LETTERS
Illustration: Cathy Wilcox
The decision to abstain in the UN vote to grant Palestine observer status reveals that the Labor Party's humanist heart still beats (''Backbench revolt forces PM to drop Israel support'', November 28).
It showed that the flame that lit the light on the hill has not been entirely distinguished. Also it showed that the compassion for the underdog that once dominated the political divide is not entirely dead.
Reg Wilding Wollongong
At last the Labor caucus has had the backbone to roll Julia Gillard on an important policy issue - Palestinian membership of the UN. Maybe this will give members the courage to enhance their electoral prospects by deposing both Gillard and Wayne Swan in favour of people such as Kevin Rudd, Penny Wong and Bob Carr.
In the process, they could show that the faction leaders who deposed Rudd are not as powerful as they once were. The polls show that the electorate would be delighted.
Colin Simpson Little Hartley
I rejoice at the news that Australia will not be joining the pro-Israel bloc with seven other states (including the Marshall Islands) to vote against Palestine's observer status at the UN. However, it is disturbing to see that Julia Gillard needed so much persuasion to even agree to an abstention, let alone a yes vote.
It would be untenable for Australia to take its place in the Security Council obviously so beholden to the pro-Israel lobby. You would hope that this is the beginning of a more independent stand in Middle Eastern affairs.
Susan Daniels Balmain
What price silence? We spend millions getting a greater voice at the UN and then abstain on a key vote.
David Burke Ashfield
Israel has offered to negotiate with the Palestinians with no pre-conditions for years. The Palestinian Authority governing the West Bank has refused to negotiate, just as in 2008 and 2001 when it rejected substantive peace offers, with no counter-offer.
The Hamas leadership governing Gaza explicitly seeks the destruction of Israel and launches thousands of rockets targeting civilians. The Palestinians enjoy an automatic majority at the United Nations due to the support of a large Arab bloc of dictatorships and extremist governments, but countries with moral authority, such as the US and Canada, recognise the path to peace is through engagement with Israel, not unilateral claims, rejection of negotiations and incitement to violence, extremism and hatred.
It's sad that the Australian Labor Party would rather pander to Muslim populations in local electorates then take a moral stand and that Julia Gillard lacks the determination and conviction to advance her sound views on this issue within the party that she's supposed to be leading.
Mark Lewkovitz Edgecliff
When Australia took a stand against apartheid in South Africa, we were on the right side of history. Our government, in deciding to abstain when the UN votes on observer status for Palestine, is merely avoiding the wrong side, a much weaker moral position.
Jennifer Killen St Peters
Melting Arctic sounds an alarm that must be heeded
Ben Cubby's article makes it clear that the world has passed the climate point of no return (''Where even the earth is melting'', November 28). From here, even with the most stringent imaginable action to restrict greenhouse emissions, humans face environmental catastrophe on an unprecedented scale. Failure to heed the message might well make the planet uninhabitable for humans within a century or so.
From now, politicians and captains of industry who delay or resist urgent action to restrict greenhouse gas emissions are knowingly placing the lives of our children and grandchildren at risk. This must not be allowed.
Doug Evans Clifton Hill
More alarming news about the release of the powerful greenhouse gas methane from a melting Arctic permafrost. The current circus that Canberra has become is ostensibly about integrity. What a pity that the dolts we elect to represent us are unable to direct some of that concern for integrity towards a viable future for coming generations.
Rod Hughes Epping
The front-page article is the usual mixture of science and guesswork. The Earth is warming and the Arctic ice cap is melting. This is scientifically proven and measured fact. It is caused by human action - this is assumption. In fact, the present warming is identical with similar phases of the climate cycle, which has been unchanged for as long as the planet has existed.
Buried within the article are these references: "Ancient forests locked under ice tens of thousands of years ago", and "The last time a majority of permafrost carbon was thawed and lost to the atmosphere, temperatures increased by 6 degrees". Can the advocates of human-caused climate change explain what caused "last time"?
