Firstly, Gai Brodtmann has been a committed and dedicated representative for the residents of Norfolk Island for quite some time and is passionate about improving the deplorable financial and social situation the island finds itself in. I say this as a former public servant with no agenda for any particular party.

The need to change the governance on Norfolk Island received bipartisan support as both major parties recognised the current situation as unsustainable – a population of 1500 or so simply can't raise the funds needed for a modern society in the absence of some exceptional resource.

Chris also suggests the Commonwealth will make considerable money out of the changed arrangements. The facts suggest a substantially different position. While islanders will now be subject to Australian income tax for island earned income, the benefits they receive, such as Medicare, social security and like, will greatly exceed the tax paid (as is common in many small remote communities). The Australian taxpayer has paid many millions to help the island continue to run and many millions more will be paid over coming years to address the many projects that need urgent attention. This is coupled with the money needed for social security and health (and many other things). If the Australian taxpayer is funding all this, it is only fair that people on the island ought to be in the tax system, is it not?

Chris claims that islanders will only have political representation at the local level, conveniently ignoring his earlier point that there is also federal electoral representation. Chris also repeats the claim that the island is not part of Australia, whereas Norfolk Island was first settled in 1788 by the British as a part of what became the Colony of New South Wales and has been a sovereign part of Australia and its predecessors since then (noting a brief Polynesian settlement appears to have existed hundreds of years earlier).

Norfolk Island needs a sustainable model of government which I think is more likely to be the case from July 1.

Julian Yates, Pearce

When I first moved into Lyons we had a garage which serviced my car. We also had a newsagent and post office, a supermarket, a chemist, a doctors surgery, a takeaway food shop and hairdresser. Now there is hardly anything left. The decline occurred incrementally and insidiously over a decade or more.

Around 2010 the Stanhope government boasted about its $1million refurbishment of the Lyons shops. But, all the people got for their money was a bronze statue, a transparent pergola, some paving, and a light. When I met MLA Shane Rattenbury at the shops, several weeks ago, he reminded me about the light, so he obviously knew about the refit.

What he didn't know was if there had been an unsuccessful DA application already lodged in 2010 for a new three-level shopping complex with underground parking for retail customers. As the story goes, it failed because the underground parking would be too close to the abandoned, underground fuel tank, on the site formerly occupied by the service station. Yet a year or two later an apartment building was constructed on the site of the old garage and it does have underground parking. How could this be? Is the story true, or has it been embellished over time?

Shane Rattenbury also didn't know that a recent plan has been approved. Consequentially the Lyons shops are scheduled be partly demolished, supposedly, soon and replaced with a complex with underground parking, but only for the tenants.

Jeremy Hanson's office has previously questioned the ACT government on these issues, in writing on behalf of one of its constituents. Mick Gentlemen's first statement that the apartment building "does not have underground parking" is in his email/letter correspondence. His later correction and withdrawal of that statement is also in writing. When I raised these issues and others with Shane Rattenbury he saidhe would inquire and get back to me.

Well, I haven't heard back from Mr Rattenbury. The refit of 2010 was a huge disappointment. So please MLAs Rattenbury and Gentleman, clarify the DA approvals mystery. The people have a right to know if there has been a mistake.

Dr Judy Ryan, Lyons

After secretly conspiring to pass a retrospective law, the ACT government has decreed that the approved and half-built 1500-square-metre Giralang supermarket with Woolworths must be torn down to be replaced with a maximum 1000-square-metre shops (or more likely, units).

McMansion builders, beware, the ACT government might be coming to tear down your property for a smaller one too.

Sarah Hulbert, Giralang

Lawyers representing families of the victims of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, which was shot down over Ukraine in 2014, are suing President Vladimir Putin and Russia for $10 million each in the European Court of Human Rights. Sounds like an opportunistic exercise to me, as the great bulk of world opinion is that it was shot down by Ukraine not Russia – regardless of the childish "shirtfronting" by Tony Abbott and the constant tirades by Julie Bishop against the Russians.

The US Secretary of State announced that he knew all the details three days after the event, almost two years ago but for obvious reasons has kept that information to himself to milk it for some sort of anti-Russian political mileage. I suggest the lawyers get the facts. John Kerry's email address is available if they're serious.

