I have been a regular kayaker on Lake G for the last 10 years and I have never seen the lake in such a sorry state.

Over the years the quality of the lake has steadily deteriorated with algae outbreaks becoming more and more frequent due to the increase in suburban water run-off.

With the new lake suburb of Lawson soon to come on line, my forecast is that the lake will soon become a smelly unusable cesspool like Lake Tuggeranong — and Lake Burley Griffin!

And what is the ACT government doing about it?

Nothing, as usual.

Bruce Kentwell, Holt

AIC too valuable to let collapse

David Biles' article (canberratimes.com.au, November 21) on the demise of the Australian Institution of Criminology is a wake-up call for a country without a Bill of Rights.

As he explains: the Attorney-General's Department last year merged the AIC with the Australian Crime Commission before receiving the endorsement of the Senate.

This, in effect, required an independent statutory authority to conform to the expectations of a public service agency.

Staff members were called on to combat terrorism by working in the narrow areas of criminal justice, causing half the research staff to seek employment elsewhere.

The federal government has rushed ahead without Senate endorsement knowing that of the 20 submissions received, 19 opposed the merger.

All parliamentarians must carefully study Davis Biles' call to save a valuable institution that has served the nation well.

Keith McEwan, Bonython

Transit lanes proven to work

Transport Minister Meegan Fitzharris can offer faster commutes ("What Canberra's light rail construction will mean for your commute," canberratimes.com.au, November 21) by putting transit lane signs on strategic sections of Canberra's roads.

The government's transit lane study found many Canberra roads to be suitable for transit lanes, subject to further analysis.

My analysis shows converting 150 metres of Flemington Road from a bus to a transit lane would cut minutes from peak car commute times.

H. P. McKenzie's "Carpooling and Transit Lanes: a Case Study" found "the number of carpoolers ... increased approximately 23.4per cent since the introduction of the transit lane".

Ms Fitzharris claimed "there has been no analysis performed because there is no clear Australian data on the impact transit lanes have on people's travel behaviour".

Will the transport minister reconsider?

Leon Arundell, Downer

Road to prosperity ... not quite

Peter Hartcher states in his article, "The moment the US gave the world to China" (canberratimes.com.au, November 22), that: "An open, global trading and investment system has allowed poor countries to trade their way to prosperity. And it allows rich countries to grow richer." The second statement is correct and indisputable. The first is part of the myth of international trade and development.

Poor countries, as pointed out by developmental critics like Walter Rodney (How Europe Underdeveloped Africa) and Susan George (A Fate Worse Than Debt) among others, is quite different.

The "road to prosperity" has more often been a road to impoverishment.

What global free trade has done is to create a First World in Third World countries and a Third World in First World countries.

Rajend Naidu, Glenfield

Don't abandon merit to be 'fair'

Helen Pitt's article "Whinge, complain, leave – the bad ride for women in IT" (canberratimes.com.au, November 23) makes the same fundamental mistake of all who practise identity politics; she has mistaken equal outcomes for equality rather than the real equality of equal opportunity.

Helen's version of equality denies merit and the individual and instead discriminates on the grounds of gender, race, sexuality and religion.

People like Helen see a field of human endeavour, in this case IT, and look at percentages of various groups involved and then claim there is a problem if the percentages do not align with the "correct" number.

This sort of foolishness denies women as individuals and denies the fact women are simply making their own life choices.

Given the importance of IT to Australia's future it would be very short-sighted to abandon merit in favour of identity politics; to discriminate against men in IT to simply have more women because they are women.

Australia should be encouraging more men into IT as the evidence suggests (as a group) they perform better in IT than women when judged on merit.

Damon Fraser, Weetangera

No punishment no change

Union "bosses" are globally vilified, have to prove their innocence, are implicitly rogues and engaged in members' funds malfeasance according to opportunistic political propaganda. By contrast bank bosses' record of overseeing siphoning of investor funds, charging "fee for service" never received, manipulating the Bank Bill Swap Rate, and thumbing their noses to ASCI, seems to raise their adulated profile to knighthood status.

ASIC, Australia's finance watchdog, seems to devote its efforts to producing "reports" and issuing bellicose pronouncements at seminars, intended to have terrorised bankers fleeing to panicky repentance ("ASIC chief slams lack of accountability", BusinessDay, November 23, p22). Realistically, until rorting bankers do time for their misdeeds and suffer pecuniary penalties, and shareholders have a hit on their equity and dividends, nothing will change.

Albert M. White, Queanbeyan

Climate change is no joke

Gerry Murphy (Letters, November 25) tries to make a bad-taste joke by linking people dying with climate change.

That's just what will happen — and in massive numbers — if we listen to denier.

Eric Hunter, Cook

Remote communities, mostly Aboriginal, get preyed on. Their money largely disappears in overcharges and rorts by "whitefella" operators.

One area has been getting attention from ASIC lately. It's the arrangements by which some operators sell cars into remote communities.

Heard of "book up"? To get a clapped-out car for double its cost plus thousands, the remote community member has to hand over their keycard and PIN.

Everything in the account is cleaned out at every opportunity. They can get a bit back, but only as credit in the company store, or other credit at the provider's grace and favour.

Heard of loading up loans? Instead of evaluating the capacity of borrowers to pay, they are locked into loans for which the payback takes up all or most of their income. The provider is associated with a car dealer whose sales staff make up the lending documents the way the lender wants them.

These arrangements depend on remote communities having no available alternatives.

