For some years now, there has been a Memorandum of Understanding between the government and the UnionsACT that gives effective veto power over letting of government contracts. There must have been a few loopholes in it, otherwise legislation would not be required.

It would be a "courageous" Labor MLA, chief minister or other, who would contradict let alone disobey the wishes of the union movement in this City. Is that what taxpayers voted for last October? Well, it is what they are getting. And let us not forget the tax-paid gold mine that is light rail that the unions have negotiated with the government, through the selected contractors, thanks to that MoU.

M. Silex, Erindale

Governments are held accountable for the actions they take and can be removed over a period time if they are deemed not to be acting in the interest of the citizens. So how can UnionsACT which is a non-government body have stealth veto powers over our elected government's decisions? What stops someone lining the pockets of UnionsACT officials so they can decide which company gets the nod?

The UnionsACT secretary stated that "The Memorandum of Understanding obliges the government to consult with us, and that is the extent of what it does". So why is the government intent on providing legislation that affirms this MoU into law if it is just a consultative role? I certainly did not vote for the executive of UnionsACT so they should not have any say in the contracts that are awarded by the government.

Without formal independent governance oversight, this Memorandum of Understanding between the ACT government and UnionsACT has the potential for corruption. It is bad enough that the government shares pillow talk with developers making affordable housing a pipe dream to many, it has drafted the Planning and Development Act 2007 (ACT) to favour (deep-pocketed) development over community concerns through the use of weasel words. The ACT needs an Independent Commission into Corruption to investigate the current government. The endless negative reports from the ACT Auditor-General should be viewed as a wake-up call. Wasting billions on light rail when our life-saving hospitals languish is plainly ludicrous.

Stephen Petersen, Dunlop

I write in support of voluntary euthanasia ("Push for ACT voice on assisted dying" August 1, p6) having contracted a disease which, though ultimately fatal, is more often associated with periods of remission. So I find myself being carried along by a stream of circumstances which see me, contrary to previous intentions, accepting complicated therapy with encouraging biochemistry but so far little symptomatic relief. I would like to think that voluntary euthanasia will be available to me if needed.

On a more controversial note, just as some couples make a conscious decision not to have children [for example the adopting couple in "Lion", based on a true story], some wish to curtail their life span and some of these are not even ill. Given the parlous state of the planet or issues of senility and dependence, small wonder.

An unconscionably large proportion of the health budget is expended on keeping people with terminal illness alive for limited periods. By all means spend those resources on those who want them but what harm is done by allowing a decent exit to those who do not?

And Kevin Andrews would be the last person I would want dictating my fate.

Dick Varley, Braidwood

It's always useful to be reminded Canberra IS the nation's capital (Letters, August 3). Our city was planned from the beginning by Walter and Marion Griffin, just as Washington DC was planned by Pierre L'Enfant and Brasilia by Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer.

That planning included what has become our Bush Capital. It's not the dense high-rise capital, too much at the mercy of property developers and their profit-driven whims. Canberra's origins are being sold out.

This city is not like Sydney or Melbourne or Brisbane. The cockatoos feed regularly on the nature strips and I walk past kookaburras every morning. Canberra's incomparable.

Peter Graves, Curtin

Kirsten Lawson's dining review of Monster Kitchen and Bar ("Monster mash-up of innovation", Good Food, August 1, p3) certainly gave me a fright, particularly when the score she assigned was compared with the review itself.

Tragics like me who regularly scour the weekly dining reviews will know that her score of 15.5/20 is one of the highest an establishment could expect to earn, given the scoring method. For that score, a reader could expect to be told about tasty and high-quality food and ingredients probably combined with impeccable service or atmosphere. Not so it seems.

Descriptions such as "not pleasant to taste", "looks rather better than it tastes", "not well produced", "a little disjointed" and "the food has not been consistent" are just a few examples of the critic's findings.

It's pretty clear to this reader that the lack of consistency was not just confined to the food – but flowed through to the review itself.

Scores should reflect what the reviewer encountered and not be inflated to reflect what they expected.

Ian Duckworth, Griffith

Clause 5(2) of the October 2016 Parliamentary Agreement between the Chief Minister and the Greens makes provision for the use of "deliberative democracy strategies (citizens' juries) [as a means of strengthening] community consultation processes so that diverse views are taken into account in relation to major project proposals".

At the time the Chief Minister signed, he might have confidently assumed that the government would be able to convince a citizen jury to approve the major projects (the City to the Lake, new Civic football stadium and light rail) of his grandiose, multibillion-dollar infrastructure "vision".

However, any such confidence would have been severely jolted by the decision of the South Australian citizen jury on November6, 2016 to reject (by an overwhelming 70per cent majority) Premier Jay Weatherill's proposal for a nuclear waste dump.

The Chief Minister is still professing "support" for citizen juries ("Citizen jury idea risks 'boring the people of Canberra', say Greens", August2, p6) but it seems half-hearted.

Judging by the government's nomination of the Mickey Mouse issue of compulsory third party insurance, the government is too scared to let a citizen jury get its teeth into any really meaty issues, such as whether the territory can afford the multibillion-dollar cost of the Chief Minister's pet projects.

I'm confident that if a citizen jury were to hear the Auditor-General's detailed analysis of the government's capacity to fund these projects, it would be unlikely to approve any of them.

Bruce Taggart, Aranda

I applaud Bill Shorten for outlining his policy objectives so early in the electoral cycle, but that has given all of us a glimpse of just how destructive to rural communities they would be. His ill-advised tax-grab aimed at trusts is a prime example of failing to understand the complex ebbs and flows of money that sustain rural communities.

