Jenna Price (Times 2, June 9, p2) captures a bundle of important truths in her column about international students. She sees the inside of the educational beast from key angles: as a parent, working journalist, teacher and person who'd like to believe in international sister/brotherhood.
Australian universities have been squeezed in a vice for 20 years: take more students, make do with less money.
To pay the bills, they have sent out recruiters and signed up agents to bring in fee-paying students from overseas. Such students need more care, not less. But less is what they often get. So in fact do all students, as class sizes grow.
One of the poignant pictures on an Australian university campus in the first weeks of a new year is of 25-30 eager first-year students trying to pack themselves into a tutorial room, built in the 1970s for a maximum of 20. A fair number give up and go away.
If Australia wants tertiary education as one of its largest export earners, we have to invest in classrooms, accommodation, support services and a generation of cluey, caring teacher-scholars.
Robin Jeffrey, Braddon
Water, not power
Putting electricity supplies underground to a new suburb costs about twice that of overhead reticulation.
There are clear safety and continuity of supply benefits from the former. However, buried cabling is not safe from gung-ho backhoe operators who do not dial before they dig. A recent widespread blackout in Sydney was caused by damage to a heavily loaded feeder during an excavation.
As for pulling down existing overhead reticulation and replacing with a buried system; don't waste our money. There are much more urgent and worthy uses for scarce funds and the attention of ActewAGL, like a hurry-up program for our stumbling water supply development. Another El Nino event and we shall be down to Level 4 restrictions.
Colin P. Glover, Canberra City
Put a stop to coal
When it comes to human nature, politics, and the state of our planet, I really find many things hard to believe when it relates to the actions and inactions of people generally, ie, we have coal mining companies preparing to destroy some of our country's most valuable agricultural land (the Liverpool Plains and land near Gloucester), to meet export/profit requirements.
NSW Premier Nathan Rees condones this prospect with the ridiculous assertion that coal mining is more economically important and that there are more coal mining than agriculture jobs.
Both assertions can be discounted when taken over a long time frame. You can only mine the coal once, while most farmers would attempt to make their land sustainable for all time. To permanently damage soils and water tables would be be unforgivable.
Perhaps Rees might care to explain why NSW persists with coal-fired power stations when natural gas is more environmentally friendly and plentiful (China is buying huge volumes from us at a pretty nice price).
I appreciate the cost of change would be high, but it appears that Australian Governments (especially NSW under Labor) have a problem planning in advance.
The NSW Treasury has been sucked dry, and NSW citizens will be hit with higher power bills this year.
Allowing for corporate greed, and human greed generally; the political decisions being applied generally, I don't see a brilliant future for NSW, Australia or our planet.
Sometimes I like to be proved wrong, but in those cases its hard to find someone with a strong and decent argument.
Ken Brown, Invergowrie, NSW
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