Rex Williams, Ainslie

The problem with the suggestion that pedestrians should walk on the right on cycle paths is that it is the opposite of what we do everywhere else. My experience is that pedestrians walking on the right tend to move automatically to the left when they encounter a cyclist, because that is what we do on roads when driving and on footpaths when walking with other pedestrians.

Rather than having a different rule for cycle paths, it would be much easier and safer if everyone – cyclists and pedestrians – behaved as though they were driving on the road: keep to the left, overtake carefully when it is safe, and look in all directions before moving to the other side.

Andina Faragher, Macquarie

The ABC Vote Compass finds that Malcolm Turnbull is more "trustworthy" than other party leaders, but all the evidence from word and deed is that we can only trust him not to stray from traditional Coalition policies – austerity for the poor and tax breaks for the rich, even if it is camouflaged as "jobs and growth".

His earlier mantra promoting innovation and the knowledge economy are revealed by the budget as mere rhetoric. If those were his objectives then he would have proposed completing the NBN as soon as possible and restoring full funding to education and research.

Instead, money is still to be squandered on direct and indirect government subsidies for those who export our carbon for others to burn and pollute the planet. For a transition to a knowledge economy we all need access to global information, and we need to encourage those who wish to acquire the intellectual tools to exploit it.

Trickle-down wealth seems never to have produced jobs and growth, except in statistical models. Bottom-up growth based on the information super highway is a better bet.

Adrian Gibbs, Yarralumla

According to the economist Kenneth Galbraith, "trickle down" was the theory that if you feed the horse amply with oats, some will pass through down to the road for the sparrows. To understand how the distribution of wealth works in practice, it is worth looking at how wealth was shared in the past.

During the industrial revolution, the mill owners became very rich, but rarely shared their wealth with their employees. Titus Salt in Bradford and Robert Owen in New Lanark in Scotland were rare exceptions, benevolent employers who created better conditions for their workers by building houses for them and providing education for their children. The great majority of magnates built their great mansions in the country, but paid their workers no more than they had to.

Ricardo explained how the tendency was for wages to rise just above subsistence, and then no more.

More than that encouraged the workers to have more children, who would then quickly boost workforce numbers, forcing wages down again.

Given this time-proven propensity for the rich to get richer and the poor to get children, exactly how "jobs and growth" can be created by giving billions of taxpayers' money to the already-rich needs to be more carefully explained.

Harry Davis, Campbell

Bill Shorten's noble Medicare plan is flawed. He proposes to fund it by using the "tax cuts" foreshadowed in the Coalition's income and expenditure plan. To do this implies that Uncle Bill not only accepts but will implement the Coalition's Budget, otherwise "the tax cut savings" are unavailable for his use. And of course adopting the Coalition's Budget and implementing his Medicare promise would put in jeopardy his grandiose plans for education and 98 other policies.

Obviously, Mr Shorten is playing the general public for mugs. Mr Shorten needs to provide a realistic Income and Expenditure plan for the next three or four years rather than predictions based on 10-year forecasts.

Tom Cooke, Pearce

So much for Malcolm Turnbull's new economy and jobs of the future. According to Immigration Minister Peter Dutton, there are up to 50,000 jobs just waiting for illiterate and innumerate refugees to arrive and snap them up, displacing hard working illiterate/innumerate Aussies in the process. Clearly the advantage of being illiterate in their own language and English is just too much of a competitive edge.

So kids, leave school now, oh, and try to become illiterate in a few more languages as well, so you can compete on a level playing field for the jobs of the future. Who knows if you can become ignorant enough you could even aspire to the position of Immigration Minister.

John van de Rhee, Watson

Stephen Saunders (Letters, May 20) has shone a light on the huge economic migration to Australia facilitated by government at the urgent request of business.

It is much easier for needy employers to import hundreds of thousands of skilled workers annually than to offer apprenticeships and to train Australians and refugees – just ask Gina Rinehart and other major sponsors who import well over two hundred thousand every year. Fortunately, uneasy locals are encouraged to focus their resentment on the few thousand poor asylum seekers who arrive uninvited and not to question the government-business conveyor-belt that saves so much on the education budget and allows the safe destruction of the now-redundant TAFE colleges that would otherwise be needed.

The effect of overcrowding on local infrastructure, health, housing and the environment is never mentioned. Successive governments are facilitating this excessive import of population while asylum-seekers languish in hopeless darkness. This may explain the major parties' agreement on the inhumane treatment of asylum-seekers whose qualifications include risk-taking, initiative, concern for family and outstanding courage.

