Say no to AUKUS and nuclear reactors and yes to disarmament

Wise First Nations peoples say the uranium devil should basically be left alone; buried deep in the ground where it belongs.

I was so excited when Dr Professor Michael Antony Denborough AO started the Nuclear Disarmament Party some time in the 1980s.

I saddled up my old red Yamaha XS and thundered up from Apollo Bay to Canberra to join: member number one.

About 10 years later I got a job with the feds in Canberra and our paths crossed again in the Canberra Program for Peace.

We decided to resurrect the party partly on the strength of my former address in Queanbeyan and, graciously helped by Mike's wife Erica who often had my family to dinner, we stood candidates for the Senate three or four times.

Mike and I wrote and had printed new NDP leaflets and managed to get arrested again, once for just handing them out. We witnessed the dirty truth about politics from the belly up.

We're just too greedy. We colonise the rest of the world and steal land, waste energy building grandiose houses, roads galore, travel in space and drive gas-guzzling tanks.

Are we too stupid to live gracefully on beautiful planet Earth?

I don't care how small the first reactor is. No nukes. This industry will cost the Earth and we can't live without our planet.

Harry Davis (Letters, May 24) trots out the same old dinosaur lines about nuclear power regarding Chernobyl and Fukushima. Everyone knows Chernobyl was due to human error during a routine test and the Soviet government at the time tried to cover it up.

Fukushima had no deaths attributed to radiation. The reactors failed because of an earthquake and flooding on the site. That would affect any type of power plant.

Many countries around the world have been using instant, reliable, baseload, clean nuclear energy safely for decades. In Australia we have been operating nuclear reactors in Lucas Heights for 70 years without any catastrophes.

Consider the lives lost and land destroyed from hydro accidents. They don't seem to get anywhere near the same negative exposure as nuclear.

On April 9 an explosion at the Bargi hydroelectric power station in Camugnano in Italy killed seven workers and seriously injured five more. In Khakassia, Russia, in 2009 there were 75 fatalities due to a catastrophic turbine failure. In 1979 the Machhu Dam in India collapsed, resulting in the deaths of up to 25,000 people. The 1975 Banqiao Dam failure in China killed an estimated 26,000 people directly. More than 100,000 survivors later died of starvation or as a result of epidemics. Millions were left homeless.

These figures don't stack up too well for the green dream of hydro-electric power.

Meanwhile, our Snowy Hydro 2.0 project is way over budget and Florence the auger is stuck once again, resulting in more land degradation in our beautiful Snowy Mountains. Where is the outrage?

Ian Pearson comments "the ACT government is treating us as fools" (Letters, May 27), using the example of the Campbell Primary School expansion. There are many more examples.

The Barr-Rattenbury government's May 7 Our CBR online newsletter, with the innocuous heading "Commonwealth Avenue traffic changes in May" announced "The next stage of works (on the raising of London Circuit for light rail) will be to demolish the northbound Commonwealth Avenue Bridge". It was definitely not April 1.

The cost and the resultant traffic chaos are almost unimaginable. This madness must be brought to a halt in the November 10 election.

I note in the latest CBR News plans for stage 2A, based on govt figures costing around $1.4 billion. Meanwhile the homeless go without.

Why is the government contracting homeless services out instead of doing like the NCDC used to and building tiny house communities to give our most needy somewhere to live.

The last time I worked on veteran homeless projects was 10 years ago. Little has changed, certainly not for the better. Anecdotal evidence, not just human rights, tells us mental health improves markedly, people are more able to cope with life, get a job on so on if they have a safe place to live.

There must be no homeless on our streets before 2A gets built. Roll on election 2024.

Sue Wareham bemoans the use of the word subspecies in regards to hoons. The word could equally be applied to home invaders, and those who assault children, women or the elderly.

We are living with the consequence of an overly liberal society; one where everyone is self-entitled, woke and must have their needs met free from consequences. There is no respect for others.

Dehumanising the subspecies firmly places them back in the box where they belong. What we need are tougher laws, not safe spaces.

There are two possible readings of the International Criminal Court finding about the Gaza war.