It's not just farmers in the south-east of NSW who rely on trusts to smooth their income flow between good and bad years; many rural small businesses rely on income from primary producers.

Farmers and graziers don't invest in new sheds, fences, pumps when they are not earning and many of the small businesses that sell and maintain this infrastructure rely on trusts to manage their income year to year.

The ALP has effectively labelled these workers as wealthy tax dodgers. Rural communities across the south-east of NSW will be much worse off if Bill Shorten is given the keys to The Lodge.

Nigel Catchlove, Yass, NSW

We know that the Coalition's same-sex marriage plebiscite is an expensive sham, because the avowed marriage opponents have already signalled that they plan to defy the will of the Australian people in the event that a "yes" vote was successful. If plebiscites are suddenly all the rage, how about one on the Adani mine, coal-seam gas fracking, and implementing a carbon price?

Further, if the government has a lazy $150million earmarked for this farce, there are far better uses it could be put towards such as funding domestic violence prevention and shelters or low-cost housing for Australia's many thousands of homeless.

But the whole charade is about the self-appointed moral guardians subjecting the populace to their views on decency. It's time they got on the right side of history.

David Jenkins, Casey

I've yet to see a case, from a community perspective, for Federal Golf Club's planned housing development.

However, here are three good reasons to stop it and return the affected land for public use such as walking: they obviously don't need the land to play golf, and in any case maintaining fairways on the side of Red Hill is environmental lunacy. The housing is very unlikely to be affordable for anyone but the wealthy and there are plenty of existing housing blocks nearby with houses close to the end of their physical life.

Bruce Paine, Red Hill

Felix MacNeill dismisses the arrival of autonomous cars within a "decade or so" (Letters, August2) by equating, without analysis, the chances of their appearance with that of jet-packs and other unmaterialised predictions.

In so doing, he ignores the stated intentions of Daimler, BMW, GM, Ford, Volvo, Audi, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, Google's spin-off Waymo, Baidu and others to commercialise the technology as shared fleets of autonomous cars providing mobility on demand, door-to-door, 24/7 within five years.

He ignores the evidence from dozens of academic and consultant models, and studies showing such services will cost much less than current cars and even public transport, be much safer, reclaim space from car parks and garages, and in low-density cities such as Canberra, eliminate congestion.

Mr MacNeill ignores the initiatives of dozens of jurisdictions planning to make best use of their arrival to improve the lives of their citizens.

Just as the coal lobby wilfully ignores evidence of climate change and developments in renewables, instead promoting "clean coal", he, like the ACT government with its focus on trams, is placing a very large bet against technology propelled by intense competition and research and development that will revolutionise the movement of people and goods, just as the internet transformed the movement of information and ideas.

Kent Fitch, Nicholls

The provision of section44 of the constitution that would prevent anyone who is entitled to the rights or privileges of a citizen of a foreign power from sitting in Parliament is a real problem for actual or potential dual citizens.

An actual foreign citizen can renounce that citizenship, while a potential one can refrain from claiming or activating it. But is this enough to satisfy section44?

Don't such people retain their entitlement to foreign citizenship should they wish to (re)claim it in future? And doesn't this continuing entitlement prevent them from sitting in Parliament?

Michael McCarthy, Deakin

TURNBULL'S PROMISE

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is duty-bound to ensure his Coalition will not facilitate the passage of any bill for same-sex marriage without firstly keeping his promise to consult the Australian people. Should such legislation pass both houses without popular consultation, the Executive Council should not present the bill to the Governor-General for assent.

David D'Lima, Sturt, SA

WHINING ABOUT ABC

I find it odd that major newspapers and some commercial TV channels are whining about the ABC and SBS. Fairfax and the ABC often work together on Four Corners stories and journalists from the papers appear on ABC news shows. Commercial TV stations have poached many ABC shows after it was proven they were viable and entertaining but were too scared to produce them themselves.

Adrian Jackson, Middle Park, Vic

THE NEW SLAVERY

Slavery doesn't really exist today, just exploitation.

Rod Matthews, Fairfield, Victoria

UNEQUAL LANGUAGE

Who says you can't teach old dogs new tricks? The editorial of August 3 taught me the difference between traditional class lines and socioeconomic categories. I now have learnt that these classifications can be used to obfuscate the "contours of inequality". It is a fecund age in which we live.

Gary J. Wilson, Macgregor

HADLEY HIDING TOO

Shame on you Ray Hadley, accusing a decent man like Shane Rattenbury of "hiding behind parliamentary privilege" to make "unsubstantiated" allegations against the Canberra Greyhound Racing Club ("'You look like an unmade bed': Shane Rattenbury cops spray from shock jock", canberratimes.com.au, August 3) whilst hiding behind a microphone.

John Rodriguez, Florey

FAR-WRONG GROUPS

The Norwegian "Fatherland first" Facebook group mistakes a photograph of six empty bus seats for a group of women wearing burqas, as abhorrent evidence of the ongoing and unstoppable "Islamification" of Norway.

For the sake of their cardiac and respiratory functions (alas the cerebral ones are all up) one has to hope they never take a bus in Canberra. Also noteworthy that far-right groups wear face-masks and balaclavas when they publicly demonstrate against burqas.

Luca Biason, Latham

SMOKERS' PARADISE

What a great idea Etienne Hingee (Letters, July 28). The Health Minister should declare the entire light rail corridor smoke-free.

T Henderson, Holder

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