The Territory Planning Authority is responsible for maintaining the character and streetscape of our older suburbs because this is an outcome that is important to the community. But the TPA really doesn't want the responsibility of delivering this outcome.
They see their role as promoting and approving new developments as quickly as possible. That's also the easy outcome developers want.
Nothing says "respect and protect the character and streetscape" of the inner suburbs of Ainslie and Reid like approving a 29-metre telecommunications tower on the corner of Limestone Avenue and Quick Street Ainslie. That's across Limestone from Olim's Hotel on the way to the Australian War Memorial.
Before you squeak that we need telecommunications towers, there were three other less obtrusive, viable locations 100 metres away.
Instead the TPA believed they had no option but to approve the infrastructure developer's preferred option. It was also likely to be the developer's cheapest option.
The TPA had no choice but to approve the gift of development rights to the most obtrusive and damaging 90-square-metre site on unleased endangered grasslands.
The TPA need to work a bit harder to protect the character of Canberra's suburbs because this is important.
Reportedly close to 20,000 merchant seamen are currently stranded in the Strait of Hormuz, and in the vicinity. How long will it be before supplies run out, as charity organisations delivering supplies cannot keep up with demand, and are doing so at high risk to themselves?
What will happen to these unfortunate seamen as after two months of boredom, harsh living conditions, and isolation, their mental and physical state has to be questioned? As there are no substantial medical facilities and medicos on board the stranded ships, that is a real cause for concern.
Under the circumstances will they all be eventually repatriated, or be abandoned by the ship owners, or will the rest of the world intervene to force Iran to reopen the strait to shipping? The United Nations has its hands tied owing to their ridiculous "right of veto" rule; in this instance it is nothing more than a toothless tiger.
It also raises the question: are the seamen being paid by the shipping companies while stranded?
Is it any wonder that gas export taxes were rejected in the federal budget? We need look no further than our broken lobbying laws.
Currently, a large number of industry lobbyists are not even required to be on the Australian government register of lobbyists. This includes major gas producers like Santos and Shell who have easy access to the inner sanctums of our Federal Parliament.
As your writer Christian Slattery so aptly points out, "when lobbying is conducted by extremely powerful and cashed-up vested interests from gambling, to gas, to weapons industries it creates a significant imbalance in our democracy." A Senate inquiry was held two years ago, but we are still awaiting a response from the government.
Where is the transparency? The Australian people deserve better.
The ACT government has been embroiled in a bitter pay dispute with essential workers such as teachers, which escalated recently with workers striking in protest of low pay offers. While refusing to award our ACT government workers with a decent pay rise that meets inflation, the government seems to be heavily invested in killing our precious wildlife.
Over many years our ACT government has spent over $5 million killing kangaroos, wallabies and their babies in a brutal and cruel manner that most Canberrans would find completely unacceptable. Instead of wasting ratepayers' funds on a wildlife culling program that has no demonstrated scientific benefits whatsoever, the government could invest this money in pay rises for government workers so they can put food on their families' tables and pay their bills.
The government's harsh attitude to government workers and its brutal treatment of wildlife is not consistent with Labor values and needs to be challenged by the community.
The plans for light rail stage 2B include what are effectively railway level crossings across the major roads on the Woden side of Parliament House, one on Capital Circle and the other on State Circle. ACT Labor calls them "signalised intersections" - rail level crossings without boom gates.
While rail level crossings are being removed in Melbourne at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars because they are dangerous and slow traffic, ACT Labor is intending to spend several billion dollars on a project that will add them to Canberra.
The proposed stage 2B is a train wreck waiting to happen - exorbitant cost, slower than the current express bus route, additional carbon emissions, and permanently slowing the major traffic route to Woden, Weston, Molonglo and Tuggeranong due to the extra intersections.
Hopefully ACT senator David Pocock, who is on the federal joint standing committee on the National Capital, will at least insist on a public cost-benefit study for stage 2B. Unfortunately, Labor's Alicia Payne, who is chair of the committee, and Senator Katy Gallagher, who originally facilitated the project, have so far toed the ACT Labor line rather than properly analysing the proposed extension to Woden.
No John Metcalfe (Letters, May 30), claims by the propaganda flotilla activists of Israeli brutality are quickly unravelling in the absence of evidence and, in fact, due to photographic and video evidence to the contrary. The similarity to Gaza is in the use of propaganda to tarnish Israel's reputation.
Israel's military hasn't agreed with the Hamas casualty figures - one unnamed official agreed with the overall tally. What Israel's military, and experts on urban warfare, do say is that the percentage of fighters killed as against civilians is better than any other recent urban war, and that the civilian casualties are largely due to Hamas illegally embedding itself among civilians.
Therefore Israel's conduct of the war did not breach international law. Neither did its interception of the flotilla. The UN's Palmer Commission determined that Israel's Gaza blockade is legal, and it is legal to enforce a blockade by intercepting ships intending to breach it in international waters.
In his 1964 book, The Lucky Country, Donald Horne criticised the cultural cringe of those times, our poor leadership and the importing of ideas instead of investing in local innovation.
That was the time when a move against negative gearing was needed. The move now by the Albanese government is far too late.
The problem for Australia today is much more than the over-reliance on the luck of natural resources and geography which has persisted since the 1960s. It is most simply expressed in the halving of the number of births per population size.
If a generation doesn't have enough babies to build its future workforce it has to rely on migration, thus creating the problems so obvious now.
There are three main factors in the low birth rate that have been building since the sexual revolution: the downgrading of motherhood in favour of career and independence, the rise of pornography which destroys the capability of a man to love and respect a woman, and the insidious nature of the social media which severely restricts the full human social contact so necessary for relationships amongst young men and women to develop.
Unfortunately, it is beyond the capability of Prime Minister Albanese and his progressive left to understand, let alone acknowledge, the critical role of these simple human issues. They are committed to the madness of legislated womanhood (Peter Waterhouse, Letters, May 29).
So Australia is not going to get three new nuclear submarines from the US. Surprise, surprise.
The Americans obviously saw us coming.
Many people have been saying from the start of AUKUS that the US cannot be trusted. With reports in recent days of the US forces merging more closely with the Israeli military, we need to disentangle our military from the US/Israeli forces.
We are already complicit in the conflict in Gaza, we should not get more deeply mired in American-sponsored violence.
