diff --git a/railties/CHANGELOG b/railties/CHANGELOG
index 5a80e21446..86b30244ba 100644
--- a/railties/CHANGELOG
+++ b/railties/CHANGELOG
@@ -1,5 +1,7 @@
 *SVN*
 
+* rake time:zones:local finds correct base utc offset for zones in the Southern Hemisphere [Geoff Buesing]
+
 * Don't require rails/gem_builder during rails initialization, it's only needed for the gems:build task. [rick]
 
 * script/performance/profiler compatibility with the ruby-prof >= 0.5.0. Closes #9176. [Catfish]
diff --git a/railties/lib/tasks/misc.rake b/railties/lib/tasks/misc.rake
index d083a8aef4..61042595f9 100644
--- a/railties/lib/tasks/misc.rake
+++ b/railties/lib/tasks/misc.rake
@@ -24,7 +24,10 @@ namespace :time do
     
     desc 'Displays names of time zones recognized by the Rails TimeZone class with the same offset as the system local time'
     task :local do
-      build_time_zone_list(:all, Time.now.beginning_of_year.utc_offset)
+      jan_offset = Time.now.beginning_of_year.utc_offset
+      jul_offset = Time.now.beginning_of_year.change(:month => 7).utc_offset
+      offset = jan_offset < jul_offset ? jan_offset : jul_offset
+      build_time_zone_list(:all, offset)
     end
     
     # to find UTC -06:00 zones, OFFSET can be set to either -6, -6:00 or 21600