Although of mature years, I consult text books regularly. The one on my desk this morning is the weighty study by Stephen Hawking of The Mathematical Breakthroughs That Changed History.

The brains of the children on the other hand are still deficient in decision making skills, which is why we do not ask them to sit on juries or encourage them to stand for parliament.

Regrettably, their naivety is being exploited by "catastrophic climate change" activists who have long since abandoned reasoned argument for cherry picked, emotive campaigning.

One consequence of this is the documented failure of our school system to help all children achieve basic standards of literacy and numeracy so they may participate in lifelong self education.

That in turn will sow the seeds of future dementia.

P J Bewley (Letters, September 11) accuses "Morrison and his government of assuming that all unemployed are out of work work by choice and are having a wow of a time living it up on drugs, gambling and consuming alcohol...."

He goes on to say they should be given them a substantial lift in unemployment benefits to help equip them to better equip them to compete for the few real jobs out there.

Tell that to employers who cannot find people to fill vacancies or who leave them in the lurch by failing to turn up after a few days, or after lunch on a given day for reasons unknown.

Trouble is with branding "all unemployed" in the same way we blithely quote "all Australians or everyone" when we want to make a point.

Let's face it, being unemployed is tough going but there are those unemployed who prefer not to work, just as there are those who are spending unemployment benefits on more than basic living needs.

Rather than reverting to denigrating our nation's democratically elected government, and thus our Prime Minister, how about supporting rather than dumping on their efforts to encourage a percentage of targeted unemployed to focus more on positive ways to better equip themselves for a job and to spend less of their taxpayer funded benefit on harmful addiction?

Having just come back from Spain, I can confidently corroborate Rod Holesgrove's sentiments on E-scooters (Letters, September 7). They are definitely a menace to pedestrians. In Spain there have already been a couple of deaths caused by fast moving E-scooters running onto elderly pedestrians.

The E-scooter invasion represents yet another example of faceless multinationals swamping the markets all over the world. The main company hiring the E-scooters in Malaga, Spain, is Uber.

I add my voice to Rod's in his unstated call on Shane Rattenbury to reconsider allowing E-scooters to roam through the city center.

The heads of both the ACT Master Builders' Association and the Real Estate Institute are busy crossing their fingers and playing with data when they dismiss possible links between the fall in new apartment sales and the burgeoning building defects crisis ("Canberra apartment sales plunge with demand down for newer builds", canberratimes.com.au, September 6).

They clearly don't talk to many people outside their property and government networks or if they do, they aren't listening. They, instead, blithely blame a downturn in building approvals on investor hesitation and the pre-election lull. Yet the REI tries to encourage sales by suggesting that buyer protection from drawn-out and financially draining impacts of defect remediation may be achieved by seeking out complexes with active and vigilant body corporate committees and a high live-in owner population.

Unfortunately such criteria would not be relevant to many complexes newly built or under construction, where committees are yet to be established or have not had time to work effectively, or where the builder, the developer or many domestic and overseas investors end up owning an influential number of units for rent and have little interest in spending money on defect identification and rectification. Such residential environments suggest a range of quality-of-life risks and impacts that many potential long term live-in buyers, particularly downsizers, would be very keen to avoid.

As Kane Thornton, chief executive of the Clean Energy Council says, investors offering billions of dollars are being deterred from supporting Australian clean-energy projects by the federal government's "uncertain" energy policy ("Fears energy investors will turn offshore", September 5, p12).

Big investors in renewable energy would be looking decades into the future, but all Energy Minister Angus Taylor can offer is a short-term philosophy of encouraging fossil-fuel, particularly coal, energy and the building of more coal-fired power stations.

To make matters worse, Mr Taylor is actively undermining efforts to increase the share of renewables in the energy mix. His justification for this backward step is that "the economics of this is working fine now".

If Mr Taylor were to do his homework properly, he would know that renewable energy, notably solar, is already cost-competitive with coal, and with storage (e.g. battery), will soon be less costly than coal as a source of base load power.

The Morrison government needs to seriously rethink its position on energy policy or many billions of investment dollars will go to other, more forward-looking countries such as New Zealand.

It beggars imagination that any Australian official can assess Sri Lanka as safe for members of the Tamil community, let alone for anyone associated (in fact or by reputation, such as by rumour) with the Tamil opposition to government forces. It is not the Biloela family's claim that courts should review but how this conclusion was arrived at.

