Don't build your home among the gum trees

They are brim-full of flammable oil. We might as well line our streets with drums of petrol.

There are other considerations as well. In summer, they cast too little shade, in winter, they cast too much. In all seasons they drop messy and inflammable bark, leaf litter and branches.

As Margot Sirr says, from now on common sense must prevail: we must plant only green, shady, fire-resistant and deciduous trees.

In recent years, the people of Samoa let measles vaccination coverage fall from 90 per cent to 30 per cent, partly because of the urging of anti-vaxxers including a recently arrested "faith healer". The end result has been numerous deaths; including about 50 children.

What a sad waste of young lives. This disaster clearly illustrates science is far more important than individual opinion in dealing with measles.

Fortunately an all-out vaccination effort is stabilising the situation.

ACT Health sensibly states that if there is a case of a vaccine-preventable disease at a school or a child care centre, children not fully immunised may be excluded from attendance. Selfish, ill-informed people who deliberately risk the health of their children and that of others by not immunising are depending on everyone else for "herd

immunity".

Fortunately most Australians are too sensible to listen to anti-vaxxers. Long may that continue.

I can't help but agree with M Silex (Letters, December 13) that the people trying to blame our Prime Minister for the current bushfires are the ones who voted for Labor and the Greens and this is just their sour grapes because they didn't get what they wanted.

They billed it as the 2019 climate election and people voted against it. The bushfires would still have happened if Labor and the Greens had got in. Why are they blaming Scott Morrison?

It is amazing we don't hear scientific terms like La Nina and El Nino. They are what influences our weather patterns. Also, there are some very interesting articles on the IOD (Indian Ocean Dipole) that has a predominant influence on our drought and, as a result, bushfires.

I guess the sore losers find it much easier to blame a Prime Minister they didn't vote for, than natural weather phenomena.

As one of those directly involved in the establishment and implementation of the Defence Force Retirement and Death Benefits Scheme from the early 1970s I can say, with absolute conviction, neither I nor anyone working with me, ever indicated, suggested or inferred to any retiring member of the Defence Force that the commuted portion of their pension would be restored once they reached a certain age.

We went to great lengths to advise them any reduction would be for life.

This was not the intention of the commutation provisions and never was. To accept the argument put forward by Ken Stone would also necessitate reclaiming overpayments for those who died earlier; a clearly absurd proposition.

The Department of Defence were not responsible for the administration of the legislation. It was the Australian Government Retirement Benefits Office. I am not sure why they are apologising.

I suggest Mr Stone could find a better way of assisting worthy veterans than by raising false hopes based on some perceived injustice that was never there.

I see no evidence Scott Morrison has belatedly accepted long-standing expert advice on climate science. So far he seems to be just putting more spin on his plan to continue to support the interests of the fossil fuel industry ahead of the rest of us.

If he were serious, Australia would not be continuing with its intention to use Kyoto credits in the face of international condemnation. This possibly illegal and certainly immoral fudge has the effect of letting Australia claim it will meet its Paris targets 'in a canter' while actually making almost no emission reductions.

The effect of this duplicity is to undermine international efforts to reduce emissions. Others can point to Australia and say "Why should we reduce our emissions when Australia is refusing to do its share and still opening new coal mines and gas fields despite being blessed with the world's best resources for renewable energy generation?"

The Australian Rugby League wishes to stage an indigenous/Maori rugby league match in February. Most of the Australian contingent are protesting about our national anthem being played.

All they have to do is stand still for five minutes with their mouths shut.

If they don't wish to show respect to this great country, then cancel the match along with the payments that would have been in Australian dollars. Plus it's cricket season anyway.

It was disappointing, on the eve of the British national election to see even as competent a masthead as The Canberra Times, emphasize in its editorial that the one major leader there deserving of contempt and ridicule was Jeremy Corbyn. No matter Boris Johnson's persistent history of lying, confabulating, clowning, buffoonery and increasingly nationalistic far right beliefs.

He amounts to a Trump protégé, or gimp. His cabinet is a circus sideshow of fringe extremists who could have been hand-picked by Tony Abbott.

But the extremism in British politics is of course only the left's. Mysteriously and as always Thatcher, Reagan, Abbott and Johnson are always deemed just barely right of centre no matter the radicalism of their politics.

Any leftist who doesn't take dictation from Rupert Murdoch is an unreconstructed Leninist.

This is the sort of balance we'd expect in The Australian and the The Daily Telegraph. It's disappointing to find it at home, somehow justified by the "any result will be a disaster" tagline.

A couple of weeks ago at Senate estimates the ADF revealed the cost of "saving Private Pyne" could blow out to $224 Billion.

That is the amount of taxpayers money to be spent on 12 diesel-powered submarines that will be obsolete before the project is completed.

These were to be built in Christopher Pyne's home state of South Australia to shore up his re-election prospects.

But Pyne accepted a better offer and didn't recontest his seat in the last Federal election. Now the project looks like being relocated to WA, probably to sandbag another marginal Coalition seat.

This reckless spending hardly seems consistent with sound responsible economic management the Coalition government has been spruiking for the last seven years.

If manned submarines are required for our future defence capability, and I'm not convinced they are, would it not have been wiser and more cost effective to consider the Japanese proposal?

That was for a state of the art, lithium battery-powered submarine already proven and in production. Instead we are trying to convert a French nuclear design to diesel.

At least we know from experience the Japanese product would be reliable, have good resale value, come fitted with a radio and heater as standard and start first time, every time.

I can recall writing speeches in 1989 for the then Environment Minister, Graham Richardson, about the urgency of acting on climate change.

That was 30 years ago.

I recall also images of the increasing fires in the 2009 dystopian British documentary film The Age of Stupid.

The film cast Pete Postlethwaite as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, watching archival film and asking "Why didn't we stop climate change when we had the chance?"

The situation is now obviously more urgent than ever, and will require a massive drawdown of carbon as outlined in George Monbiot's Natural Climate Solutions.

Much of the accepted consumption culture needs to be redesigned as well.

For example, international travel by air, cruise ships and the associated consumption need to be reconsidered.

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