Let Eastman case rest

In the past quarter of a century, millions of ACT taxpayers' dollars have been absorbed in this tawdry matter.

If Eastman did indeed kill Winchester, he has certainly served enough time behind bars.

No public interest would be served by sentencing him to more jail time. There is no evidence that he would rush out and kill another high-ranking policeman. If, however, Eastman is innocent of the crime, nothing can repay him for his lost years in incarceration.

It is very unlikely that a new trial held 27 years after the crime is going to arrive at a safe verdict. I suspect that the only people who want this soap opera to continue are the Australian Federal Police and the Director of Public Prosecutions. Neither have come out smelling of roses so far. Perhaps they feel that if they could get Eastman found guilty again, their reputations would be restored. But is this what the system of justice is putin place to do?

Is it there to protect the egos of those in the prosecutors' corner or to determine guilt or innocence without fear or favour? Corbell could enhance his own standing as Attorney-General by making a pragmatic decision: he should pardon Eastman and give him an ex-gratia payment for the years he has lost as the result of a conviction brought about by a dodgy process.

This would save the taxpayer alot of money and all the stakeholders a lot of bother.

With the Eastman matter closed, the AFP and DPP could move on to chasing 21st-century criminals, rather than pursuing a vendetta from the last century.

Mike Reddy, Curtin

Canberra Times readers with long memories will remember Rumpole of the Bailey and the famous Mr Justice Bullingham, aka the Mad Bull. One of his famous lines, when Rumpole wascross-examining witnesses, was to intercede with: "Are you questioning the evidence of the police?"

It seems that the recent reviews of the Eastman case were also tinged with the same approach. The DPP and senior police who are so ardently pursuing Eastman may think that they are protecting the reputations of their agencies. They are not. The ability to admit the mistakes of the past is crucial to any real credibility and, now, the more they pursue Eastman, the less credibility they retain.

Stan Marks, Hawker

Scheme a bit fluffy

There's something wrong with Planning Minister Mick Gentleman's arithmetic about the cost of the government's Mr Fluffy Homes scheme ("Fluffy blocks go under the hammer as new phase begins", April 13, p1), which suggests the government paid Mr Fluffy home owners less than the market value of their homes.

For example, he says the government has committed $740million to the scheme, and the net cost after selling the Mr Fluffy blocks will be $400million, which means the government will get $340 million from the sale of the blocks.

However, earlier statements said the ACT government would repay 70 per cent of the Commonwealth's $1 billion loan for the scheme ($700 million) from the sale of the blocks. That's a total of $731,000 for the 1022 blocks involved, almost the $740 million the government has committed to the scheme, so the government's profit on selling the land virtually recovers the cost of decontaminating the blocks. This means Mr Fluffy home owners are paying for the cost of decontamination, by being paid less than their land's market value, even though the scheme is said to protect 12,000 neighbours, and therefore should be a government responsibility.

R. S. Gilbert, Braddon

Health shake-up

Somehow doctors have gone from being upright, respected citizens in our community, dedicated to their cause, serving to heal and cure, to being not very well regarded "process workers", focused only on referrals, the issuing of scripts and making a bigger buck.

Dallas Stow and Jack Pennington (Letters, March 31) provoke thoughts of the political spin surrounding doctors and the cost of medical services in Australia. As pointed out by Bruce Haigh ("Patient or piece of meat", Times 2, March 21, p4), the medical profession can charge whatever it likes and mostly get away with it.

Medical funds are a rip-off and a joke. Why should anyone take out medical insurance when there are still huge gaps to be met? They appear only to allow one to dodge a waiting list and the right to elect a specialist, who will then more than likely hit you with an enormous fee.

Perhaps there should be "para medicos", who do basic referrals and scripts, and deal with malingerers and hypochondriacs who make bee lines to doctors and hospital emergency rooms when they have only minor afflictions.

Perhaps there are better ways to reduce traffic and the strain on doctors and hospitals, reducing costs in the process.

The government's current conundrum about state spending on medical and hospital services would be a move in the wrong direction. Instead of funds going to the states, it should be taken off them. The states must be abolished and funding to them cease. Cutting state duplications of the Commonwealth health and education departments would save taxpayers billions of dollars.

Money from Canberra could go directly to areas of need, administered by one central body, dealing directly with councils reduced from 250 to 50, about the needs within their municipalities. State public servants, from state to state, would be absorbed into the federal department which, intime, would be downsized, saving predictably billions.

