Years of lobbying and campaigning by the Coronial Reform Group, and more recently, the Alliance for Coronial Reform have significantly influenced the ACT government to engage the services of a dedicated coroner. Congratulations!

Recently, our family and friends attended the inquest of our daughter, sister, and friend, Brontë. It was a gruelling five days where, at times, as Brontë's mother, I felt like I was a defendant on trial. This adversarial approach made what was already a difficult time even more traumatising and excruciatingly painful.

While counsels for the territory and the AFP were trying to defend their positions - i.e. implying that I should have done more to get help for Brontë - my heart broke all over again during the five-day inquest. Fortunately, there was ultimately acknowledgment that the systems failed Brontë.

The Coroners Court staff treated our family poorly, and I was refused assistance from the family liaison officer by a registrar of the court due to a perceived "conflict of interest". This made things really tenuous as the inquest approached.

However, our family and friends openly applaud the kindness and care provided by Magistrates Court staff, coroner James Stewart and our amazing legal team, Sam Tierney and Arabella Jorgensen-Hull.

Our family and other families implore Ken Archer to be open to all things restorative in order to ensure a more inquisitorial - and less adversarial - approach is adopted in the coronial jurisdiction.

Ahead of the upcoming election, the most important issue for ACM readers is the "environment and climate change" ("Readers' survey: Climate, health and political integrity top federal election issues", canberratimes.com.au, February 27).

Yes, it is striking that 43 per cent of ACM readers, who live outside major metropolitan cities, list climate as their most important issue.

This finding debunks the Barnaby Joyce-led National Party perception that climate change is only an issue of concern for "woke" inner-city-dwellers.

Less than 24 hours after Joyce was re-elected as National Party leader last year, over 800 farmers had signed a petition asking for stronger climate action.

Communities on the land are increasingly suffering the impacts of climate change on an ever more frequent basis, and they can clearly also see the opportunities climate action offers.

We can but hope that our federal government will listen to their constituents before it is too late.

It is strange that people would rather stick their head in the sand than confront dangerous climate changes that have been slowly accelerating for decades.

Global heating is partly absorbed by the oceans, which increases the evaporation rate to the extent that the clouds can no longer cope, resulting in unpredictable catastrophic flooding.

Meteorologists have been saying this to us for decades, but nobody does anything about it.

Like many Australians who have family and friends in the region, I found it distressing to hear of the recent flood disasters in Queensland and northern NSW.

Glib statements like "I can't control Mother Nature" from politicians such as Queensland Premier Palaszczuk don't cut the mustard.

The latest IPCC report has clearly stated that the extreme and unpredictable weather events we are now experiencing will intensify even more if temperatures rise 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

Unfortunately, we are currently on track to exceed this threshold. As well as implementing adaption policies, we urgently need to reduce our carbon footprint.

New investments in pollutants like coal and gas are no longer an option. It's about time politicians at both state and federal levels faced this fact and took some responsibility.

Several letters in The Canberra Times of February 25 - including from Bob Salmond and Colin Samundsett - seek to justify Putin's invasion of Ukraine by citing past interventions by the US and other Western countries.

Some of their examples are cases of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine, where armed intervention took place on the basis of well-founded desires to protect life and liberty of citizens.

Other interventions were indeed wrong . But one or more wrongs by Western countries do not excuse Putin's actions.

Putin's arguments for invading Ukraine are clearly ludicrous. Also ludicrous is Putin's argument that Ukraine posed a threat to Russia.

Sometimes one has to make a stand against senseless war and violence. This is currently the case.

Don't get too bogged down with ScoMo prancing and preening himself like a rooster on the international stage. Domestic, not international, issues will be what the coming federal election will be fought on.

Take some guidance from what is attributed to Mark Twain: "Politicians, like nappies, should be changed often, and for the same reason."

By now most Canberrans should be aware that the Greens' "defence" policy is to drop our expenditure on defence to 1 per cent of GDP and thus leave us helpless to any half-serious aggressor nation.

