The role of the National Capital Authority (NCA) in this vandalising of our city should not go unnoticed. Supposedly its national capital plan is to ensure that Canberra and the territory are planned and developed in accordance with their national significance.

It is stated on the NCA website that the chairman, Mr Terry Weber, is lead partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers' Canberra consulting practice in the areas of property, infrastructure and facilities management.

On its website, PricewaterhouseCoopers talks about "The New Equation" to address "issues that can't be solved using old formulas but instead require new thinking".

If some new thinking were applied to Canberra, it would be obvious that transport in the Canberra of 2030 will still be dominated by the car, but using the new robotic technology. Light rail will then be seen for what it already is, an old formula.

Intelligent discussion of transport options for Canberra is not well served by Penleigh Boyd's assertion (Sunday Canberra Times, November 6) that "Melbourne is to have a trackless tram system from Caulfield Station to Chadstone Shopping Centre ... twice the speed of an average Melbourne tram, $1.4 billion and running by 2025". For a start, it is clear from the article cited that all that is going to "happen" so far is that "federal Labor has pledged $6 million to plan [i.e. finance a business case for] a trackless tram route ... if it wins the next election".

In addition, it is not helpful to rely on the comparison of the theoretical operating speed of the proposed Trackless Rapid Transit with that of "an average Melbourne tram" - operating on busy streets and beset by many impediments to clear passage - rather than, say, that of a light rail vehicle operating on a relatively unimpeded route similar to the R1 route here in Canberra.

Reliance on the touted savings in the cost and time taken for implementation depends to a great degree on the veracity of the claim (as stated in The Age) that the rubber-tyred TRT vehicles "run on asphalt", rather than on a heavily engineered road base. Readers may recall the deep wheel ruts left by conventional buses in the kerbside lanes of Northbourne Avenue remedied by the recent reconstruction of the roadway.

Reports that an illegal Halloween party in Canberra's south seeded at least 33 COVID-19 cases points to nothing less than gross irresponsibility on the part of some of Canberra's youth.

Clearly there was a couldn't-care-less attitude on the part of some youth towards not only their own personal health and safety, but also the health and safety of others, including the cohort of those responsible. I'd like to think that the irresponsible attitude displayed is not representative of the wider youth population of the ACT.

This week saw yet again another court hearing in the disgraceful persecution of former ACT attorney-general Bernard Collaery. Since 2018, when charges were first laid against Collaery and Witness K, more than 50 court hearings have been held - at great expense to the defendants and the Australian public, and with no end in sight. The objective of the Morrison government, it would seem to the average voter, is the drawn-out destruction of Collaery professionally, funded entirely by the Australian taxpayer.

There is absolutely nothing to be gained for the Australian public by the continuance of this outrageously expensive exercise in obfuscation. In as much as the case is clearly an attempt to financially destroy Collaery, it also constitutes an abuse of legal process.

Well into my career, my boss advised me that I needed to better understand the difference between what is the right thing to do and what is the best thing to do. It took me a while to fully understand that what he was saying was that politicians will always choose what is the best thing to do (for them) over what is the right thing to do (for everyone). Our current PM's flip on climate change simply demonstrates that climate change action has only now become the best thing for him to do.

Paul Keating should not be remembered as the first of our revolving-door prime ministers - he was there, in Italian garb, French empire clocks notwithstanding, for five years.

We chuckled at his waspish verbal attacks, but now, 24 years since his last National Press Clubbing, he swaps wise elder statesman (Menzies-like) for grumpy old codger, like his hero Jack Lang.

He should remember that at the height of the dangerous Cold War, we defended this continent in concert with like-minded allies under a regional agreement called SEATO. The communist powers post-WWII were highly armed and fomenting revolutions wherever they could damage the Western democracies

We came out of that era all right, perhaps because of an all-too-short defence policy called national service. No "hopeless", "ignominy" pessimism in those days, Paul.

More doolittle-and-delay from our Sub-Prime Minister. This time investing $500 million in a $1 billion fund for a large-scale test of CO2 capture and storage "on the Western Downs" of Queensland. Glencore, "one of Australia's largest coal producers" (confirmed by its website), with its Chinese partner, has been given approval to conduct such a sequestration operation. They've hit the jackpot; but why?