Saunders is right to advocate a shift in economic-migrant import policy to under 100,000 annually to accommodate them.

A Moore, Melba

Of course the Australian Federal Police is independent of the government. That is why, when I made representations to Senator Zed Seselja about the reprehensible role of the AFP in the judicial murder of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, I received no response from him. Rather, an acolyte with a Pontius Pilate turn of phrase advised me of standard flick pass to the Justice (sic) Minister.

That merely led to a response from the AFP itself. Cast in their usual self-justifying terms, in which the lives of criminals are a valid tool to deploy in their profession at their discretion, it advised that the response was from the AFP because they were best placed to respond "on behalf of the government".

Of course the AFP is independent. With insufficient accountability.

Mike Hutchinson, Reid

My husband works long hours in a largely sedentary and stressful job. In order to mange his physical and mental health he cycles to and from work every day of the year. He also regularly cycles in charity events participating in the Hartley Lifecare Challenge and the Black Dog Institute's zoo-to-zoo challenge (and many others).

Last night he arrived home after work at about 8pm in quite a shocked state, stating that he had just experienced "an all time low". He then related that he had just been spat on by an older male driver in a van while riding on the cycle path on Adelaide Avenue; the "product" landing on the lens of his glasses over his eye.

My husband has now been sworn at, swerved toward and now spat on while cycling in Canberra. Some trifecta! We are reconsidering telling people that this is a great place tolive.

Jenny Woodhouse, Yarralumla

Ian Warden gets paid to spread generous dollops of criticism on just about everybody and everything in his weekday Gang-gang column. Yet again ("It's a jungle out in the valley", Gang-gang, May 20, p8) he sinks to incivility by branding people and residents' associations who criticise urban infill as "whingers".

The reality is that people have a right and duty to protect their city from outrageously excessive urban infill and raging despoilment. I don't want to tell my grandchildren that I was a coward. I don't want to tell them that I failed to stand up to the heavily-subsidised, rootin'-tootin', six-gun-shootin' Greater Western Sydney Giants and the fat-cat, political-donatin' Melbourne developer Grocon when they rode into town and joined up with their very well-connected, local hired-guns to lay waste to the heritage-listed landscape and trees of Manuka Oval and its surrounds.

G. Fitzgerald, Griffith

CONCERNS IGNORED

The news that the CSIRO Ginninderra Field Station has been rezoned for development is very disappointing. There were many people who opposed the rezoning for a number of reasons, including the lack of adequate infrastructure and the detrimental effect on the environment that development will have. However, these legitimate concerns have clearly been ignored.

Jennifer Oxley, Evatt

TACKLING FOR LAUGHS

Instead of crash-tackling terrified sheep, the rugby boys from King's School should crash tackle their grandmothers on one of their school ovals. Surely this would be funnier and entertain the whole school.

John Davenport, Farrer

BRING BACK SCALES

Many years ago, every chemist shop in Australia had a penny-in-the-slot weighing machine with the message "your doctor says weigh yourself daily". What happened to them all? If the medical profession is still of that opinion then surely the machines should all be resurrected.

Ken Maher, Ainslie

JOBS SCARE TACTICS

If illiterate, innumerate refugees who can't speak English are taking jobs from true blue Aussies, it suggests that not only is our education system not up to par as Barbara Bankovsky (Letters, May 20) suggests but that some Aussies aren't very inclined to find work. Peter Dutton's scare tactics have everything to do with the upcoming election.

Colleen Foster, Bywong, NSW

LOGICAL IMPOSSIBILITY

No, Amanda Vanstone ("Easy for the Greens to promise compassion", Times2, May 23, p5) it can't be "just a fact" that refugees stay unemployed yet at the same time "take Australian jobs". That is a logical impossibility. And Dutton's exaggeration of the degree of innumeracy and illiteracy of potential refugees for political purposes certainly won't help them to get jobs.

David Roth, Kambah

Amanda Vanstone makes some good points about Australia's generous history of refugee resettlement, and the economic and social costs to the wider community involved. What a pity that we now spend well over $3billion a year to detain refugees and asylum seekers in conditions designed to repel people fleeing war and persecution.

Anne Aisbett, Page

ABOVE SUSPICION?

What was that bit about Caesar's wife ("Gangland lawyer cultivated top Libs", May 23, p1)?

Bob Gardiner, Isabella Plains

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