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Jay flies north to flag imminent jump east

Sep 03, 2015
Jay Weatherill with NT chief minister Adam Giles at a heads of Government meeting in 2014.

Jay Weatherill with NT chief minister Adam Giles at a heads of Government meeting in 2014.

Premier Jay Weatherill expects to push for a change to eastern standard time when parliament resumes for its spring session, with legislation set to realign South Australia to the eastern seaboard.

But, ahead of an overnight diplomatic visit to the Northern Territory, he told InDaily he wouldn’t attempt to persuade the state’s northern neighbor to follow suit.

“If it were a fact of life, they’d obviously have to reflect on that and decide what they will do,” he said before jetting out to Alice Springs this morning.

“Obviously, I don’t think they’re promoting that agenda (but) as a matter of courtesy I just try and keep them informed… it would obviously create issues for them if there’s a disconnection.”

Weatherill reiterated that there were “remaining issues have to be resolved” before the Government commits to action on the time-zone question, but insisted: “We’re going to be promoting more likely than not a shift to EST in the spring session.”

Any change would require cross-party support, with SA’s timezone dictated by the Standard Time Act, which holds that “standard time throughout South Australia is 9 hours and 30 minutes in advance of Co-ordinated Universal Time”.

It’s understood the Government’s proposed legislation would amend the definition of SA time by changing a section of the existing act to delete “9 hours and 30 minutes” and substitute: “10 hours”.

It will also incorporate a new section that redefines references to specific times in other laws, to ensure no other acts of parliament have to be amended.

Parliament resumes on Tuesday for the first time in more than five weeks.

While SA and the NT may not be lock-step on the timezone issue, Weatherill has long harboured a desire to forge stronger links.

“Obviously some people talk about amalgamation … that does seem to be highly unlikely, but there’s no reason we couldn’t explore greater levels of cooperation,” he said.

And with the territory pushing for its own statehood, the Premier is “attracted to the idea of closer connections with the NT”.

The two jurisdictions signed a Memorandum of Understanding in April, with today’s visit the first meeting between Weatherill and NT chief minister Adam Giles since then to progress the relationship.

“Together we pretty much own the outback … we’ve got a goodly proportion of the major tourist attractions,” Weatherill told InDaily.

“We think there’s real opportunities to promote this coast-to-coast experience… In the Asian tourist market in particular we see a real desire for the natural experiences, but also a desire to have sophisticated urban experiences, so those things can be matched up between us.

“It would have to be done carefully but there are real opportunities for cooperation, and we want to explore them.”

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The leaders signing the MoU in April.

Weatherill said the jurisdictions were “a bit counter-cyclical”, in that “their tourism tends to operate at a different time of year to ours, so we don’t cut each others’ throats by jointly marketing”.

Weatherill’s interest in the NT was first piqued when he attended the opening of the Adelaide to Darwin rail link in the early days of the Rann Government, and was “staggered” by the close ties between the northern delegation and Asian heads of state.

“This is just unheard of in other parts of Australia,” he reflected.

“There’s an incredibly different cultural attitude to the world; if you go into a minister’s office in the NT, they have a picture of Australia (on the wall) but it starts about halfway up … and has a map of all of Indonesia and South-East Asia as well.

“Their perspective is ‘up and out’ rather than ‘down and across’.”

He first raised the idea of forging closer links in a letter to then-Labor chief minister Paul Henderson, and later wrote to his successor, Country Liberal leader Terry Mills. He tried a third time when Adam Giles replaced him in a leadership coup, and was preparing a fourth gambit when Giles bizarrely survived a mutiny from Willem Westra van Holthe early this year.

“We finally got there,” he laughed.

He acknowledges the jurisdictions are “so different on every level”, with NT boasting “the youngest population demographic in the nation”.

“But often it’s that dissonance, that diversity, that we can actually create really powerful connections,” he said.

With the NT’s “extremely large and fast-growing indigenous population” straddling the SA border, Weatherill hopes to garner “real insights into Aboriginal governance”, and is conversely offering to share SA’s “expertise” in regulating the oil and gas industry.

When Victoria and NSW forged a greater economic partnership in 2012, Weatherill railed against it as “secession” from federation, but said the MoU with the NT was a different proposition.

“For a start, we’re looking to build these relationships across all our borders,” he said.

“Our stance is an outward-looking stance.”

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