Canberra Times Letters to the Editor: Terror nonsense

Does anyone actually understand this and the bureaucratic babble that Sally Barnes is quoted as saying? What have we come to that we hold an event but then close the car parks "to protect crowded places from terrorism". How is that going to help? If we think someone will mow people down in the car park we should all just give up.

Stay home. Cancel all events. What nonsense. Of course we then wouldn't be able to fine the poor punters who came to have a good time because we didn't tell anyone about the closed car park and didn't provide any alternative parking arrangements. Good work NCA!

As they used to say in the classics – up there for thinking, down there for dancing.

Lesley Fisk, Barton

"Building, Planning complaints up by 40 per cent", (The Sunday Canberra Times, March 25, p4).

Reflections of the Chief Minister

"I love a defective building

A vista of leaking and cracks

Of balconies truly unsafe

Of the many things that it lacks

I love the certifier's signature

That provides the developers fee

The beauty and the disaster

It's a defective building for me!"

With apologies to Dorothea Mackellar.

Murray Upton, Belconnen

I applaud your CT articles starting to focus on planning and building quality standards in the ACT. As part of this focus may I suggest you turn a spotlight on building certification practices. I believe the privatisation of building certification several years ago was part of the rot starting to downgrade building standards in the ACT.

For your typical purchaser of a vacant block, a finished stand-alone house or a unit/townhouse they rely — if they think of it at all — on the certification of a building certifier to the effect that their building conforms with ACT building standards.

The catch is that, unless the building purchaser opts to appoint their own certifier, the default is that the builder/developer appoints the certifier. It is unclear to me how purchasers of multi-unit properties have any say at all in the selection of the building certifier.

Moreover many building sites do not, contrary to law, post the name of the appointed building certifier.

When was the last time that legal requirement was enforced? Owners building on their own land do have a choice: accept a building certifier appointed by the builder or choose their own.

It doesn't take much imagination to speculate where the loyalties of some building certifiers may lie in this situation (i.e. where their future income is dependent on not upsetting developers or builders via stringent application of quality standards). It's too late to turn back the clock several years and return building certification functions to public servants untainted by fee-dependent associations with developers and builders.

It's not too late, however, for the ACT administration to improve the integrity of the building certification process. Firstly, by setting rigorous standards for the licensing of building certifiers, enforcing them and widely publicising via a website building certifiers who meet these standards. Second, by the ACT administration itself appointing the building certifier for any development, no matter how big or small, from an ACT-selected panel of reputable building certifiers. As distinct from leaving it to "the market" to basically non-regulate itself.

John Mellors, Coombs

If the puzzling madness of trams is to continue south, or in any case, we should look to Griffin's missing third lake crossing, using Lawson Crescent, Acton. It would spring from Acton Peninsula's south-west shore, and make landfall near Lennox Gardens, expanded north to Griffin's planned shape, completing his symmetry with Bowen Place, Barton.

The current plan to integrate trams into Commonwealth Avenue and its bridge is expensive and disruptive, especially as overhead wires are banned there.

The new circular crossing (which could tolerate overhead wires) precipitates much needed all-mode (except trucks) connectivity between Civic, New Acton, ANU, Acton Peninsula, Parkes, the Parliamentary Zone, and beyond. The West Lake yachting course, and east-west water craft access would be preserved. The new bridge, and recreational facilities on expanded Lennox Gardens North, would be appropriately located outside the National Triangle, but would be redolent of the nearby National Museum's colourful post-modernist structures.

Because of its new connectivity with Civic (and Parkes), the expanded Lennox Gardens precinct becomes a far better "City-to-the-Lake" solution than the current sun-deprived, very expensive, and apartment-compromised West-Basin one.

Jack Kershaw, Kambah

The Christchurch heritage tramway, which so delighted Fred Pilcher (Letters, March 25), was a reference point for Canberra's proposed Federation Line in the early 2000s. Utilising restored tramcars from all Australian systems, the Federation Line would have linked our major public institutions as well as being a tourist attraction in its own right.

Though never actually realised, the Federation Line project progressed to the point of recreating what would have been an original Canberra tram – had Walter Burley Griffin's network been successfully rolled out in the 1920s. The then innovative Melbourne W class design, fitted out in the livery of Canberra's early bus system, would have been the logical vehicle for the national capital's network, a system too small to develop and build a design of its own. Brought here for public exhibition rides on a test track 15 years ago, it became the first tram to run under overhead power in Canberra.

The "Canberra tram" now resides at the Sydney Tramway Museum. Would it not be historically appropriate to bring it back so it could be part of the opening ceremonies for the light rail system?

Ray Edmondson, former chairman, The Federation Line Inc, Kambah

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