The outcome should conclusively establish that this family are genuine refugees, and not economic refugees, thus queue jumpers.

In turn that will bring squarely into question, indeed condemnation, the boat "turn backs" of which Mr Dutton has been bragging. Turning Tamil refugees back is a classic refoulement (sending refugees back into danger), and it probably involves people smuggling given Australian officials very likely provided the boat operators with some financial incentives to take the boat back to Sri Lanka.

With "on-water security" relaxed enough for Mr Dutton to release his brag, this same relaxation should enable Australian tax payers to know just how the boat(s) were turned back, and where this occurred: international, Australian or Sri Lankan waters?

The further tragedy is that we cannot know if any would-be refugees arrived back in the danger zone: they more likely "fell" into the water and sank quickly, despite the valiant efforts of the smuggler's boat crew.

The draft religious freedom bill proposes to outlaw discrimination on the basis of belief.

But my certain belief in logic, proven science and innate humanity requires me to discriminate against those who base their beliefs and public conduct on invisible imaginary friends, impossible and unproven seven-day creation, the incestuous descent of mankind from a mythical man and his divinely reengineered rib.

These are people who accept ancient rules that were codified for the control of superstitious, illiterate, nomadic desert tribes as being applicable today, and who seem unable to grasp contemporary science or realities.

The new scar up the steepest side of Percival Hill, an eyesore from the Barton Highway roundabout, is an access road for a 18 metre (six storey) high sewer vent stack being built near the top of Percival Hill Nature Reserve.

These are stages of Icon Water's Crace Odour Control Project. This stack and track are inappropriate at the focal point of Percival Hill Nature Reserve.

The track and stack will be eyesores and the stack will obstruct the view of walkers at Percival Hill trig. This stack will also spread the odour problem from Crace to Nicholls and Percival Hill making the viewing trig vicinity uninhabitable for walkers and wildlife.

If you agree that this project should never have been proposed or approved contact your local MLA and complain.

I too was appalled at the desecration of the previously serene view to the Brindabellas. The ghetto style apartment blocks of Coombs and Wright are already a horror. Now another suburb, completely deforested, will be added to this horrendous mix. Mr Mungoven (Letters, September 9) what can we do indeed? I have voted Labor in the ACT for 45 years but not again.

Perhaps those victims of climate change in Queensland and NSW who have lost everything can ask Michael McCormack to broker some opportunities with our Pacific neighbours?

There has been support from many quarters for equal pay for female and male sports people. Most mentioned are male dominated sports such as cricket and football. The Australian men's netball team is playing in New Zealand. Will any equal pay supporters call for them to be paid the same as our female netball players?

Mr Trump is really a genius, a king when it comes to making deals. Look at the deal he made with North Korea. Kim Jong-un is still firing rockets but now it has got much better for him with no American or world condemnation and legitimacy that we have never seen before.

Having recently visited the Australian War Memorial I see no need for it to be extended. The place is exemplary in every way. Just as AWM director, Brendan Nelson, has declared he knows when to leave an institution, so it is important to know when to leave a building well alone.

I've been reflecting on the government's conscious cruelty to a family having a go to get a go. Must Morrison trump Donald?

Whenever I read one of Colliss Parrett's anti-drug missives I'm minded to suggest to him that, for the sake of brevity, he simply uses the admonition of South Park's school counsellor, Mr Mackie: "Drugs are bad, m'kay". Short, to the point, and fully encompassing everything he repeatedly says.

Scott Morrison is proving that he is not PM material as he can't break away from being a PR flunky. When Australia needs a Statesman we get a clapped out Barina instead.

Thank you Wayne Grant (Letters, September 8) for demonstrating the hypocrisy of "political correctness". It seems inclusion only applies to those who agree. I have not been reprogrammed so I don't feel morally or intellectually superior to my fellow Canberrans.

It seems that Barnaby Joyce is heading for the cross bench. He has been cross quite a bit lately, and of course, has been benched from the ministry.

Email: letters.editor@canberratimes.com.au. Send from the message field, not as an attachment. Fax: 6280 2282. Mail: Letters to the Editor, The Canberra Times, PO Box 7155, Canberra Mail Centre, ACT 2610.

Keep your letter to 250 or fewer words. References to Canberra Times reports should include date and page number. Letters may be edited. Provide phone number and full home address (suburb only published).

To send a letter via the online form, click or touch here.