Every year Anzac Day in Canberra just gets a little worse

I would like Anzac Day to be a revered occasion at a sacred site. I would like it to focus on peace.

Maybe it is time to have the Australian War Memorial moved. The current site can be renamed the Australian War Museum and we can lament the passing of peace with respect.

Monday's pre-Anzac day editorial "A day to reflect on our dangerous times" (April 22) was disappointing.

The author remarks: "Technology is advancing at great speed and there seems no doubt that any conflict will be won by the power which has the superior technology".

That is just demonstrably wrong. In fact it is the idea that has led to today's world.

Today all sides already have the technology to end life on Earth.

Technology is the problem, not the solution.

Einstein, who in a roundabout way was the man most responsible for our nuclear age, reacted instantly on news of the atom bombing of Hiroshima: "A new way of thinking is now needed if humanity is to survive".

We owe it to those who gave their lives in 20th century wars, to work for peace on Earth.

Oh dear, poor Barnaby is a bit of a slow learner isn't he?

He's not happy even though Agriculture Minister Murray Watt dismissed the no-brainer recommendation to move the APVMA out of the wilderness and back to Canberra where it could re-attract the skilled technical staff it so spectacularly lost from Barnaby's pork-barrel move to his home town.

No, Barnaby actually sounds rather surprised few people (even wise executives) want to live near him.

But his biggest failure to learn seems to be his belief that Parliament House has issues too.

Rather than leaving us cringing in a corner with an editorial which portrays Anzac Day as "A day to reflect on our dangerous times" (April 22) and Esperanza Martinez's opinion piece seeing us amid "simmering global tensions" on page 16 the same day, I have been more impressed with our Foreign Minister's courageous calls for restraint and recognition of oppressed peoples on numerous occasions.

We are not just victims of a world situation and its conflicts.

We have a role to play in shaping it.

By changing the international conversation we might change what is seen as valuable and worth protecting.

In a small way, I see the change of our relationship with China when trade was given more priority as an instance of this.

I call for more space and resources to be given to diplomacy, and I believe we should put the brakes on any precipitous war-talk by legislating that our country could only go to war after careful consideration and parliamentary debate.

Having done some maths on HECS debts and payback policies it seems to me that the current system unfairly penalises lower-paid graduates. Many occupations require a degree but pay little more than a median wage, with restricted career opportunities and few chances of becoming rich.

As the debt is indexed annually this results in those whose debt takes longer to pay having to pay more than those whose debt can be paid off quickly because of higher salaries.

The quicker a student can pay off the debt the less they actually pay.

Surely a policy that does not penalise the lower-paid graduates is possible?

No, Michael McCarthy (Letters, April 22). You cannot make peace with an enemy bent on your destruction. Israel's attempts to make peace with the Palestinians have not been reciprocated. The current war was started by Hamas because it wants to destroy Israel.

Ian Jannaway paints a picture of entitled students complaining about the cost of education (Letters, April 23).

Ian seems to forget that the ballooning cost of living in this country means that many students will meet the repayment threshold while they are still studying in order to be able to afford such opulent luxuries as food and rent. The repayment threshold is set scarcely above minimum wage, long before the realisation of increased earning potential from studies.

It's also a massive handbrake on mature age students seeking to up-skill or re-skill, who still have to work to maintain rentals, mortgages, children and so on; all while trying to balance working with having enough time to succeed in their studies.

The same can be said for students seeking trades, both vital for our future workforce and economy.

Even where students aren't repaying this debt until after finishing their studies it will greatly impact their ability to own the house that they live in, a massive indicator of whether their super balances will be enough to live a dignified retirement. Ian might be the self-entitled one here.

With the ACT government payments to Canberra Metro and Transport Canberra's own costs, 3.3 million trips per year cost the ACT taxpayers an average of over $21 per trip.

I would like to know what the light rail fares have provided towards this. I suspect less than 10 percent.

What a bargain when the bus service is costing more than $100 million more per year than the fares contribute.