The assumption warming is caused by human action is guesswork, and on the scientific evidence, seems highly unlikely.
David Knowles Chittaway Bay
Is anyone minding the shop in all this hoopla?
Can someone please advise me who exactly is running the country while the Coalition keeps nagging away at the government over something that happened two decades ago (''Bishop backs down over fraud claims'', November 28)?
Perhaps we should just lock the politicians in a dark room and they can come out when they have apologised to the nation for their childish behaviour.
Steve Shields Port Macquarie
Julie Bishop is all bluster and wind with her defamatory and unproven allegations against the Prime Minister. Instead of a prosecuting powerhouse, Ms Bishop is proving to be a coiffed court jester emulating the role played by Donald Trump in his attempts to delegitimise the Obama presidency.
Robert Barnes Wedderburn
You have to have a bit of sympathy for Tony Abbott. The carbon tax issue has lost its impact, there remains little difference between the parties on the issue of stopping the boats and now the AWU matter, despite the assistance of some sections of the media, is not providing any new material. Giving the hospital pass to Julie Bishop on the issue, however, may have been the best decision in the circumstances.
Denis Goodwin Dee Why
Ralph Blewitt and Julie Bishop are in a coffee bar. In walks Godwin Grech …
Harry Williamson Federal
One-sided benefit
I refer to the editorial on smart meters (''Smart meters are the future but it's not clear who is going to pay'', November 28) and wish to draw attention to consequences that have not been identified. Smart meters can be programmed to charge a premium tariff during peak demand. While paying a premium price for the use of luxury services such as airconditioning may be valid, other implications exist.
One peak demand period coincides with evening meal times. Households that rely on electricity to prepare meals will pay a premium to cook the evening meal if smart meters are installed and programmed for time-of-use rates. This impost is not equitable.
You mention also the smart meters' ability to control equipment within a particular premises. Most residential premises these days are cabled so that final sub-circuits terminate at a sub-distribution board, usually located in the kitchen. All home units are cabled this way. The smart meter would be located in the meter box external to the building. Home units generally have a common meter room. Substantial additional cabling between the meter box/room and the final sub-circuits at the sub-board would be required to facilitate this feature.
Smart meters benefit no-one but the electricity suppliers.
Ian Ross Fishermans Paradise
Questions of health risks, but also trust
Justice Victoria Bennett's rejection of a mother's homeopathy regime must be applauded (''Homeopathy regime is rejected as judge tells parents to immunise child'', November 28).
Homeopathic medicines are not vaccines and are not a replacement for conventional medical treatment of serious diseases or infections. The efficacy of homeopathic vaccines in preventing infectious diseases has not been adequately scientifically demonstrated, and parents who rely on such alternatives to traditional vaccines are not only recklessly risking their children's health, but the health of the community at large.
Sandi Glass Marsfield
Wow, voodoo hoodoo alive and well and living in the 21st century. Poor bloody kids.
Andrew Millett Annandale
Surely the issue of immunisation is neither here nor there when seen in the context of the appalling breach of trust of the father allowing his partner to secretly take the child for medical procedures that he knew would distress the mother. Being ''right'' is a shallow victory when you've acted so inhumanely.
As well as passing a judgment that the parents must immunise, I hope the Family Court passes judgment on one parent's inability to respect the other and co-parent for the sake of the child.
Bobby Quinn Newtown
A tale of two terms
Although overall housing affordability may have improved the crisis in access to affordable housing has worsened at the same time (''Sydney housing most affordable since 2009'', November 28).
The concepts of housing affordability and affordable housing measure two different things. Housing affordability, as used by the Housing Industry Association and the Commonwealth Bank, measures movement in housing prices relative to wage trends across the whole housing market.
Affordable housing, as used by the NSW government and many researchers, measures the availability of housing to households on very low and low incomes (up to 120 per cent of median incomes) and where occupants are not in housing stress (paying less than 30 per cent of the income in housing costs).
Consecutive interest rate cuts, rising wage levels, especially for middle and higher income earners, and marginally improved housing supply should have a positive effect on overall housing costs.
