Infill policy must face scrutiny to earn the confidence of public

Infill as a policy is not in question – it has been an essential component of planning strategies for 30 years.

What is in question is a 70 per cent infill share, adopted without analysis of its feasibility. No comprehensive assessment of alternative infill scenarios evaluating infrastructure capacity and cost, housing affordability, employment location, environmental and revenue consequences, travel time and cost, where infill should or should not occur, community acceptability and most importantly, housing preferences has been undertaken.

There is a real danger that insufficient detached housing will be supplied in the territory leading to increased travel, greenhouse emissions and reduced government revenue as demand is accommodated in regional NSW.

An infill share should only be determined after analysis establishing the most appropriate distribution of population and employment.

Only then can the community be confident the policy will lead to a more sustainable, accessible and liveable city.

Mike Quirk, Garran

There are objective reasons to criticise Tony Abbott's policies and his prime ministership. The hatred of him goes far beyond such normal criticism. This leads to the question: Why do progressives hate Tony Abbott?

I think progressives like to present themselves as morally superior and worthy of the powers of government. This is ironic because their intellectual cousins (socialists of various stripes) starved and destroyed civilisations.

Progressives find new battlegrounds for expressing their righteousness: same-sex marriage, climate change, social justice, free goods, identity politics and open borders.

There is a political agenda behind these pretensions of morality. Progressive legislation expresses a desire to control people and wreck the natural institutions – dominion, private property, free markets – that resist state power.

This is an anti-freedom agenda. When there is a reversal or slowdown in the progressive agenda, progressives get hysterical. We must understand what progressives want: a totalitarian society.

The threat of conservatism becoming reactionary terrifies progressives.

Victor Diskordia, McKellar

Howard's 'entitlement mentality', reflected in Hockey's 2014, "lifters" and "leaners" budget, was only ever intended to grind down the lumpenproletariat, while politicians continued to reward themselves – and their ingratiate plutocrats – handsomely with obscene rorts: helicopter hire, eye-watering telephone bills, "forgetting" to register million-dollar properties, enduring "hardship" Washington and London postings, making babies, pork-barrelling electorates, hosting ethics-deficient bankers and captains of industry and attending exotic weddings, all within-the-rules "allowable" entitlements courtesy of the public shilling ("Howard's bid to end 'entitlement' mentality", January 1, p1).

As though that were not enough, now the GG has gotten in on the act and, like Oliver, but with less justification and stripped of the "Please, sir" pleasantries, is demanding "more"! How much more can the long-suffering peons take before storming the Bastille?

Albert M. White, Queanbeyan

M. Silex (Letters, December 23) wondered what planet I come from in relation to tax policy. While it is obviously alien to them, Planet Earth, where we have a sense of a fair go and hope that the tax system reflects that, so people contribute to society according to their true economic circumstances.

When the denizens of Planet Liberal praise the tax settings of a prior Labor treasurer you might suspect something is amiss. And so it is, what M.Silex isn't telling us is that the current proposal to wind back the cash-out of credits returns the settings for dividend imputation to match those that were introduced by Paul Keating, with some increased fairness. The conceptual basis is that companies should be taxed once, and only once. After Peter Costello allowed cash-out of credits in 2000 the company tax receipts of government were effectively "on loan" to the superannuation industry (at the concessional rate of 15 per cent) because the benefits eventually paid to retirees were taxed according to the recipient's true economic circumstance, that is once according to the normal tax scales.

The 2006 Costello budget destroyed the conceptual basis for dividend imputation by allowing any amount of benefits to be taken out of superannuation completely tax free by over 60s. This means those company profits never face the tax scales that reflect the recipient's true economic circumstance. To use M. Silex's emotive language, the company tax receipts of government are being stolen by retirees.

