Hazards of trees
If the ACT Government was serious with public safety from dead, dying or diseased trees, then it needs to look no further than the entire length of Mugga Lane from the Monaro Highway turn-off at Hume through to Hindmarsh Drive, Red Hill.
Nearly every tree along Mugga Lane, both on the roadside and inside the adjoining boundary fences, are either dead, dying or diseased, and for years now they have posed a serious threat to motorists should a tree fall or drop their branches across the road.
Why hasn't the Government done anything about the hazard or is there a more sinister side to its tree management?
I would hate to think it has a resource savings program of sitting back waiting for the public to identify the hazard or for an accident to occur before they call in the contractor.
John Wiles, Gilmore
Uluru climbing
For more, pick up a copy of today's Canberra Times
I was interested in some of the comments from Jane Reynolds (Letters, October 13) regarding the climbing of Uluru.
I don't hold much truck with Peter Garrett but I am inclined to think he should remain silent.
Reynolds asks the question: ''How would Garrett regard the desecration of a sacred building or site belonging to a Muslim, Christian or any other culture whose religious beliefs should be respected?'' There is no objection, for example, to the climbing all over St Peter's Basilica in Vatican City or St Paul's Cathedral in London.
I expect these qualify as sacred buildings belonging to the Christian faith and I also suspect the religion is respected.
I suspect Reynolds is being just a tad too precious and very oversensitive and I suspect she becomes outraged at just about everything other people do.
John Kelly, Wanniassa
God and quakes
G. Coquillette (Letters, October 10) is wrong to say that God wanted the earthquakes that ravaged Indonesia and Samoa to happen.
God certainly didn't ''punish'' the peoples of Indonesia and Samoa as his/her letter implies.
Rather, God on occasions for His own reasons chooses not to intervene in the natural order of things.
Remember, those earthquakes were natural occurrences, arising from the way the Earth has been made.
That the earthquakes gave rise to suffering and considerable suffering at that is undeniable.
And all of us would have preferred the earthquakes not to have happened.
But the earthquakes natural events did happen.
So what are we humans to do in response?
Grieve, and then pick ourselves up and get on with life, including making preparations to minimise the adverse effects of the next ones. There are always lessons to be learned from suffering.
And one of the marks of our maturity as humans is how we respond to suffering.
We Christians believe that our God is benevolent and with us in our suffering there for comfort and support and healing.
We pray for that, and also give thanks that our God is always with us.
Don Sephton, Greenway
Obama's peace
The criticism of the Nobel Peace Prize to United States President Barack Obama surprises me.
True, his presidential journey is still at its early stages, but he has, almost single-handedly, managed to achieve a global mood swing in the direction of peace and reconciliation, and that is a very significant achievement.
Obama may not yet have changed much, yet, but, as the current United Nations General Assembly has shown, the world community is now considering important objectives such as total nuclear disarmament that a year ago were dreams.
Under his leadership the UN has gained a new vitality.
Of course he continues to be faced with the Afghanistan problem, one that he inherited, but that issue is an extremely difficult one to resolve, whatever course he chooses.
These days the Nobel committee wisely takes into account, in its awards, important peace causes that are likely to benefit from its selection, and the Obama appointment must surely be one of these cases.
It should encourage Obama to persist with his efforts, for example, to promote more effective international cooperation, at a time when our response to future challenges depend so heavily on inspired leadership.
James Dunn, Cook
Market muddle
Removal of the barriers to supermarket competition in the ACT (''Capital breaks grocery duopoly'', October 8, p1) is welcome.
Certainly governments, in the interests of competition, should act to remove artificial barriers to entry to an industry by new suppliers, particularly if it created those barriers in the first place.
But the main mistake governments make is to not stop there, but to go on to legislate to provide government assistance of various kinds to new entrants to prop them up, in the mistaken belief that to do so benefits competition.
It doesn't.
Governments tend to forget that genuine competition is a cruel process, involving losers as well as winners.
It's not genuine competition if governments interfere with that process by helping and protecting some suppliers and not others, rather than protecting the competitive process itself.
R.S. Gilbert, Braddon