...
> I don't seem to be able to get rid of the time zone any of the
> ways I've tried.
I'm pretty sure that you are running a pre-7.2 database. Upgrade to get
the proper "without time zone" behavior; before 7.2 there was no
"without time zone" type, and the parser folded everything into the one
type that was available.
But you really want time zones from what you have said. You just want
them to behave properly. So make sure that your system is running with
the correct time zone, and make sure that you have specified the GUC
option to use Australian time zones (read the docs to get my rant about
Australia having fully one quarter of the time zones in PostgreSQL ;)
- Thomas