P. M. Button, Cook

Bad grammar

Team Pedantry fully supports Michele Quirk (Letters, April 15) in her condemnation of singular verbs used with plural subjects.

The problem is not confined to the media, though. It is virtually universal – in all forms of print, everyday speech, politics, advertising, academia – just about everywhere. And nowhere is it more annoying than when it is partly hidden in a contraction, eg, "There's problems with ..."

Sure, the language changes, but subject and verb needing to be in grammatical agreement is one of the basic rules of English.

Still, I suppose we won't really hit semantic rock-bottom until it is OK to announce: "We is going to the movies tonight."

Eric Hunter, Cook

Chief Justice Helen Murrell waxes lyrical about the new Knowles Place-facing glass walls of the ACT Courts expansion reflecting the "transparency of justice" ("Upgrade of ACT's court infrastructure under way", April 12, p 2). Maybe another side of justice is expressed with the opposite facade. The Kremlin comes to mind.

There, we'll see a long, tall, bleak wall of buildings slammed down right on the Vernon Circle footpath, obliterating a whole facade of the splendid 1960s Supreme Court, and blocking vistas from the City Hill summit along Griffin's important radiating University Avenue axis.

This was avoided in ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell's earlier plan for City Hill. He envisaged court expansion to the south-west of the Supreme Court. A trial-industry facilitator has given us the new plan, wrecking the splendid landscaped campus-like arrangement of civic buildings and places at City Hill. That arrangement was adopted when Griffin deleted his hilltop City Hall after it became clear that the Commonwealth would be running Canberra.

He installed the existing formal structured hilltop tree planting instead. That transferred the ACT's eventual civic functions to the City Hill doughnut (in between London Circuit and Vernon Circle).

The National Capital Authority failed to preserve or understand that when they unprofessionally succumbed to commercial land sales as the new paradigm for City Hill.

Thesouth-west expansion of the courts can work, saving City Hill. Do it, Corbell.

Jack Kershaw, Kambah

Policies ring my bell

The sexy policies that Ross Fitzgerald advocates ("It's never too late to make a foray into politics", Times2, April 11, p5) certainly ring my bell.

Sophia Yates, Parkville, Vic

Both the US and Chinese presidents will sign the Paris Agreement on April 22, which is also Earth Day. For the agreement to come into force, 55 countries that emit a total of 55 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions must first sign it.

China and the US together are responsible for 40 per cent of emissions, and Australia is responsible for 1.3 per cent of the global total.

The World Meteorological Organisation recently reported 2015 was the hottest year on record, and 1 degree above the pre-industrial era.

This record average temperature caused record heatwaves, droughts, floods, fires, and cyclones in different regions around our planet.

In Australia we've had our highest sea surface temperatures, 2015 was our hottest year, and this March was our hottest on record. Right now, the Great Barrier Reef, from Cairns to the Torres Strait, is experiencing the worst coral bleaching in history.

During the Paris conference on climate change, Julie Bishop said the agreement was "a historic step in the global response to climate change".

So will our government also sign the agreement on Earth Day with China and the US at the UN headquarters in New York, and will it then table the agreement in the upcoming sitting of Parliament?

Stuart Walkley, Lyneham

Sea-level monitoring

On reading Michael Thomas's excellent article "Why CSIRO climate cuts could threaten security" (Times2, April 8, p5), I looked up the US National Security Strategy, issued last year, which says it "is clear that climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale, and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time."

The US appears to be taking seriously the monitoring of sea-level rise, at least.

Back in 2014, the then defence secretary wrote: "We are almost done with a baseline survey to assess the vulnerability of our military's more than 7,000 bases, installations, and other facilities. In places like the Hampton Roads region in Virginia, which houses the largest concentration of US military sites in the world, we see recurrent flooding today, and we are beginning work to address a projected sea-level rise of 1.5 feet over the next 20 to 50 years."

Half a metre in 20 to 50 years? Assuming Australian coastal bases are also vulnerable, is the Australian Defence Force monitoring sea-level rise or was it depending on CSIRO climate scientists to do it?

If so, now that they have been hobbled by CSIRO chief executive Larry Marshall, who will do it?

Jenny Goldie, Michelago, NSW

Submarine stance

Dr Michael Keating's and Jon Stanford's detailed analysis of "the most costly acquisition ever for the ADF", the $50 billion dollar project for 12 submarines ("Subs: are we in too deep?", Times2, April 14, p4), raises disturbing questions in regard to Australia's strategic relation with the United States.

