Older cyclists have safe options that provide a ticket to ride

After a lifetime of safe cycling, twice in a month I woke up in hospital to learn I had fallen from my bicycle for no apparent reason.

With no memory of the falls and no associated medical condition found, I played it safe and swapped the bicycle for a recumbent tricycle.

Now, after 17 years of extensive use, I can report that it's virtually impossible to tip or fall from it and its super comfy and relaxed seating position makes for efficient and enjoyable rides.

For cyclists of any age concerned with balance, problematic knees or rough riding surfaces, a recumbent trike might be a great investment in health and safety.

Mine, a 20-speed Adventure Tadpole, has given my old bones an exhilarating new lease of life.

If acting - certainly an apt adjective - Inspector Mark Richardson believes there is any legitimate comparison between an unlicensed 14-year-old in an allegedly stolen car and Summernats attendees, the quicker he is back in to his normal rank and out of the spotlight the better for him and the credibility of ACT police.

Perhaps someone could gently remind him of the first law of holes: when you're in one, stop digging.

Roderick Holesgrove (Letters, January 19) would do well to read the book The Lazarus Strategy by Dr Norman Lazarus.

In the publication year 2020, he was a healthy 84-year-old medical doctor and scientist who challenged the notion that ageing is a disease, and that older people must inevitably become a source of income for the pharmaceutical industry.

As he got older Norman took up non-competitive long distance cycling and walking and has since done scientific research and produced many papers on the benefits of this.

This showed for the cyclists much improved aerobic capacity, better muscle structure and physiology, and higher mental agility compared with those who were not active.

The main risks to cyclists in my mind are on-road cycle paths rather than separated paths, combined with drivers going too fast without thought of consequences as flagged by Keith Hill (Letters, January 19).

Prices are going up but one example might warrant some scrutiny.

Store brand soft drink (1.25 litres) used to cost 75 cents. The government put the price up to 85 cents to allow for the 10 cent bottle refund. The price quickly went to $1. It is now $1.20.

The price is, and has been consistently, identical between Coles and Woolworths.

If this is not collusion and price fixing between "the big two" I don't know what is.

My husband died last year. It was very sad for all the family.

I also have to say it is very hard for family to get the system to recognise that someone has died. Ten months later I am still trying to get through to banks (five different occasions), the telcos (it took weeks of them harassing me because they wanted to talk to my husband and would not accept that he had died. Plus over five hours to get the services transferred to my name before their bereavement team contacted me).

Apparently unless I have all his passwords I cannot act on his behalf.

The ACT government told me they would contact everyone so I had to go a re-register our car at their convenience, not mine. I don't know who else they told.

The federal government just stopped my Medicare card and didn't tell me. I only found out when my bereavement counsellor didn't get paid.

Is anyone managing this? I haven't even got to all his loyalty cards yet. It does seem very hard to die and stay dead in this country.

Would it be too much to ask the ACT government to print the rates billing number on our rates notices with some prominence?

It's a critical piece of information yet it's printed in a minuscule font that makes it both difficult to find and hard to read and transcribe into the online payment form.

They might do the same to the section and block numbers, which as of 2024 apparently also need to be transcribed when paying online.

Independent "expert" Abul Rizvi ("Can Home Affairs dept be rebuilt?", January 15, p13) advising Labor how to "fix" Home Affairs is like the sound of one hand clapping.

The key issue isn't the portfolio arrangements. It's Immigration putting immigration ahead of voters.

For years, under Liberal and Labor, boss influencer Rizvi has been reinforcing increasing levels of supposedly "skilled" migration.

Migrants haven't really made Australia much younger. Business still craves ever more of their "skills".

Even with Albanese's half-million net migration and one-sided India migration-agreements - inconceivable 20 years ago - Rizvi is still focused on Dutton and Pezzullo's sins. Twenty months after the election Rizvi still claims, Labor is mending the Coalition's "visa mess".

In December, before Labor had even publicly released its fake migration "crackdown", Rizvi was on TV, massaging a quarter-million as some kind of "migration normal".

In all reputable polls, voters want it much lower. They're right. It should be about 80,000 or less. To at all stabilise the population and the environment.

But Rizvi's priority will always be immigration; regardless of what it costs the locals in terms of falling real wages, falling living standards, and record rental distress.

Professor Marian Sawer asks why hoisting the British flag at Sydney Cove was so central to Australian identity ("Why is there outrage at changing the date", January 15, p17).

I would have thought the answer would have been obvious. Were it not for that event there would have been no ANU for her to teach at, and she probably wouldn't be writing in English.

No other event, on any other date, in the history of this land, has had such a profound effect on how this country has evolved, and on how we live and are governed today.

Even her preferred date of May 9, celebrating the opening of the first Australian Parliament, would not have even occurred, had it not been for January 26. And does she really think that a Parliament which had no women or even women candidates, where women and Indigenous Australians couldn't even vote in the majority of states, and which immediately passed the White Australia Policy is such a unifying event.

That hoisting of the flag, as Professor Sawer calls it, is the most defining moment in our history, and changing the date will do nothing to change that history.

It remains worthy of celebration.

I might have missed it in the letters but what is all this slavering in the media over "our Mary", the Australian born woman who is now Queen of Denmark.

Is it some sort of Australian inferiority complex that every Australian person who achieves some sort of recognition in another country is feted over?

Much as I admire Denmark as an almost perfect country, I don't know why its new Queen is attracting so much attention. It's bad enough with the Australian media slavering over our own non-representative monarchy.

There are other more important issues after all, such as the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

The fanfare has already started for the commencement in the ACT of "new minimum construction standards" according to the "National Construction Code" (capitals intended, for pomposity).

Great, you're thinking, I may for the first time in decades be able to buy a new build in Canberra that won't more than likely leak rain and shower drainage across every "barrier". And bleed me financially white with monstrous rectification and litigation costs, via inflated strata levies that are unbelievable by global standards.

On looking these new "standards" up, they're in fact only about "energy efficiency and liveable housing [merely "accessibility"] requirements for new ACT buildings". Nothing like tackling the fundamentals.

It looks like new constructions will continue to adhere to the "sub-minimal construction standards" the generation-old post-deregulation code in practice adds up to.