DAYLIGHT SAVING

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 365, 28 May 1928, Page 8

DAYLIGHT SAVING

IT APPEARS from a letter sent by the New Zealand Farmers’ * Union to all branches that the provinces show a “deplorable apathy” in respect of daylight saving. Instead of being aggressively up and doing, they have—with one exception—made no response to the union’s appeal for “reasons against the Summer Time Act being re-enacted, founded upon the actual experience of farmers and their families.”

_ It is common knowledge that objection to the Act is almost entirely the objection of the farming community; but it is probably not far from the truth that what the union thinks is deplorable apathy is really due to the discovery that, after all, daylight saving did not impose any severe hardships, did not, in fact, cause anything but minor difficulty which could only by exaggeration be called hardship and which longer experience would successfully overcome. In other words, the failure to produce reasons against re-enactment, “founded on the actual experience of farmers and their families” during the Summer Time period, means simply that, on the whole, there are no such reasons.

Motions against daylight saving have been carried here and there ; but it has been noticeable that the motions were supported and carried with much less fervour and conviction than animated the opposition to the Act, before its provisions had been tested. This is actually the best of reasons for prolonging the experiment and against breaking it off. It has made far more converts than enemies; it has taken the fire out of the hostility to it. It has, indeed, some strong supporters among farmers. It is to be hoped that such leaven will work powerfully in the agricultural lump.