Jenny Stewart may be a professor of public policy but she clearly knows very little about the realities of forestry practice in Australia (''Forestry didn't get it all wrong'', October 14, p21).
The assertions throughout her article are consistently wrong. To mention just a few:
While the original foresters in Australia did protect native forests from land clearing, there is no similarity between the early days of single-tree selective logging and the current highly mechanised all-but-clearfelling destruction of vast areas feeding insatiable woodchip mills.
For Stewart to liken our eucalypt forests to those of Canada and Scandanavia is disingenuous, as those forests are nothing like ours; they are primarily fast-growing softwood forests in high rainfall areas.
In short, Forests NSW's industrial logging practices are transforming our biodiversity-rich native forests from multi-age, multi-species natural ecosystems to single-age, single species monocultures (i.e. plantations). As public forests are yielding lower and lower timber supplies, the industry is moving rapidly into private forests, where regulation is at a minimum and desperate landowners are being paid a miserable $2 a tonne for their timber resource.
Governments of all persuasions and at all levels continue to condone and support this diminution of our rapidly disappearing natural heritage, despite a substantial majority of the population supporting a cessation in native forest logging for woodchips.
John Hibberd, executive director, Conservation Council ACT
NURSES UNDERVALUED
In response to ''Higher salaries 'boost' leader's performance'' (October 12, p4), I would like to say that everything in this article could be used in relation to nurses' wages as well.
Labor MP Andrew Leigh says politics must compete with higher salaries in other professions.
The difference, of course, is that the shortage of nurses constantly increases because as the older workforce - which has become used to the current pay and conditions - retires, newer generations find the same conditions utterly unacceptable.
Thus, the latest statistics show that a newly educated nurse will last an average of two years in the profession before finding another job.
This makes the assurance from the ACT's Chief Minister, Katy Gallagher, that 200 new nurses will join the workforce next year sound pretty futile.
And as for Leigh's claim that $50,000 more or less in his salary wouldn't matter to him, that exact sum is the yearly wage of an enrolled nurse after 25 years on the job.
Someone can go straight out of school with no education and earn more than that amount.
Nurses have the lives of their patients in their hands, but no one appears to seriously value this.
Politicians believe it is fair to ''almost double'' their own pay, but nurses need to threaten strike action to have their pay increase raised from 2.5per cent to 3.5 per cent.
In Europe, average people are fed up with being the ones footing the bill for the lifestyles of the rich.
Australia is fast heading in the same direction.
Steenus von Steensen, Phillip
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