Australian time zone abbreviations

[Robert Elz]

    Date:        Thu, 1 Jun 2006 13:06:12 -0700
    From:        Chuck Soper <chucks2 at veladg.com>
    Message-ID:  <p06230906c0a4f427a3a0@[192.168.1.50]>

  | I have read the notes in the australasia tzdata file. Should the 
  | current official time zone abbreviations be used rather than the 
  | popular ones? This would be my preference.

What "official"?   In Australia the time is legislated (except for ACT)
by the state governments, not the commonwealth government - so if you
were looking for anything official, you're looking in the wrong place.

Unless there's been a recent update I haven't heard of (not impossible)
at least the Victorian legislation defines Eastern Standard Time and
Eastern Summer Time (definitely not daylight saving time).

Further, since it is Victorian Legislation, if it were to put a location
designator in it, it would most likely be Victorian Eastern Standard Time
rather than Australian (and similar for NSW, Tas & Qld).

The time in Melbourne, or Sydney (etc) is "Australian Eastern Standard Time"
in exactly the same way the time in New York (or Washington, DC) is
"United States Eastern Standard Time" and the time in Ottawa is
"Canadian Eastern Standard Time".

I suspect that you'll find that those web pages are just attempting to
provide information to the masses in a "friendly" format, and are not
even pretending to be accurate - neither of them even mentions Lord
Howe Island, let alone the western parts of NSW that operate on SA time
rather than NSW time.

Leave the Aust tz abbreviations as they are.

kre