Unsettling views
I FAIL to see why some of your correspondents are upset by the Prime Minister advocating in favour of the canonisation of Mary McKillop.
He has certainly shown a tendency to support other minority groups such as soccer supporters, so why not keep the few Catholics in the community happy?
Maybe next he could demand that all schools teach where and what Cardiff is (Letters, July 10) to keep our Welsh minority happy.
Tracy Giurietto, Burrill Lake, NSW
TV's terrible tactics
''WE'LL FIND out right after the break''.
As free-to-air TV battles to keep your finger off the remote control, this is increasingly the tactic.
The cliff-hanger.
Surely therefore, AFL football with 25 to 30 natural cliff-hangers to place advertisements after is the perfect game to broadcast free-to-air.
What an epic missed opportunity then for Prime (TV) to decide not to broadcast the Geelong vs St Kilda game.
The game of the non-finals season and arguably one of the outstanding games for many years past or to come.
What strange agenda(s) could have led to such an outwardly baffling decision or non-decision?
Why didn't someone have the guts to say, ''No, come on, its a no brainer we've got to broadcast this game''. But then, if they're to dumb to do it out of their own self-interest, doing it to give their customers what they want has no chance?
John Dinn, Ngunnawal
Young and caring
THE SCENE. Busy peak-hour traffic on Belconnen Way.
My car (old like me) breaks down in a middle lane and obviously needs a tow.
A motorcyclist stops and pushes the car off the road and a young lady also stops, phones for a breakdown truck, rings my wife and arranges for the motor repair shop to receive my car. The age of chivalry is not dead. My heartfelt thanks to the young people concerned who left without leaving their addresses.
( Incidentally, the next day I invested in one of those new-fangled mobile phones.)
A. H. Rendell, Belconnen
Semi-detached is best
A VERY simple and pain-free method of increasing urban density significantly is to mandate the use of semi-detached houses.
It is hard to understand why we don't embrace the ''semi'' more enthusiastically.
If designed well, they are more private and can be better sound separated than usual closely spaced detached dwellings which have windows looking on to the neighbour's windows.
Semis are thermally more efficient and most of all they don't waste that ridiculous few-metre strip between dwellings which normally serves no purpose at all.
Full-terrace housing can equally be made efficient, attractive and very liveable, using minimum space while still giving a very useable back yard. At similar densities, you get more useable yard with a terrace house than with one of our ludicrous courtyard houses.
It's time to end our negative view of semis and terraces.
Julian Robinson, Narrabundah
It's all heading north
HUGH SADDLER and John Sandeman (''ACT fails grade in rating homes energy efficiency'', July 10, p1) would force more stringent energy ratings on our homes .
Apparently many don't face sufficiently north for their tastes.
The big windows in our place face west. We wouldn't have it any other way.
You see, household temperatures are substantially determined by plants.
Our great, big, deciduous trees to the west completely shade the house on hot summer afternoons, but allow wonderful westerly winter sun to stream in, across the rooms.
Faster growing exotics, offering rich autumn colours, will do this job within five years, allowing temporary awnings to be removed.
People with less space build deciduous-vine-covered high trellises from their eaves, growing grapes or flowers.
Relax fellas.
Tom Waring, Ainslie
Police info danger
UNDER a treaty with Indonesia for mutual assistance in criminal matters, information was passed by the Australian Federal Police to the Indonesian National Police which directly caused three Australians to now be on death row in Bali.
A similar treaty was signed by Australia and the Peoples Republic of China in 2006, which unfortunately allows the AFP to do the same thing, without reference to anyone, until a person is actually charged with an offence which could attract the death penalty.
This is a ludicrous loophole which you could drive a truck through as it is pretty obvious when information is being passed that in the event of charges, the death penalty could result.
Could we have assurances from the AFP that they were and are not involved in the current Stern Hu case in China?
Vic Adams, Reid
West is best?
IS IT so hard to believe that an Australian is capable of dodgy business practices?
Or is it that the Australian media and its political counterparts cannot see outside of the West's socio-political system?
Australia would not accept the infiltration or compromise of its own system?
And moreover, Australia seems quite comfortable to hold people in detention that allegedly compromise its own national security.
When will Australia (and the West) overcome its unwavering belief in its own cultural relativist superiority and start seeing its counterparts as equals?
Andrew Dib, Lyneham
Walkers beware
MAREE Philip (Letters, July 9) must be one of the very few pedestrians who have the ''approach with caution vibe each morning'' while they walk through the Civic Bus Interchange.
As a regular user of the interchange, I am regularly transfixed at the antics of some of my fellow users.
Many of whom walk through the intersection while texting on their mobiles, listening to their iPods or drinking their morning coffee.
All this instead of watching out for bus traffic.
After all it is a bus interchange, not a pedestrian mall.
Alan Kennett, Amaroo
Share the space
THE IDEA to turn Bunda Street into a shared space used by cars, walkers and shoppers etc, has some merit (''In a safety drive, try sharing a Bunda Street space'', July 7, p9).
It is also interesting to note that Canberra's CBD now requires a shared space as Canberra's old CBD offered a shared space exclusively free of cars.
The area from Bunda Street to London Circuit (incorporating Garema Place) and East Row to Akuna Street was always a shared space albeit with minimal car access.
Sure, a ride on the merry-go-round after a Friday night family dinner at Woodstock pizza restaurant was not necessarily Parisian but it was pretty cosmopolitan for Canberra.
It's a shame that when our planners decided to move the heart of Canberra's CBD from the Garema Place area of Civic to Bunda Street with the creation of North Quarter that they did not realise that a fully functional shared space already existed.
Maybe it was just another case of greed getting in the way of practicality.
Gordon Edwards, Page
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