However, there is no evidence that these factors have made the battle of the bottom 30 per cent of income earners any easier in finding secure affordable housing, especially in Sydney.
This is why the market alone cannot effectively break the affordable housing crisis we have. Improved housing affordability may help those lucky enough to have mortgages and who are struggling. But it won't make much difference to the bulk of low and modest income earners locked into the private rental market, social housing or who are homeless.
Gary Moore Leichhardt
Healthy dose of incompetence
Three weeks ago, I became a victim of the state's crumbling health system, and the manifest incompetence of Wollongong Public Hospital.
I presented at the emergency department with an obvious infection immediately over a hip prosthesis.
I told the triage nurse that I had had many battles with infection over four decades stemming from a machine-gun wound in Vietnam in 1969. I pointed out that in my case, given the past history, infection was potentially devastating in a man with a number of prosthesis. It was to no avail.
I sat there for more than six hours while the triage sister put through drunks with split lips and the like before finally putting me through to see a doctor who subsequently confirmed the infection. It then took another 16 hours and an ultrasound before being admitted to hospital and the first intravenous antibiotics administered. But the antibiotic was a generic one that did not take into account the previous history of infection they had been told about. No wound culture was taken, nor any aeration carried out. I was discharged after four days with oral antibiotics.
Four days later, with the infection now raging in the hip joint and the hip prosthesis now compromised, I was readmitted to hospital and an operation finally performed to determine the nature of the infection and what antibiotic would be required.
An emergency operation was carried out four days later to remove the prosthesis in an attempt to prevent the infection reaching other prostheses further down and osteomyelitis taking hold.
All this because of a cavalier attitude by a triage nurse and dithering administration.
Don Tate Albion Park
More than able to stand on alone
Thank you, Ross Gittins, for your critique of Ian McLean's Why Australia Prospered (''Lucky country also blessed with skilful management'', November 28).
For years I have had to listen to naysayers claiming that Australia needs the monarchy because ''the Queen gives stability to the country'' and now Gittins and McLean scotch that talk. They are able to see the strength of this country and do not think that we must fall back on ''Mother'' for stability.
McLean gives much of the credit for the state of our country to the quality of our economic and political ''institutions'' - legal system, property rights, control of corruption, political arrangements and social norms - and Gittins backs him up with knowledgeable arguments.
If a non-economist like me can see that our institutions are strong, what is wrong with those who argue that we need someone to hold our hands, especially when we can see in the past few years that the country supposedly holding our hand is not able to look after itself.
So let's get the ball rolling - onwards to the Australian republic and a bright and independent future.
Gloria Healey Condell Park
Hail to the bully
Why is it that the US trumpets loud and hard about democracy and democratisation (to the extent of invading ''non-democratic'' nations so as to impose a democracy) yet is the first to act the bully and threaten smaller, vulnerable populations when they exercise their own democracy to try to upgrade their own status in the world (''US warns Palestine UN vote threaten aid flows'', November 28)?
John Boutagy Mosman
Fiasco for ASIO
Could ASIO please counsel both sides of federal politics? All of this bickering must be terrible for national security?
Graeme Gibson Caringbah
Suburban bus tour
Actually, Jim Gentles (Letters, November 28), my bus doesn't take 45 minutes because it is held up by cars.
It is because it goes along a tortuous route and takes in several suburbs along the way. I had one bus driver who wouldn't believe that Abbotsford was close to the city, as the bus route is so long.
If all these suburbs had their own frequent express buses into the city it would be a different story. I would be very happy to catch public transport if it was more efficient. But this would involve buying more buses, ferries and trains, and successive governments don't seem to consider this as they are hell bent on focusing their money and efforts on our road systems.
Don't get me started on the lack of cross-suburb transport. Not all roads lead to the CBD.
Margaret Grove Abbotsford
Men's club
We males should initiate the long-haul fightback and begin by calling it Father Nature. What about it, brothers? Let's not take it lying down.
Rod Matthews Fairfield (Vic)
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