IN her article "How to ask someone if they're vaccinated" (Herald, 9/11) Vijaya Sundararajan suggests it is critical that we ask visitors to our home if they are double vaccinated.
Why? It's common knowledge that vaccinated people can still contract COVID and pass it on to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people. At no point in her article does Vijaya name these "visitors" when we all know she is more than likely referring to our family and friends who are more than just "visitors" in our lives, perhaps suggesting we need emotional distance before deciding to allow an unvaccinated "visitor" into our home.
There is already enough division in our world and our lives without now looking at our dear family and friends in this way, as mere "visitors". I am sure that my family and friends would be careful and considerate about coming to my home if they believed themselves to be contagious with any kind of illness, whether it be a cold, flu, a stomach bug or indeed COVID, as I would be in going to their home.
I understand sometimes it is not apparent that you are contagious however in the case of COVID this applies to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people and I would suggest a vaccinated person may be more dismissive of symptoms, believing they are protected by the vaccine.
While it offers some protection, it does not offer 100 per cent protection. I think the more critical question to ask here is why do Vijaya Sundararajan and people in her profession, as well as journalists and the government, feel the need to perpetuate this perception that we need to be afraid and or distrustful of our family and friends? The answer to this question is anything but "casual" and "non-judgemental". That is what I fear.
Linda Mueller, Edgeworth
Coal likened to drug dealing
DRUGS are unhealthy. They cause financial and health damage to everyone whose lives are touched by them. But drug bosses argue that if they don't supply the drug, someone else will, since the customer demand will remain and there is money to be made. Drug bosses should never become addicts. If drug bosses are drug addicts, they should wean themselves off their product.
The same reasoning applies to Australia re: its coal exports. We know that the product is injurious, but if we don't earn the export dollars, other nations will. It is fine for our coal customers in faraway places to continue to burn coal, indeed our federal government encourages it.
Nevertheless, Australia will wean itself off coal and fulfil its international obligations and reach its net zero emissions target. The problem is that coal is not an illegal drug and that the "faraway places" may as well be here in Australia. We all share the same air and the same oceans. This is the case of the biter bit.
How do we get drug producers such as opium poppy cultivators and ice drug labs to stop producing drugs? How do we get Hunter coal mining towns to stop digging up and exporting coal? Putting a moratorium on production or destroying producers' livelihoods doesn't work. It just raises prices and encourages production. Other producers, somewhere else, step into the breach. Producers of drugs and coal need to be given more profitable alternative products to produce. Potential customers need to be educated so that they switch their demand to these healthier alternative products.
Geoff Black, Caves Beach
Fossils can't be competitive
AUSTRALIA is blessed with the world's best solar conditions, and among the best wind conditions, for renewable energy generation. Enough to provide many times our current electricity demand, and at record low prices.
The quickest and cheapest way to decarbonize our atmosphere is to take advantage of the technological advances that have already seen renewable wind and solar energy (even including transmission upgrades and energy storage) become the cheapest forms of generation.
Luckily we don't need any new technology to get to a 90 per cent renewable electricity grid as new technology needs both taxes and time. All we need is a rapid injection of much more renewable generation and storage using well proven existing technology.
Oil, gas and coal will never again be competitive, and the federal government's massive investment of taxpayer's money into carbon capture and storage (CCS) will only add costs, ensuring CCS, even if they get it to work, will never play any part in our two biggest emission sectors, energy and transport.
"Green" hydrogen gas (produced using renewable energy) will be an important energy source that generates no emissions, but producing it using fossil fuels is environmental madness, and neither process will be cost competitive if electricity can do the job.
Richard Mallaby, Wangi Wangi
Where is your photo ID?
WHO does not have photo ID? People without a drivers licence, older citizens, people with disabilities or others that have no passports and of course the homeless.
