I long for the day when Australia has a government which actually believes in something and is actually willing to stand up for those beliefs and argue its case, regardless of public opinion or prejudice.

Joshua Smith,

Gordon

MORE SCARE TACTICS

The boats are coming! Lock up your daughters! The boats are coming! They'll use your front lawn as a public lavatory. They'll pollute the dinkum Aussie gene pool. They don't have a clue who Phar Lap was.

What on Earth am I on about?

If Labor calls a election, the Libs and Nats badly need help.

Philip Ruddock and Kevin Andrew have risen from the dead.

I'm writing Scare Campaign commercials for the Coalition.

Graham Macafee,

Latham

POVERTY AND REFUGEES

Australia's refugee problems can be fixed, but not by increased border security or tighter laws.

It has to be fixed by addressing the root cause of the problem, which in many cases is poverty.

Extreme poverty exhausts governments and causes instability.

Fragile states can collapse, imperilling their citizens, with ungoverned areas becoming a breeding ground for terrorism, trafficking, civil war and disease.

By applying our effort and money to foreign aid we can reduce the number of people who need to seek asylum in Australia.

Australia needs to comply with the Millennium Development Goals to try and halve extreme poverty by 2015.

By doing this we can stem the flow of refugees by addressing the cause instead of the symptoms.

That's why I'm part of the Oaktree Foundations Stand Up For Change campaign, to help end extreme poverty.

As a young person I think this is of the upmost importance because by fulfilling the Millennium Development Goals we can improve the livelihood of millions.

Anna Himmelreich,

Farrer

SAFE CLIMATE POLICY

The logic of the Greens' safe climate policy presented to the public this week is so rational that it should be subject to a wide debate and, hopefully, understanding.

Certainly the games being played by the two major parties will not add to the safety of our planet and, if continued, stand a good chance of missing the boat altogether.

In this case, politics has become a dangerous game.

R. Williams,

Ainslie

NAMES OF JUDGES

Would The Canberra Times please disclose the names of the 22 judges who demean themselves by applying for the chief magistrate's position in the ACT (''Defamed SA judge seeks top ACT job'', October 15, p4).

Surely we're looking at sundry lawyers and the odd person who already holds magisterial rank, including a former South Australian magistrate.

He might have been warned that local commentary on judges and his kind are attracting more trenchant assessments than, for example, ''delusional'' and ''daft understanding of the law'', earning him quite a windfall on his patch.

Our Attorney-General needs to be wary of this gentleman, and so do we.

Patrick Jones,

Griffith

APPLAUD PUBLIC ART

Colin R. Petrie (Letters, October 13) did not speak to me or many others I know as part of his survey of people who endorse (or not) Chief Minister Jon Stanhope's public art program.

We all strongly endorse and support the public art program and believe that many people in Canberra do too.

Would Petrie consider the much-loved Kangaroos by Jan Brown that drink from the pool in Commonwealth Park ''uniformly ugly''? Stanhope has built on a widely applauded model in Canberra that was evident in the late 1960s to the mid-'70s thanks to the National Capital Development Commission.

Each public building and space that was constructed during that period schools, health centres, parks and shopping centres had a work of art as a component.

The roles of public art in the community are many and varied.

Public art can take different forms: statues, such as the Burns Memorial, commissioned by the Canberra Highland Society and Burns Club, on the corner of Canberra Avenue and National Circuit, and the King George V Memorial near Old Parliament House; stained-glass windows in churches, the National Library of Australia and the Australian War Memorial; and abstract works such as Fractal Weave in Civic Square.

Public art challenges its audiences. It pushes boundaries, is shifting, causes discussion about the space it inhabits and inevitably creates heated debates.

Clearly Stanhope's public art policy has achieved this.

Meredith Hinchliffe,

O'Connor

HUMAN RIGHTS

Father Frank Brennan, the ''head of the Government's Human Rights Consultation Committee'' disclosed the danger of human rights legislation in the article ''Human rights proposal 'no picnic for lawyers''' (October 15, p6).

He ''dismissed ... concerns, saying government would retain the right to ignore a court's ruling''.

The Government's Roman adviser stated that the Government's intent is to over-rule precedent.

This is revolutionary.

The essence of our constitutional monarchy is that the Government is absolutely subject to the law.

Gary J. Wilson,

Hackett

STUMBLE ON SPELLING

Did Ronald Krebs, as quoted in Ramesh Thakur's article on Obama's Nobel Peace Prize (''Obama's Nobel nothing prize'', October 15, p19), really refer to the possibility of Obama brandishing ''his pubic hawk'', as distinct from his ''inner dove''?

As a former public service commissioner, I learnt early in my term to triple check the spelling of the word ''public'', whenever it appeared.

However, this beats anything I ever came across!

Denis Ives,

Farrer

HOLES IN LIBRARY

Thanks, ACT Public Library, for putting in a new system which ensures I don't need to interact with anyone and which I can't use if I have forgotten my card.

Thanks for taking away the desks, where I could find someone to answer questions and point me in the right direction to find things.

Now everyone gets to queue up at just one place for simple queries, loan inquiries, computer bookings and longer questions. People are taking one look at the queues and leaving, so I guess that makes it efficient.

Thanks for taking away the staff computers, so that even if you can find someone to help, they are unable to look anything up.

Thanks for cutting staffing so severely that, even if you can find one, there are few staff who know anything about their product (I suppose their training has been cut too).

Thanks for tossing out old books and for your emphasis on current bestsellers, selected by booksellers interstate, to the detriment of subjects such as history, science and literature.

Thanks for tossing out the newspapers and their weekend magazines after just one week.

Thanks for telling me my suggestions are important and then ignoring them.

I'm off to the bookshop. At least they have staff, desks and computers.

C. Hamilton,

Chisholm

SENIOR HEALTH CARD

As a superannuated Commonwealth officer, I must disagree with Annette Barbetti's view (Letters, October 12) that the income test for the Commonwealth Seniors Health Card should be relaxed to remove the inequity between Commonwealth superannuants and other self-funded retirees.

The better policy option is to strengthen the eligibility test to include all income, including tax-free pension streams, so that all retirees are treated equally on the basis of their total incomes. I note that the Government attempted this in the 2008-09 budget but, in the face of rent-seeking opposition from retirees, was too weak-kneed to implement the change.

Dan Buchler,

Waramanga

BEACHED ATHEISTS

What a miserable state Ian Warden describes (''Beached atheists abound in Oz'', Forum, October 10, p18).

For such supposedly clever people it's a marvel that ''beached atheists'' can't make the connection between evolution and the suspension of Christian beliefs.

The author is in the intellectual cage with them, rattling from the inside.

One person did write about the recent events as foreshadowing the Second Coming and the Judgment and was met with the usual flippant and ignorant response.

Don't worry, Ian, there are more of us than you think and we do pray for all of you. Think for yourself instead of swallowing the indoctrination. Anti-God is as much a religion as pro-God.

Mrs J. Halgren,

Latham