Peter Bradbury, Holt

Phil Nicolls in his letter of December 27 states that with respect to the delivery drone trial in Bonython, democracy no longer exists. He is right. The ACT government did not include the views of people from Bonython in the approval process for the drone trial. Those who have had to live with excessive noise, fear of drone crashes, distressed pets, loss of bird life and privacy, are of no concern whatsoever to our government.

Now Gungahlin residents are to be subject to this experimental technology and there still does not exist a government agency officially responsible for policing the noise drones make. The noise is not under the remit of the EPA, as it only deals with residential noise, not aircraft.

CASA will not check the noise as its remit is only safety. Air Services Australia only deals with manned aircraft, not drones. What is under the ACT government's remit? The health and welfare of Canberrans, or supporting a foreign company whose activities are causing constituents to lose their most basic right to the peaceful amenity and enjoyment of their homes?

Canberra residents as a whole should decide if delivery drones are our future. Not a handful of people in the ACT government, CASA or Project Wing.

I. Kolak, Bonython

Before light rail Northbourne Avenue was a beautiful grass and treed vista, a welcoming entrance to Canberra. If Flemington Road is anything to go by, what we will have now is a concrete railway route lined with wood chip mulch, 60-centimetre native grasses going to seed, invasive couch, paspalum and other common Canberra weeds.

Give it a year and the mulch will be overgrown with long grass and weeds, be a home to snakes and other vermin, not to mention a fire hazard. Maybe common sense will eventually prevail and it will be re-landscaped with low maintenance park grass as before. Or, it could be maintained by serving as a travelling stock route.

K. Wark, Watson

How ironic that Canberra Metro sees fit to spend almost $30k on drone shots of the Northbourne Avenue light rail path and equate it to the view that a high-flying bird would see ("$7.7m of extra costs added to light rail contract", January 2, p1). With the barren wasteland that the avenue has now become, devoid of its former majestic gum trees I seriously doubt that any currawongs or magpies will ever frequent this zone again.

Ron Edgecombe, Evatt

It is obviously not practical to expect the entire human species to turn vegan overnight. Not every human has yet had the opportunity to grasp how urgently the earth needs us to make this change. But ultimately, nothing less than the complete abolition of animal agriculture will turn the trick, and the sooner we all we accept this, the better our chances of survival.

Jenny Goldie (Letters, January 1) suggests that we can address the impacts of livestock grazing on earth's climate simply by reducing the amount of methane sheep and cattle belch during rumination. The public should understand that greenhouse gas emissions from ruminants are less than half the problem posed for earth's climate by animal agriculture. The bigger issue is the land used for raising livestock, not just the land used to pasture them but also the cropland where crops are grown exclusively to feed livestock.

Every bit of this land that is not needed to grow plant crops to feed humans (and any animals who remain in our care once we stop exploiting them), needs to be revegetated to restore greenhouse gas sinks and wildlife habitat.

Even land that is so badly abused by human overuse that it will no longer grow anything, can be used for generation of electricity from the sun and wind. All this is necessary, and it is doable. All it needs is the public and political will.

Frankie Seymour, Queanbeyan

Sally Pryor's "relative" (given he replaced one Geoff Pryor) piece provided a balance between her written tribute to David Pope's 10-year tenure and some of his best, not only in The Canberra Times, but also across other Fairfax (now Nine) mastheads ("Making has mark", December 29, Panorama). I continue to be in awe at the skill of the political cartoonist, the capacity to take often breaking news and turn the event and its people into a brilliant illustration, sometimes with few words. Congratulations David Pope, your political dispensation is exceptional.

Allan Gibson, Cherrybrook, NSW

Re: "Howard govt feared slow Y2K bug preparations, cabinet documents reveal" (January 2, p8), the tortured penultimate paragraph persists with the meme that Y2K was a furphy and the fact that no "apocalypse" occurred is "proof". There was every financial reason for companies and the public sector not to do anything if the threat was not real. It was real and is probably the greatest IT success story ever: Years of work to identify and scope the problem among IT professionals, then to convince others that it was a real and imminent threat, then to set in place effective measures which had to be completed by the fixed deadline of December 31, 1999.