The least of our concerns is that these SSK, or conventional (non-nuclear powered) submarines, which will not be deployable until the early 2030s, will create a 10-year gap in effective submarine capability in replacing the Collins-class submarines.

But of far greater concern is that they are no match in forward-projection combat operations compared with their nuclear-powered counterparts, the SSNs, which are already being deployed by Russia, China and India.

Keating and Stanford go as far to suggest that Australia's participation in such operations with the US should be "contingent" upon the US allowing Australia to acquire nuclear submarines.

So then why are we not investing instead in half the number and a smaller version of the SSK for only $6 billion to simply protect our shoreline, as recommended by Keating and Stanford?

The answer lies in the fact that we are spending billions upon billions of dollars in mere strategic posturing just to artificially maintain our most-favoured-nation status with the US and to secure our place in a nuclear-armed world.

Reverend Dr Vincent Zankin, Rivett

Distorted history

As we approach Anzac Day, I am saddened that Japan has at last achieved formal recognition by US Secretary of State John Kerry of their significant losses due to the A-bombs dropped on them during World War II. I am saddened, not because I don't recognise the terrible price these civilians paid, but because the Japanese themselves have yet to acknowledge the terrible treatment their forces inflicted on both POWs, mainly British and Australians, and conquered peoples, significantly Chinese.

They have written their own atrocities out of their history books, so that modern Japanese are only aware of what the allies did to them.

This might not be an issue in the US – I can recall an article recently where stories of maltreatment of US POWs by Japanese were a revelation to modern Americans, because the Pacific conflict hadn't been as widely reported as the European front, apart from victories achieved and, of course, the Bomb. However, I feel for those Diggers who suffered at the hands of cruel and vicious Japanese captors, and for Japanese civilians who suffered through the intransigence of their military leaders who would not accept that victory was beyond their capacity.

Nothing in war is truly honourable, but I hope the press recognise that we should not be made to feel guilty about Hiroshima or Nagasaki, while the "other side" refuses to recognise its war crimes.

K. N. Bell, Kambah

Deaths in custody

Shane Duffy and Jackie Huggins' article "Time to change the record for the next generation" (Times2, April 15, p5) was an interesting lament of Indigenous victimhood since the 1991 publication of the report of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.

Pity they didn't mention paragraph 3.5 of the report's summary: "The proportion of deaths in police and prison custody was similar for indigenous and non-indigenous people."

Bill Deane, Chapman

WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

Apropos Bill Blick's comments on attempts by senior federal public servants to water down FOI laws (Letters, April 15, and "Top bureaucrats acting out of self-interest in relation to FOI", April 15, p4), I agree. If advice from senior officials is demonstrably sound, what's the problem with disclosure? If it isn't sound, why on earth was it put forward in the first place?

Chris Whyte, Higgins

LET'S RATE MOODY'S

Moody's credit rating agency has lectured the Turnbull government on Australia's budget deficit and hinted that our AAA credit rating is at risk. But isn't this the same organisation that gave the top credit rating to packaged sub-prime mortgages?

Rod Matthews, Fairfield, Vic

EASTMAN ENDGAME

The editorial "Eastman case is far from compelling" (April 15) ended saying "many people will struggle to identify what public purpose will be served by staging another expensive trial of Mr Eastman, other than, perhaps, shielding the AFP and the DDP from accusations of ineptitude". May I suggest massive damages for Eastman as well as a reopening of the case to find the real killer?

Gary J. Wilson, Macgregor

FORTUNATE TIMING

North Queensland's Yabulu refinery workers can thank their lucky stars the refinery went belly-up with an election just around the corner. Those old enough may remember John Howard bailing out his brother's company so that workers could get their entitlements. And it didn't do him any harm.

D. J. Fraser, Currumbin, Qld

INSULT TO RATEPAYERS

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr's salary is to rise $299,000 from July 1, making an increase of 7 per cent in two years ("4 per cent pay rise for ACT politicians", canberratimes.com.au, April 15). What an insult to ACT ratepayers, who've continually had to wear many and varied tax and levy increases. And from October this year, ratepayers will have to pay for an extra eight MLAs. Exciting times ahead.

Michael Attwell, Dunlop

EUTHANASIA RISKS

Bob Hawke expects his wife, Blanche d'Alpuget, to organise euthanasia for him should he go gaga ("Hawke blasts lack of will on euthanasia", April 15, p4). He doesn't expect to be smothered with a pillow, but for d'Alpuget to organise something with the family doctor. Doesn't Hawke realise that the doctor could end up in prison and lose his/her career if the plan went ahead?

Anne Prendergast, Reid

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