to take steps to minimise the impact of daylight saving on your health and wellbeing. This may include gradually adjusting your sleep schedule in the days leading up to the start of daylight saving, getting plenty of exercise and exposure to natural light during the day, and avoiding caffeine and alcohol in the evenings.

Decisions to implement daylight saving in Queensland, or to apply standard time across Australia, should be evidence-based and encompass health and socioeconomic factors. The Sleep Health Foundation (Australia’s leading advocate for healthy sleep) and the Australian Sleep Association are both considering the existing evidence and, where necessary, collecting new data relevant to the Australian population and environment.

Professor Graeme Orr

Lecturer in Public Law and Law of Politics
TC Beirne School of Law

Who has the power to set time zones, and why does Queensland lack daylight saving? The ‘who’ question is easy enough. The ‘why’ is more complex.

In the Australian federation, states kept their colonial power to set time. The Queensland Parliament could easily legislate daylight saving time. The Commonwealth Parliament has power over ‘weights and measures’. But time zones aren’t a ‘measure’ in the sense of quantifying something real. So anyone yearning for more national uniformity on daylight saving can’t appeal to ‘the feds’.

Queensland time is set by ordinary legislation. It’s not embedded in any constitution. That Queensland had a 1992 referendum on daylight saving was a game of political hot-potato, not a legal requirement. Like 2017’s ‘marriage equality survey’, such a vote is not only optional, it’s not formally binding on a parliament.

As to why Queensland avoids daylight saving, commentators usually point to the state’s relatively decentralised make-up. Western Australia also spreads east-west and into the tropics (where dusks are short). It has rejected daylight saving 4 times, despite its people being mostly in Perth. As the south-east corner of Queensland balloons, pressure for daylight saving for the state – or at least that populous corner – will only grow.

Queensland is also unusual in another way. We have no upper house, so a single-issue party like the Daylight Saving Party barely gets a look in. Also, as people use e-meetings more, rather than flying interstate, coordination is less of a problem (since e-diaries easily take account of time zones).

Australia is a wide brown land. Countries with east-west girth usually have multiple different time zones. On a train to Adelaide recently, a US tourist regaled me about 'the unique oddity' of central Australia’s half-hour difference from its neighbours.

Time used to be set locally, I told him. There weren’t astronomers in every town and, until the 1870s and the roll-out of the telegraph, there was no speedy communication to calibrate clocks. Even today, Adelaide wants to be closer to Sydney/Melbourne time than to Perth’s, despite being about halfway between.  

Different regions, with different seasons, latitudes or economies see things differently to central planners drawing lines on a map. Clocks and calendars are ultimately artefacts meant to serve, not enslave us. Which makes them surprisingly political – not just technological – issues.

Professor Robbie Wilson

Academic Director, Hidden Vale Research Station
School of Biological Sciences

When we discuss the pros and cons of daylight saving, we often don't consider the potential benefits for wildlife. Yet, daylight saving could dramatically reduce vehicle collisions with wildlife on Queensland roads and improve conservation outcomes for native species. Every year across Australia, hundreds of millions of animals die in collisions with vehicles. For some threatened species, including koalas, roadkill is a major cause of death and reducing collisions is a conservation priority.

The species most vulnerable to collisions with vehicles are those most active in the first few hours of darkness. This is precisely when traffic volumes are heaviest as commuters return home from work. Daylight saving could help reduce collisions with nocturnal wildlife because it would still be light when commuters drive home – increasing visibility for drivers and reducing overlap in animal activity and rush-hour traffic. Benefits will likely be greater in the early spring, when the switch to daylight saving occurs, because many animals breed during this time and are on the move looking for mates. 

Along with UQ researcher Dr Bill Ellis from the School of Agriculture and Food Sciences, my research group was involved in examining the potential benefits of daylight saving for koala conservation in South East Queensland. We tracked wild koalas and compared their movements with traffic patterns along roads where they are often killed. Collisions with koalas are most likely to occur during twilight or darkness (the time koalas become active); however, most cars would be off the road during daylight saving. Our model – created using data on koala movement and traffic patterns – suggests that daylight saving would substantially decrease koala deaths. Daylight saving time could decrease car collisions with koalas by 8% on weekdays and 11% on weekends, simply by shifting the timing of traffic relative to darkness. 

The results are very encouraging, and we hope it will prompt the Queensland Government to factor daylight saving into koala and wildlife conservation strategies for South East Queensland. If we can reduce the number of animals hit on the roads by making a simple change like this, then conservation and road safety should become part of the daylight-saving debate.

The flip side of this research is that we don’t know the impact daylight saving will have on diurnal animals (those active during the daylight hours), such as snakes, lizards and birds. Although we need to know more about wildlife and road crossings, I suspect daylight saving could have major benefits for reducing vehicle collisions with wildlife on Queensland roads.

Does it matter what time I go to bed?

Some of us love to be tucked up in bed by a particular time every night, ensuring a certain number of hours of sleep. Others go to bed when they start to feel tired, or when they’ve finally finished everything they wanted to get done. But does it matter what time you go to bed?