There is currently before federal parliament a bill designed to compel voters to show photo ID in order to cast a ballot. When we can use apps to make our ID available for the COVID situation, is it not possible to do the same for electoral security? The on-paper rolls have been outdated for many years. Legislation that limits some citizens' ability to have the little say they do have in our democracy. The solutions to simple practical issues are put aside in order to cut spending so the legal custom of pork barrelling is ever present. It is illegal to have a private relationship with someone you may be in love with, because they may have influence over you, but totally legal to be electorally disadvantaged by a party member who is senior in the party and holds your future in the balance.
Try to get your Seniors ID at the Roads and Maritime Services, (RTA for us oldies), before they call an election. Seems you have to wait a year to book an appointment for your P plates test. Got to love getting back to normal. Smile, you're on government camera.
Lyn Rendle, Rankin Park
Magic memories
CAN anyone remember the Kwinana garage at the nine-ways at Broadmeadow. I think it was a BP located roughly where Belflora Florist is currently located.
I had a job for a while driving their promotional Goggomobil around town to advertise their garage. I believe it was a two or three cylinder two-stroke, noisy as buggery. Painted in green and yellow this iconic Aussie car was a vehicle that stood out in Newcastle. Also does anyone remember the pitman who sold pies out the back of his old wooden baker's cart across the road from the Century Theatre at the nine-ways where at interval of the surfing movies such as "The morning of the Earth" and "Crystal Voyager", everyone would pile out of the pictures to buy a pie and sauce for threepence. Or the night we booed The Beach Boys off the stage at the Century for being two hours late and giving us a one-hour show.
Things and scenes like these should be remembered and shared. Write in and tell us to rekindle memories about our great city.
Graeme Kime, Cameron Park
SHORT TAKES
I'VE got a solution that's a lot cheaper and a lot more effective than Angus and Scott's $1 billion dollar waste. How about trees? Plant some trees which capture a lot more carbon than this unproven technology. Or just stop burning coal, the carbon is already captured in fossil fuels so stop releasing it? Invest that $1 billion in renewable energies that have proven them self already or battery technology. This is just their excuse to keep burning fossil fuels for their rich mates.
Brian Markson, Charlestown
THANKS Carol Selmeci for your letter (Don't lose city's old charm (10/11). I first came to Newcastle, training as a nurse over 60 years ago. They sure were 'the good old days'. You captured the essence of a wonderful day out which was catching the bus into town and walking from one end of town to the other, wearing our hat, gloves and high heels. My children can't believe that is what we did. The Mall was the beginning of the end of "our Disneyland". The rest is history thanks to 'Rejuvenating Newcastle", Supercars and the stupid white elephant tram. When I returned to Newcastle 11 years ago, I lived in the Azura building overlooking the Newcastle Beach. The Supercars was the final straw regarding the "loss of the city's old charm" for me.
Pat Garnet, Wickham
MAC Maguire (Short Takes, 9/11) I too am inclined to agree with said assessment of the PM. Scotty from Marketing constantly reminds me of the joke about someone incompetent in a position of power being compared to a turtle stuck on top of a post: You know he didn't get there by himself, he doesn't belong up there, he doesn't know what to do while he's up there, and you have to wonder what kind of idiot put him there to begin with.
Adz Carter, Newcastle
PAUL Keating should no longer be given a platform in our national discourse. He is a China sycophant, who in this article is advocating Australia reboot the discredited policy of appeasement. Lost our way quotes Keating, 'Australia shouldn't trouble itself too much with tensions involving Taiwan', Neville Chamberlain would be so proud, he gave up Rhineland, Poland, the Sudetenland in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Belgium to Adolf Hitler before he learned appeasement was a policy of weakness. Australia should not follow such folly.
Luke Brown, Hamilton South
RE: Short takes 5/11 John Levick, surprise, John has taken the word of Macron over our PM. I never would have guessed (typical Labor). The cost has ballooned, years of problems, we had get out clauses, so whether it was Liberal or Labor, we were never going to stay with the French. And as for lying, remember Julia Gillard? "There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead". (Oops).
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