My late father was in an aged care facility in which his most frequent complaint concerned the quality and quantity of the food. Fortunately, he never lost his sense of humour.

He described a breakfast of tinned mushrooms on toast as resembling a cow pat. A lunch promoted as whole fish prompted him to check the pond and count how many goldfish were left, because the fish served up was so small.

He referred to the chips served with the fish as firewood. Then a dessert supposedly of plums and custard, comprised just one plum in custard. When he was still able to do so, he would sometimes walk to the nearby shopping centre to have lunch because he couldn't face what was on offer in the home's dining room.

He had a sweet tooth and I used to make sure that he always had a supply of homemade cakes to supplement his diet.

Although the aged care facility included a well-equipped commercial-sized kitchen, little of the food provided was prepared there; rather, the meals were supplied by a firm in Wollongong and delivered frozen to the facility where they were simply reheated.

I believe that this system is used in other aged care homes, but this aspect of the catering was not mentioned in your article.

It is so good to know that Maggie Beer's foundation now runs master classes for aged care chefs ("Malnutrition is 'silent abuser' in aged care", canberratimes.com.au, July 17).

To further rectify the scandal of trying to feed aged care residents on as little as seven dollars a day, and to convert aged care homes into places we'd like to visit, I suggest we encourage friends and relatives to insist on paying for an opportunity to share the main meal with any resident they visit.

In the longer run, under Maggie Beer's guidance, I suspect the dining rooms of aged care homes could become popular (and profitable) local eating places. They might even evolve into the inter-generational community hubs they should rightly be.

We need to find out which planet Federal Industry Minister, Karen Andrews, has landed from.

She says: "It's now incumbent on the states and territories to listen to what [the property] industry is saying, they cannot continue to ignore industry".

This would be the same industry which state and territory politicians and bureaucrats, corruptly and incompetently, have long taken donations and dictation from to remove all that nasty "red tape", regulation and enforcement of urban planning, building design, construction techniques and materials, wouldn't it?

I think the industry has been listened to far too much already. Hence the malodorous circumstance Australia finds itself firmly in.

The ACT Council of Social Service's call for Canberrans to lobby for increases to Newstart and Youth Allowance is timely.

The ongoing poverty forced upon recipients of Newstart, Youth Allowance and Austudy is a disgrace. Groups like ACOSS, the St Vincent de Paul Society and the Brotherhood of St Laurence have lobbied on this issue for years but with little success.

It is time for ordinary people to add their voices and let politicians know that we want to live in a "fair go" society, not a selfish self-centred one.

Given the high levels of financial distress experienced by students on government benefits, I hope that more academics will become actively involved in this campaign.

The United Nations (UN) has released a report ("The of State of Food and Nutrition in the World 2019") showing the number of people chronically hungry has risen for the third year in a row, to 820 million.

One result is low birth weight babies and stunting of children which severely impairs their full development. This is a vicious cycle, because with so many developmentally impaired people, it makes it harder for the community as a whole to achieve the sustainable development goals of ending poverty and hunger, protecting the land and sea and so on.

The UN cites population growth as a problem. Efforts to increase food production are off-set by the rise in number of mouths to feed. Australia can do its part, not just through supporting the World Food Program (WFP), but by helping to end population growth. This can be done through funding family planning and the education of women and girls.

Lee Welling (Letters, July 15) asks why Mr Barr and his government are fixated on the tram for transport.

The tram is not about transport, it's about development along the route. For transport, there are technologies that compared with trams are greener, faster, more flexible for the future, quicker to build, cheaper to operate ... and less than 10 percent of the cost per kilometre to build.

We used to think we were quite a progressive place but the world is leaving us behind. For just one example, try searching for the "Trondheim trambus" to see what modern transport looks like.

One engineering feature is that while it feels like a tram inside it uses rubber on the road rather than steel-on-steel that struggles with emergency braking and handling gradients like those on the trip to Woden.

The fear surrounding the herbicide Roundup needs some perspective. A US study tracking 54,000 heavy users for over 20 years has found no link to any health problems.

The French based WHO body which has classified Roundup as "probably carcinogenic" lists eating red meat, night shift work, hot drinks above 65 degrees, and being a barber in the same category.

Arsenic is placed in a more dangerous cancer list.

In modern Australia the biggest exposure to arsenic is in Brussel sprouts and beer. The level of exposure is low enough to make the risk minimal.

Sprout haters may rely on this information to avoid said vegetable.

Vegetarians may take solace also.

The editorial ("Is APRA the physician to heal itself?", July 18, p20) and other articles have brought me to think of the authority as the child of indulgent parents who never wanted it get dirty playing competitive sports.

Instead they encouraged their child to be a minimal interference referee and appointed coaches of the same mindset as themselves. But now they, and this child of theirs, have to face the reality of refereeing the grown-up game of the dirty competitive finance industry.

So when the current coach's contract expires I recommend they ask Andrew Colvin, the soon to be available Chief Commissioner of the AFP, to become the boss of referees at APRA.

He would be eminently suitable judging by the commentary of Dr John Coyne the head of the Strategic Policing and Law Enforcement Program at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

Professor Clive Williams concludes that the dangers of a new arms race between China, Russia and the US, involving the revolutionary development of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles, can simply be reduced to "a matter of who can deploy the most to deter other parties from using them" ("Global hypersonic arms race gains speed", canberratimes.com.au, July 16).

Firstly, by relying so heavily on the classical strategic doctrine of nuclear deterrence, he is normalising these latest developments in an attempt to bypass any consideration of the dangers inherent in the further reduction of critical response times.

This exponentially increases the probability of a miscalculation that would inevitably trigger a nuclear war.

Secondly, Professor Williams acknowledges that this new generation of hypersonic weaponry renders current anti-missile defence systems as practically ineffective.

He even sees this breakdown in defensive capacity as leading us into an arms race that is "destabilising".

The end result is that we are increasingly arming the planet with penetrable doomsday weapons capable of destroying human civilisation within a matter of minutes.

We are not made more safe by deploying more of these weapons.

They must be abolished.

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