Only sensationalist media and the uninformed referred to an "apocalypse", not IT professionals, but the risk was real and the consequences of not dealing with it massive.

The work at global scale to prevent the forecast potential catastrophic consequences was hugely successful. On this issue Howard was right – governments and businesses worldwide listened to the experts, acted on what they recommended, and took action which reduced negative impacts to near zero. If only we would pay the same attention to science when dealing with the much larger threat of climate change.

Steve Blume, Chapman

Ken Helm's recollections on the founding of his fine vineyard ("'People told us we were mad"', December 29, p12) contain an important reminder of the degradation of Australia's science's once high international scientific reputation. In Canberra we owe the absence of bush flies to 20 years of research by George Bornemissza of the Division of Entomology.

The CSIRO gradually became top-heavy with administration, now eroded leaving an unsightly semi-ruin adjacent to Campbell School.

Two years ago our Coalition government replaced the chief executive with a former venture capitalist who made hundreds of job cuts to climate research appeasing climate change deniers.

In Australian's current administration, science is an unnecessary impediment, and we are internationally insignificant.

Jack Palmer, Watson

Blowing up 14 tonnes of explosive over Melbourne and most likely a similar amount over Sydney had the revellers enthralled and excited. We continue to be confronted by what some have described as climate catastrophe. Is there a huge degree of hypocrisy here? We are led to believe that the majority consider catastrophic global warming as a threat to our very existence.

Many of the revellers on statistics must be catastrophists. Therefore it must be harmless fun to cover major cities with toxic smoke with over 1 million under the cloud, but only on New Year's Eve.

Is that how is goes? Just asking.

Newton Reynolds, Croydon, Vic

MEDIA V TRUMP

The US media's hatred of Donald Trump has become so palpable I am now convinced that if he cured cancer the headlines would read "Trump destroys research industry, thousand now unemployed".

Mark Sproat, Lyons

FREE PARKING

Richard Green (Letters, December 29) is understandably upset that parking costs more than the cinema ticket at the Palace Cinema in Acton. This follows the removal of the previous parking discount for cinema ticket-holders.

But Richard is wrong when he says that "one is forced to use this rip-off system". I often see films at the Palace, but almost never park under the theatre. There is plenty of parking not far away, just past the Shine Dome, and outside of business hours it is free.

John Hutchison, Coombs

SUMMER OF CRICKETS

Sankar Kumar Chatterjee (Letters, January 1) suggests we should "get on with the game of cricket maintaining cricket". Have others noted that this summer, Australian crickets are pretty quiet (perhaps waiting for some moisture), while Indian crickets are particularly chirpy?

Peter Baskett, Murrumbateman

CREDENTIALS REQUIRED

The most useful thing I ever learnt was how little I really know. I did Grade Six Nature Study but don't know much at all about climate change.

Could you please publish the credentials of "expert" correspondents? Then we'll know.

Barrie Smillie, Duffy

WHO'S TO BLAME?

Your editorial ("Howard's troubling legacy", January 2) refers to the subsequent "loss of 30,000 public service positions". In the context of this decade's cuts, I have seen claims that a significant portion of those 30,000 were a lagged response to funding cuts made by the previous Keating government. It would be interesting to see a considered analysis of this point.

Ian Douglas, Jerrabomberra

LACKING MORALS

Yes, Albert White, (Letters, December 30), you are quite correct in describing spying as the second-oldest profession. But you need to add the corollary "with fewer morals than the first".

Peter Sealy, Thurgoona, NSW

PUERILE DENIGRATION

I wrote in these columns some time ago urging Gary Wilson to cease his references to the ACT government as "our town council' (CT Letters). As I pointed out then the ACT government bears responsibility for education, health and many other functions which elsewhere are the responsibility of state governments, not local councils.

Once again I urge Mr. Wilson to desist from this puerile denigration.

T.J. Marks, Holt

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