It seems they aren't legal but criminal prosecution is a bridge too far for state and territory authorities who find prosecuting and jailing remote community children easy and a profitable justification for more federal funding.

Bill Leak and The Australian think remote community problems are just about personal responsibility — and not the responsibility of the operators and administrators who prey on the communities.

Christopher Hood, Queanbeyan

Legendary icons

To all sports reporters and sub-editors who labour under the lash of the cliche (and readers who may be similarly afflicted), try this quiz:

Q. Which meteorological phenomenon is always present when a player is injured? A. An injury cloud.

Q. Where is the player always located? A. Under it.

Q. Which other meteorological phenomenon occurs when our team loses an important game? A. It rains.

Q. Where? A. On their parade.

Q. How many guns did our last opponents have? A. Too many.

Q. In nautical terms, where is our team after a defeat? A. In its wake.

Q. What activity does a player undertake when facing an injury? A. They battle it.

Q. What time is it (generally after about the fourth game of the season)? A. Crunch time.

Q. Which throw of the dice does our team always face (usually after about round 5)? A. The last.

Q. What sort of a battle does our team face to make the finals? A. An uphill one.

Q. What sort of a loss did our team recently suffer? A. Heartbreaking.

Please can the sporting staff of The Canberra Times come up with a few original phrases?

I guess I'm facing an uphill battle to convince you to print this letter but hopefully this won't be my last throw of the dice.

Ken Fraser, Kambah

Listen to the people

The press has bombarded us with the use of the term "populism". One writer was Ross Gittins with "Nation's politicians be warned, the road to populism goes nowhere" (November 21, p35).

I googled the term to properly understand what it means; the many entries showed I was not alone in being unsure of the meaning.

One description was that "it is a strange political beast, as nobody knows what it is, and fewer identify with it, but (in theory) should be the prevailing political ideology".

Another description was "a notoriously slippery, yet essential, political concept".

A common definition is it is a belief in the power and right of regular people, rather than a small group of political insiders or a wealthy elite, to have control over their government.

Perhaps it is a synonym for "democracy"!

It wasn't until Gittins' third-last paragraph that he admitted "none of this says the Rust Belt revolters don't have legitimate grievances".

If the elite had bothered to come down from their ivory tower earlier and listen to the "populists"' grievances, perhaps the world would not now be saddled with such an obnoxious, irrational person as President-elect of an economic, military and cultural giant.

Robert James, Melba

A better democracy

Democracy is the system of government whereby people have a say in decisions which affect them (D.N. Callaghan, Letters, November 22).

The key question is how to arrive at wise decisions.

Decision making is a process requiring deliberation of all aspects of the decision and its implementation.

In small groups direct participation is possible. But larger groups like nation states need some form of representation in the decision making forum (at current levels of technology).

This is not about superiority but practicality. So how do we, the people, keep those representatives accountable, all the time?

More importantly, how can we reform our system so we can participate in the deliberative processes informing decision makers in Australia's parliaments?

A place like Canberra is rich with possibilities.

What roles could the community councils play?

Could we select our representatives to the Assembly differently? Election is only one way to select representatives.

How would participatory methods like Citizens' Juries help? What about a Citizen's Chamber to complement the Assembly?

Peter Tait, O'Connor

In praise of trams

John Kimber (Letters, November 14) describes the woes of the recently completed Light Rail in Denver.

I knew nothing about the Denver situation so I did a bit of online research, which suggests that John Kimber has presented us with a very one-eyed view.

Politico Magazine, for instance, describes it as "The Train that Saved Denver", and goes on to say: "The car-choked city overcame regional distrust to build a major transit system that is remaking the urban core and the suburbs too."

John Kimber goes on to say the answer to the problem is driverless electric cars.

Those pushing driverless cars need to articulate what problems driverless cars address and how they contribute to the solution.

John Hutchison, Coombs

CAPITAL OF GREED

Re "Windfall of $1.7m goes to parties" (November 24, p2), it seems outrageous that political parties in the ACT are "voting themselves a system of public funding that far outstrips other jurisdictions". They could follow the example of South Australia, the Northern Territory and Tasmania, and have no public funding for elections. Many have described it as "absolute greed".

John Milne, Chapman

ALMOST A DEATH WISH

That One Nation could win 13 seats in the Queensland election and may be needed to form a government is enough to send a shiver down the spine. The majors have only themselves to blame, as Ross Fitzgerald points out in his article on the NSW byelections. Nature abhors a vacuum. So does the body politic.

Craig Ellis, Crows Nest, NSW

SOW AND REAP TOGETHER

Malcolm Turnbull should negotiate with Bill Shorten over the backpacker tax, for the good of farmers.

Rod Matthews, Melbourne

JOYCE LOOKS BETTER NOW

The election of Donald Trump seems to mitigate the bizarreness of our acting PM being Barnaby Joyce.

M. F. Horton, Adelaide

A WORD TO THE WISE ...

Letter writers, here are two similar words; "flaunting" and "flouting". They are not interchangeable.

Fredrik A. Limacher, Kambah

... AND A LAST ONE FROM ME

After writing letters to The Canberra Times for 21 years (more than a 1000 of which were published), I announce my retirement.

R.S. Gilbert, Braddon

Email: letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au. Send from the message field, not as an attached file. Fax: 6280 2282. Mail: Letters to the Editor, The Canberra Times, PO Box 7155, Canberra Mail Centre, ACT 2610.

Keep your letter to 250 words or less. References to Canberra Times reports should include date and page number. Letters may be edited. Provide phone number and full home address (suburb only published).