The Australian government has, between 2007 and 2014, already spent big on testing; budgeting $12.8 million, eventually expended to $41 million, on a comprehensive investigation into CO2 sequestration in the Victorian Otway Basin, envisaging a possible scheme in the Cooper Basin.

Its outcome is hard-copy available as Geologically Storing Carbon: Learning from the Otway Project Experience, a very thorough exercise conducted by a scientific team of geologists, geochemists, geophysicists, hydrologists, and reservoir engineers. They estimated "a comparable project in an active oil exploration area in Texas might cost $20-$30 million or less".

Is Glencore and partner in need of the subsidy Morrison might be providing? Further, the Otway Basin exercise showed that, if very carefully done, such sequestration can be successfully carried out at a price, but certainty against leakage over indefinite time cannot be guaranteed.

What is more, as it can capture only a proportion of CO2 released from fossil fuel activity, any remarkable quantity of sequestration which Scotty from Marketing might declare can only be achieved by an even greater quantity of CO2 released by fossil fuel.

Tony Eggleton (Letters, November 11) gets straight to the nub of the climate change issue: the rate of the global warming that causes climate change.

Earth has already warmed about 1 degree since pre-industrial times, and the rate of warming is increasing relentlessly. There is only about 1 degree of "leeway" before the warming begins to become intolerable and human life on Earth increasingly unsustainable. That is why decisive action on global warming, such as ending our dependence on fossil fuels, is becoming increasingly urgent.

Australia's "plan" for achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 is a sales pitch, rather than an holistic plan with intermediate targets for achieving this outcome.

The modelling behind it is to be released "soon". This will undoubtedly lead to unproductive disputes over what input data and assumptions it should have been based on.

It is simply not feasible for any model to produce a universally accepted cost that will stand the test of time. Political posturing, narrow self-interest and cost models must not override the scientific and observational evidence.

Just because Phil Jackson could, I want to make a quibble too. Of all the letters ever written to the poor editor, why on Earth was Mr Jackson's published yesterday? Did it win some prize for triteness, irrelevance, spurious authority and tedium?

Didn't you have a care for the reader hoping to find a bit of wit, quirkiness maybe, a new skew on things? Sometimes publishing nothing shows more editorial judgment than publishing just anything.

Last week, my wife and I towed our camper trailer behind our 2019 model electric car and camped in Bermagui from Monday to Thursday before returning home to Canberra. Now the PM claims he never said this would end the weekend. Good to know we could stay a bit longer next time.

Paul Keating's views expressed at the National Press Club about the submarines disturbed me. It seems there are many things that we don't know. I think the best thing is we produce the subs here, in Australia.

Age might have wearied him, but Paul Keating's recent message to Australia at the National Press Club gave more stimulus to the national debate than I've heard for years.

And whilst his Armani suits and slice of arrogance might have tainted his profile, his understanding of complex issues and capacity to express realities in language that everyday Australians could understand has not been equalled since his departure from Parliament.

John Coochey must have been hiding down a coal mine for years if he hasn't been able to find any evidence that the government is subsidising the fossil fuel industry to a significant extent (Letters, November 11). in April this year the Australia Institute published research that demonstrates the level of subsidy to this industry at over $10 billion per year.

I just don't get it! According to media reports, the ACT's health system is in immediate crisis and needs a massive injection of funds.

Whatever your thoughts are on the light rail stage 2A and beyond (and its bodgy business case), there is no imperative to build it now. We have to get our priorities right, and 20th-century technology isn't one of them.

The easiest way around these voter ID laws proposed by minister Ben Morton (November 9) is to just tell the polling booth worker you've donated $1 million to a cabinet minister's blind trust. Then you won't have to reveal your identity at all

What most Australians admire and respect about First Nations people is their supreme and unchallengeable authenticity.

I don't get it with this applause for carbon capture. If we reduce our emissions, we reduce our own emissions. If we attempt to capture and store carbon, aren't we doing that for the world? It's like opening all the doors and windows and then turning on the air conditioner to cool the whole street.

Given the history of the pissoir in Paris, it's no surprise that the French president would recognise a leak when he saw one.