West Australia DST: to be or not to be

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Tue, 21 Nov 2006 23:00:50 +0000 (UTC)
    From:        Christopher Hunt <huntc at internode.on.net>
    Message-ID:  <loom.20061121T235956-4 at post.gmane.org>

  | The bill has been passed by both houses and is now awaiting assent 
  | (whatever that means - sounds like a done deal though).

Any bill needs royal assent before becoming law.   In Aust, that's done by
the state govenor (or the governor general for commonwealth laws) acting as
the Queen's representative.

This is essentially the same as getting approval from the President or
a state Giovenor in the US (or lack of a veto perhaps) - except that in
practice, assent is essentially never withheld (it has happened only a
handful of times in all of Australian independence, and not for a long time
now ... if it were to happen it would be very big news indeed).

So, yes "done deal" is what it is.

In an earlier message, which was quoted again today Jesper Norgaard Welen
jnorgard at prodigy.net.mx said:
  | The first bill introduces a note that clarifies that when using 2:00am in
  | the bill, it refers to 2:00am standard time, so the DST would run to 25
  | March 2007 3:00am (daylight saving time). But the second bill does not
  | mention that, and states 2:00am both when entering and when leaving DST.

See section 3 (the definition of terms) where it says "2am means standard 
time" (which is in accordance with Aust practice.)

While it is often easy to skip the definitions section as being mostly
too obvious to bother reading, that's almost always a poor idea, in many
cases (not quite so much here) the most interesting parts of an act are
found there...

kre