[tz] South Australia may move clocks 30 minutes

Paul Eggert eggert at cs.ucla.edu
Wed Jul 29 03:02:09 UTC 2015


Thanks for the heads-up.  It reminds me of the situation in Indiana a while ago: 
business interests wanted to switch to daylight saving and Governor Mitch 
Daniels (who at the time had US Presidential aspirations) pushed it through. 
There was a lot of controversy, and although Daniels is a president now he's 
merely the president of Purdue ... I wonder if the South Australian premier 
knows that?

Anyway, the SA government reports can be found here:

Report on community consultation over South Australia's time zone, 5 February – 
10 April 2015. 
<http://yoursay.sa.gov.au/documents/dsd170-sa-time-zone-report-on-community-consultation-3.pdf>

Whetton S, Kosturjak A, Kaye L, O'Neil M. Cost benefit analysis of changes to 
South Australia's time zone. SA Centre for Economic Studies, May 2015. 
<http://yoursay.sa.gov.au/documents/changes-to-timezones-cost-benefit-analysis-final-report-june-2015.pdf>


Three amusing things about the cost benefit analysis.

First, it says the main benefit of switching to EST (+1000) versus switching to 
true CST (+0900) is "reduced business cost".  The report does not explain this 
benefit or break it down.

Second, it says the main cost of switching to EST versus true CST is "increased 
energy usage", citing Kellogg & Wolfe 2007.  These costs would fall on the 
community.

Third, the report mentions "software costs to implement new time zone" as a 
disadvantage to switching to true CST (as opposed to EST, where it says the 
software cost of switching should be zero).  Apparently nobody associated with 
the report had much expertise in time zone software....


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