But do we know the independents' (who are also vying for a Senate seat) defence policy?

I asked the two charming and friendly helpers of independent candidate Kim Rubenstein this question the other day at the Red Hill shops, and they did not know. Nor do we know David Pocock's.

Indeed, do these two high-profile independent candidates even have one? Given events in the Ukraine and China's recent aggressive stance against Australia, I think the voters of Canberra need to know. What is your defence policy, Kim and David?

On Friday last I returned my Coles trolley to the car park "nest", but forgot to extract my walking stick.

I returned in five to 10 minutes, but the trolleys were gone. Coles advised that they had not got my vertigo aid.

Imagine my delight when a guy phoned to say he had found the stick and would restore it to me that evening. True to his word, he did so - but left in his red tradie ute before I could thank him. He even left a Kit Kat.

Thanks a lot to an honest, caring gent. May your tribe increase.

In his letter of February 28, Felix MacNeill of Dickson erroneously states: "In order for a Senate vote to be formal, you must either number at least six boxes above the line or at least 12 below the line."

The correct position is expressed thus: "In order for a Senate vote to be counted as formal, you need only express a single first preference above the line or at least six below the line."

MacNeill is writing about the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Act 2016, which he regards as a democratic reform.

Wrong. That enactment replaced a bad system with another bad system.

What is desperately needed is genuine democratic reform.

At least the old system was honest. The present system is dishonest.

The single most important element of what is needed is an honest, voter-friendly ballot paper. The present instructions must be scrapped. They are best described as "deceitful" and "manipulative".

Australia is vulnerable to having petroleum supplies cut off. This would rapidly cripple transport, both personal and commercial.

Rising prices are a real but milder threat. This was obvious long before the recent events in Ukraine.

If the right-wing parties were serious about national security, rather than just posturing, they would have been encouraging, not disparaging, electric vehicles.

EVs can run on diverse sources of distributed generation, which is intrinsically robust.

They are not dependent on energy imported through long, thin, vulnerable supply lines.

Volodymyr Zelensky, if you survive this and succeed, you are most welcome to come and run Australia. You are a true leader.

Even if, despite his best efforts, Volodymyr Zelensky loses Ukraine - and possibly even his own life or liberty - he may just have saved the rest of the world.

To paraphrase Churchill: "We will no longer speak of Ukrainians fighting like heroes, we will speak of heroes fighting like Ukrainians."

I am, you are, we are Ukrainian.

Putin's invasion reminds me of when the unwieldy Persian empire attacked Greece in the fifth century BC. Greece was victorious. Eventually the Persian empire became the Hellenic empire under Alexander the Great.

Where is Tony Abbott when we need him to shirtfront Vladimir Putin?

If a foreign leader announces he's put his nuclear forces on high alert, does the Pentagon do the same as a precaution? If so, then we presumably enter the realm of a hair-trigger accident, or human error, on the part of either side.

Doesn't India have any moral fibre?

It was one of only three countries to abstain from the UN Security Council Resolution on Russia's invasion of Ukraine along with China and the UAE.

If it can't condemn this totally unwarranted attack on an independent nation, then when China once again takes some of India's claimed territory in the Himalayas, our response should be "stuff happens ... remember Ukraine".

I see that journalist Alan Kohler believes that Vladimir Putin, surrounded by yes men and in effect Tsar of Russia for 20 years, has become unhinged. So he has now become Vlad the Mad Peacemaker.

What on earth possessed The Canberra Times to give an entire column on page 2 of Monday's paper to Trump's "condemnation" of Russia's "pretty savvy, genius" invasion of Ukraine? Nothing this man has to say is of any relevance. At most it should have received a passing mention way back on the world pages.

Pauline May (Letters, February 23), criticised an ABC interviewer for not allowing a union delegate to have his say on the NSW transport "strike".

This is a welcome breath of fresh air compared to the pervasive criticism of the ABC for left-wing bias, most prominently in the News Corp media.