Daylight Saving is back: Why do we still change the clocks?

<b>New Zealanders are about to lose an hour of sleep and the twice-yearly ritual of changing our clocks has a surprisingly strange history, reports Mava Moayyed.</b> At <a href="https://www.1news.co.nz/2026/08/20/how-long-is-it-until-we-change-our-clocks-for-daylight-saving/">2am next Sunday, September 27</a>, New Zealanders will move their clocks forward an hour. That means one less hour in bed and potentially a few days of disrupted sleep as our body clocks catch up, and we try and figure out how to change the clock on the oven and the car. <a href="https://www.tvnz.co.nz/player/newsclip/explained-the-strange-reason-daylight-saving-came-about-and-why-we-still-do-it"><b>Daylight saving explained - Watch on TVNZ+</b></a> And for some people, changing the time is a much bigger job. Jamie McKinnon is a clockmaker and the owner of the Precision Watch Company in Auckland. He looks after more than 100 clocks in his shop. "There's hundreds of them, just hundreds," he says. It’s also his job to change 22 public clocks around Auckland and Northland.