[tz] Australian time zone abbreviations

[Greg Black]

On Tue, Nov 8, 2011 at 06:37, Edwin Groothuis <edwin at mavetju.org> wrote:
>
> On 08/11/2011, at 00:25 , Eliot Lear wrote:
>
>> Two questions:
>>
>> 1.  What does the man on the street in Australia think? AEST or EST?
>
> I picked three Australian groups of sources I think have high visibility to the general population: Visual media, printed media and two government services.
>
> - The Australian Broadcast Corporation and the SBS use AEST on their website
> http://search.abc.net.au/search/search.cgi?query=aest&sort=&collection=abcall_meta&form=simple
> http://www.sbs.com.au/search/?query=aest
> Channel 10 uses mostly AEST (three pages with EST, more with AEST)
> http://ten.com.au/ten-search.htm?q=aest&x=0&y=0
>
> - The Sydney Morning Herald uses EST
> http://www.smh.com.au/execute_search.html?text=aest&ss=Business
> while the Australian uses AEST
> http://search.news.com.au/search?us=ndmtheaustralian&as=TAUS&q=aest
> and the Daily Telegraph (oh the things you do for science) uses both:
> http://search.news.com.au/search?q=est&sid=5001021&us=ndmdailytelegraph&as=DTM&ac=search&r=typed
> http://search.news.com.au/search?q=aest&sid=5001021&us=ndmdailytelegraph&as=DTM&ac=search&r=typed
>
> - The Australian Bureau of Meteorology uses both, but gives in their submission guidelines only AEST.
> http://agencysearch.australia.gov.au/search/search.cgi?query=aest&collection=agencies&form=simple&profile=bom&scope_disable=off&Submit.x=0&Submit.y=0&Submit=submit
>
> - The NSW State Emergency Services website uses AEST
> http://www.ses.nsw.gov.au/
> The VIC and NT SES website don't specify a timezone.
>
>
> Now the man in the street… Australia is big and centralised, lim(x->100)X% of the people in one of the big cities don't care about other states, let alone which timezone they are living in. A quick chat with my greater family showed that they see AEST and EST as the same.

My inbox this morning had three emails from different Australian
organisations which used ADST (for a time zone that I personally would
label AEDT). There is almost no hope of a standard or correct version
ever being established.

Greg