Lay down your arms

Re Bill Stefaniak’s great column (CW 24 October), and Mario Stivala’s letter on page 16: I would like to open with a quote that may be from either the late Golda Meir, Israel’s fourth Prime Minister for the period 1969–74 and amplified by Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech, or directly by Netanyahu, who has said: “If the Arab lay down their arms there would no more war, but if Israel lays down its weapons there would be no more Israel.”
I believe this quote is 100 per cent accurate. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah are interested in the safety of their own people. They are only interested in destroying Israel, whatever it might take to reach that end.
I agree with Bill’s comment noting that Golda had stated during her time as Israel’s PM that you can’t make peace with someone who wants to kill you.
I would like to close with the following quote I heard many years ago and its truth keeps ringing in my ears: “If you can keep your head when everybody around you is losing his, then it is very probable that you don’t understand the situation.”

– Paul Myers, Karabar NSW

Roos not pests to be eradicated

Recently I heard about an experience of an acquaintance who had a distressing experience involving one of the ACT Government rangers. After witnessing a car accident which resulted in the death of a female kangaroo who was carrying a joey. A woman at the scene undertook a pouch check and found the joey had survived. 

A ranger at the scene advised that they would take her to court for rescuing an Eastern Grey Kangaroo joey and refusing to hand the joey to him. The ranger’s intention was to kill the joey by blunt force trauma. While the woman argued with the ranger, an onlooker who witnessed the accident stood by crying, shocked that the ranger planned to kill the joey. Sadly, the joey died at the scene. 

I believe that most Canberrans would be outraged by the way the Greens/Labor government treats Eastern Grey Kangaroos, simply as though they are pests to be eradicated. 

• Rebecca Marks, Palmerston

Blight of SUVs

SUVs, big and small, now outsell sedans despite the fact that they are generally more expensive, less fuel efficient and less environmentally friendly; they are also more likely to cause more damage to other vehicles and their occupants when involved in accidents. Could it possibly be that SUV buyers are thinking more about self-preservation than anything else, as research has shown that apparently owing to their higher elevation SUV occupants are 50 per cent safer from injury than those in a sedan? Their higher elevation provides SUV drivers with better vision, however it is at the expense of sedan drivers as they cannot “see through” them, particularly so if one parks adjacent to your car in a parking lot, as it means you have to blindly reverse into traffic, and that’s why I reverse park into parking bays.

• Mario Stivala, Belconnen

Hard-working Aussies

What a wonderful article you wrote and published about Maria Ljubic the cleaner at the APH.

You should do more on the hard-working average Australians that go about just doing their jobs but without them their workplaces would fall over.

• Paul Batista

Perils of renewables

First, Douglas Mackenzie’s letter (CW letters 26 October). If he could give me one valid reason why Jacinta [Price] could not become PM, I would be more than happy to change my mind. I think she could and so do a lot of people I know of.

Second, Ian Pilsner’s letter. I agree with Ian entirely, apart from one minor detail. Wind and solar strictly speaking are not renewables. Wind turbines cannot be fully recycled, the blades have to be chopped up and buried. Solar panels can possibly be partially recycled, but at the moment it is too fiddly and costly to make it worthwhile. If they could all be recycled, then why are there so many left in place where they died, cut up and buried, or like the wind turbines in Queensland, taken down and dumped in the bush? In the USA there are massive fields of dead turbines and solar panels left in place to rot.

As to the birds getting killed, what Douglas fails to realise or ignore, there are rare raptors that fly high that are getting killed by the blades so they are being decimated. The birds that are getting killed by cars and flying into buildings are the smaller birds that exist in large quantities.

The wind turbines create sub-sonics, and when positioned offshore they affect the communication and navigation of whales and dolphins. Since the offshore turbines were installed in the USA, there has been a vast increase in whales being washed ashore and dying.

• Vi Evans, Macgregor

Not enough time for nuclear

Ian Pilsner (CW letters, 26 October) should dismount from his ideological high horse and face reality. In his attempts to discredit me, he has grasped at straw arguments. Mr Pilsner claims that “20 (US nuclear) reactors … are planning to operate up to 80 years”. Not one has yet reached that milestone.

He also ignores the killer blow. Given that climate experts insist that advanced economies, which produce the lion’s share of CO2 emissions, must reduce emissions to zero by 2040, or 2045 at the very latest, Australia does not have the time to change federal legislation, train technicians and operating staff, and build the necessary number of nuclear reactors before it is too late. Meanwhile, renewable energy is right at our doorstep.

The argument that “vehicles and glass walled buildings … don’t produce any energy” is irrelevant: are we are counting energy produced or birds killed? Furthermore, “giant bird-killing structures” is simply irrational emotion.

• Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin

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