Is this the wrong way around?
No, but I did an embarrasing cut'n'paste:o. :-) Anyway, I thought the Calendar module's localtime timezone guessing system could be made to look for this to improve its guessing. Closer looking at TZnames.pmod makes me guess it might be the wrong approach, though -- the mapping timezone_expert_tree does have an entry for Europe/Amsterdam, but for some reason it doesn't seem to help. This nearby comment:
// note that at least Red Hat 6.2 has an error in the time database, // so a lot of Europeean (Paris, Brussels) times get to be Luxembourg
suggests it could be worth testing whether Debian is showing similar bugs or if the expert tree needs improvements.