I was half an hour late for a job interview today…. and the interviewer was half an hour early. How so?

Australia’s timezone stupidity mixed with a dash of Microsoft Outlook fun.

The interviewer was visiting Sydders from Brisbane and had sent the meeting invite from his Brisbane computer. Brisbane is an hour behind Sydney. Why does Brisbane need to have a different timezone? Because they’re “not bloody Sydney”, that’s why.

Seriously though, the longitude distance between Sydders and Brisvegas is about 180km, roughly half of that between London and Dublin (same timezone) and a fraction of that between Paris and Rome (same timezone). Yet they are in different timezones.

There can be no logical reason for this, it’s purely a “we’re not having their timezone” argument between two states. A bunch of bureaucrats flexing their muscles against another set of bureaucrats and the rest of us have to muddle along trying to work around it making allowances for the two hours of each working day where we can’t rely on the other being in the office.

Obviously Perth has it’s own timezone (about 1987 currently), it’s practically at the other side of a continent. However, the time difference varies depending on the time of the year. Why? They don’t follow the same daylight savings regime as everyone else. They’re independent, see? Plus, it fades the curtains and scares the cattle.

Adelaide has their own timezone but no-one cares as nothing’s happened there since…. well, I was going to write something sarcastic here about an interesting event that happened in Adelaide once but I actually couldn’t find anything at all after extensive Googling. So nothing’s happened there, period.

It doesn’t stop there though, oh no.

Driving licences, car registrations, tax regimes, police, fire brigades, schools, rubbish collectors, dog-catchers, diversity officers, equality persons, etc. are all administered at a state level. Presumably, all of these state-governed departments then need a “liason officer” on a full-time basis to ensure that they “align” with their peers in the other states. There’s probably another full-time employee “liasing” with the Federal government too. And a whole team of them in the Federal government liasing right back at them in a culturally diverse inclusive kind of way.

What’s the upshot of this? A tax regime to pay for it all that would make Al Capone blush.

The worse thing is, is that most Australians I talk to don’t really question this all as unreasonable. “Bloody Queenslanders” they’ll say, or “Victorian and proud of it”, or “hey Sis, wanna play hide the snag again?” if they are from Darwin. I’m all for solid community identity but sometimes the price outweighs the benefits. There are very few questions where the right answer is “more government”, I reckon.

As Ronald Regan once said, “the 9 scariest words known to man are ‘ I’m from the government and I’m here to help ‘ “.

Oh, also some cricket competition starts tomorrow morning. I’m not excited. Much.

Good evening Princess David.