Sometime within the coming week the Western Australian government will vote upon a bill to commence a 3 year trial of Daylight Savings in WA.
Whether you're a fan of daylight savings or not, the bill has one fatal flaw - it is due to commence at 2am on the 3rd of December, 2006. Less than 2 weeks from today, or about 10-12 days from when it goes before a vote of the upper house.
If it is passed, the implications of this change are significant and wide ranging. From an IT perspective it means that every computer in WA will need to be updated to be aware of the change - preferably by installing an updated timezone file beforehand, or at a minimum by manually modifying the time on the 3rd (although this will result in GMT/offset issues).
But it goes much further than that. All flights into WA from other states/countries will arrive an hour later than expected (or leave an hour early, which is unlikely). Flights out will most likely need to be rescheduled to allow for the late arrivals. Airlines normally build daylight savings changes into their schedules months in advance, but with less than 2 weeks notice they are not going to be able to do so.
The same goes for pretty much anything else that crosses the state border - call centre staff communicating with other states, other transport, B2B communications (especially in a state which hasn't had daylight savings for 15 years), etc. These are issues that occur in other states that already have daylight savings, but in those cases we've all had more than 10 days to plan for them!
Of course, this impact has either not occurred to the politicians, or they simply don't care. Given that the bill originally had a start date of the 1st of December (ie, Friday morning) which was changed to the 3rd they do obviously realise that there would be an impact, so...
If you happen to be in WA, or have Solaris systems that use the Australia/Perth or Australia/West timezones for some other reason, then you will need to take action if this legislation is passed. As we most likely won't have time to get a patch created and through Sun's patch testing process in less than the 2 weeks the government is going to give us we've instead created InfoDoc 87748 which describes a workaround to update the Solaris timezone files with the new details. This document will be updated as more details are available.