[Zope] DateTime - Date format problems

I believe I have discovered a link between the DateTime module and and stress related heart failure. After many annoying timezone related bugs (AEST != US/Eastern, despite pythons evil attempts to thwart me), I am down to one last major problem. I have a Plone/Zope based website, and need users to be able to enter dates in the format DD/MM/YYYY. DateTime has deciced to make my life interesting by deciding that it will sometimes use that format, and other times use MM/DD/YYYY. Is there a way to force DateTime to always use DD/MM/YYYY no matter how much it's feindish algorithm decides different? (strftime isnt an option either- I need to get it into the DateTime object correctly in the first place)