Councillor Adrian Schrinner is not the “Mayor for Queensland” and should tread carefully on applying a south-east centric view to state-wide issues like daylight savings, Katter’s Australian Party Leader Robbie Katter has said.

Mr Katter, speaking in response to the Brisbane Lord Mayor’s calls for a new referendum on introducing Daylight Saving Time (DST) in Queensland within two years, said calls for change were fundamentally lacking in compassion.

He said while DST would present a degree of convenience to the south-east, it would lengthen already oppressively hot Summer days and dramatically erode liveability across the geographic majority of Queensland.

“We have a very serious issue in the regions – particularly in the west – at the moment with trying to attract people to man the mines, work in the industries and run the farms,” he said.

“You can correlate declines in productivity with the ability to get people to live out in the areas where they are needed to keep the economy going.

“Try doing this if you make policy decisions that affect liveability to the degree that DST would.

“If we see DST introduced out in the rural and regional areas, then you’ll be drawing the curtain on a 45 degree day at 8pm at night.

“DST for Queensland is a very one-eyed view and successive governments have stayed away from the issue for a reason – they have said: we govern for an entire state, not just the south-east.

“If the Brisbane Mayor wants the Queensland Government’s commitment to rural and regional Queensland tested, then he and other pro-DST proponents should continue down the path they’re on.”

Mr Katter said he, and the KAP, would support a referendum on DST in Queensland on the one condition that it also posed a question about whether North Queensland should become its own state.