I can see the case for raising the HECS repayment trigger, but find the proposals on indexation wrong-headed ("Tens of thousands of Canberrans could get relief from HECS", April 19). Indexing quarterly rather yearly to make the impacts smaller (eg, four one per cent increases instead of one four per cent increase) is pure sophistry sure to backfire. The kids will see though it; they'll be triggered four times as often; it will provide no relief because repayments relate to income not debt; and it will increase debt because of compounding effects (increasing a $100 balance by one per cent four times in succession gives you more than $104).

Indexing by wages rather than prices during a future bout of inflation seems to make the rather bleak assumption that wages would never get back in front of prices (remember, the repayment burden is unrelated to debt). If that is so then policy concerns much more significant than HECS arise.

Are the banks really so stupid as to treat HECS as a debt rather than focussing on the repayment impact on take-home pay?

I fully agree with Mark Gaetani's call for genuine government action on online gambling ("Australia gambles like no other country", April 20). However, the promotion of gambling is more widespread. For example, on every page of the racing form guide in The Canberra Times there is at least one advertisement for Bet365: the promotion of every-day gambling.

Mr Gaetani also notes that gambling can become an addiction. I have seen evidence of this potentially tragic outcome. A few years ago, I saw an ordinary working man who, I was told, fed his entire pay packet every pay day into a club's pokies and went home penniless to his (probably hungry) family.

After reading Paul Magarey's letter "The ACT education system is not meeting our expectations" (Letters, April 20) I felt compelled to respond and to support our current teachers.

As a teacher of many years, we are trying to do our best given the horrendous circumstances; we are overworked, under-supported, undervalued and underpaid.

Imagine if Mr Magarey's friend's son was in a class of say, 10 students, the teacher could really do his/her job properly.

Instead, teachers are fronting up to classes with up to 30 students, trying to cope with the myriad of different learning and wellbeing needs whilst keeping up with all the other tasks (not related to teaching and learning) that teachers are expected to do.

Unless you are in the classroom people do not have a true understanding of what is involved. It is bloody hard work.

Until governments and policy makers address the crux of the education crisis - the workload issue - we will continue to have a teacher shortage and our education system will continue to fail our students.

Eric Hunter (Letters, April 19) spare us the claptrap about Australia needing to set an example on emissions reductions. Australia only needs to do its fair share, which it has been doing for over a decade. Not shoot itself in the foot economically, which it is now doing, in trying to shut down a major source of national wealth.

Before Donald Trump was charged over the secret so-called "hush money" paid to Stormy Daniels she was regularly referred to as a "porn star". Now, the same media calls her an "adult entertainer". Has she been sanitised to paint Trump as a sleaze?

The Israelis should take note of this scripture from the bible: "Love does no harm to a neighbour; therefore love is the fulfilment of the law": Romans 13:10

Because we are one and free, as the national anthem states, proponents of the Sirius building name change may stop using the English language whenever they wish.

Over the centuries our language has gathered so many words to describe our grief, sadness, anguish, pain, regrets and mourning. And yet we sanitise our distress and say we "pay our respects"; such an understatement for our sorrow.

I think we should require potential immigrants to have secure accommodation before their arrival. No accommodation, no entry. (But waterproof tents may be acceptable in large capital cities.)

I have only spent a few days in Dubai but my memory and the advertising material is all desert-based. Climate change is starting to hit everywhere. Maybe it's time to accept the reality and do something about it.

"We will spend more than Labor on defence" trumpets opposition home affairs spokesperson James Paterson. How pathetic. As if the amount spent on defence is the relevant metric as against, for example, what a given dollar amount is spent on.

The US vetoed UN membership for Palestine. Twelve security council member countries voted for it and two abstained. The UK was one. This is America's way of showing support for democracy.

Is it just me, or has anyone detected a slight fall in fruit and vegetable prices in the big-two supermarkets now that their CEOs have to front the Senate inquiry into supermarket prices?

There used to be a word that described the spiralling litigation of the Higgins/Lehrmann/Wilkins/et al case: MAD - mutually assured destruction.