One is that Israel must immediately stop its campaign in Rafah. However, as there is no order about Hamas this would mean Hamas is free to continue firing rockets at Israeli soldiers and into Israel from Rafah, and Israel can't do anything about it.

Surely no reasonable court would order that.

The other reading is that Israel must stop its campaign to the extent it could cause the physical destruction of the Palestinian people, in whole or in part. That is what the order actually says.

In fact, two of the judges who agreed with the orders made separate declarations saying it should have clarified that the second interpretation was correct.

Crispin Hull is wise to warn that Labor should not underestimate Peter Dutton or the Institute of Public Affairs ("Dismissing Dutton's immigration plans could be quite dangerous for Labor", May 22).

Both are very good at scare campaigns.

In the lead-up to the 2019 election, as Home Affairs Minister, Peter Dutton ramped up fears of asylum seekers swamping Australia's shores under a Labor government.

The IPA's deputy executive director Daniel Wild wrote a piece entitled: "Labor is coming after apple pie-baking nanas."

Other scare campaigns about electricity blackouts as arguments for more fossil fuels are also active.

While these tactics are to be expected, the Australian people deserve to be informed, not scared.

A word from the other side on your article "Don't blame enforcement; your parking is the problem" (May 19).

I assist those who receive traffic infringement fines. The single mother who parked having to accompany her young daughter to a public toilet, the medical emergencies and vehicle breakdowns, the equally hardworking people caught in on-the-spot challenging decisions.

In one example a teenager, having her licence for just a few months, borrowed the family car to complete a school assignment at the National Library in her final year of study. She was not aware of parking requirements and had no money to pay.

She was compromised. The pressure of succeeding in her final year at school was too much for her to drive away. She completed her assessment assignment and received a big fat fine. There are many hardworking people out there trying their best.

R Holesgrove and D Mackenzie (Letters, May 26) are highly critical of the very popular four-wheel-drive utes, rightly pointing out that the huge American Dodge, Chevrolet and Ford utes are socially undesirable in every way.

They ignore the fact that the vast majority of utes sold in Australia are from Japanese makers such as Toyota, and these smaller Japanese utes have relatively small engines, significantly streamlined front ends, and commendably low fuel consumption relative to the old Holden and Falcon utes.

Compared to a petrol engine, it is true that diesel engines tend to produce higher emissions of nitrous oxides, but they also use significantly less fuel and so emit significantly less carbon dioxide.

For tradesmen and for towing, diesel utes and SUVs are simply the best vehicles for the job. However, for those that can afford two vehicles it is desirable that a smaller vehicle be used around town. I use a Prado-style SUV for caravan-towing and an EV for everything else.

If anyone's tempted to complain about the upcoming increase in electricity prices - which they well and truly asked for with their vote - let them be consoled by how much little acts like this make a truly massive difference in the face of China and India's carbon output.

There is only one moral equivalence. One life is worth one life. While politicians ponder their prospects the innocent die and suffer. The United Nations must live up to its promise of peace.

Mark Sproat (Letters, May 23) says that Jim Chalmers "has no economic qualifications". Nor did Ben Chifley, Peter Costello or Joe Hockey although it seems that perhaps the most inept of the opposition's recent spokespeople on matters economic, Angus Taylor, does.

Felix McNeil of Dickson (Letters, May 25) rightly points out that nuclear reactors do have to shut down for refuelling. That takes about two weeks and occurs every 18 months or so. Maintenance on most systems is done while the reactor is operating as all systems are duplicated. Wind and solar, on the other hand, only work about 30 per cent of the time.

The problem, Leon Arundell (Letters, May 27), would be if your car shuts down when the sun wasn't shining and the wind wasn't blowing.

How can anybody say solar is as reliable as nuclear? Every evening since the Earth began spinning the sun has gone down.

Ian Pearson (Letters, May 27) says the ACT government is treating us like fools. This may be appropriate behaviour, as surely only fools would keep voting for these clowns.

When I watch the news about the conflict between Israel and Hamas and also the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, I just think about the resources lost that could have been used to eradicate poverty in the world.

I have read with interest the articles and letters on controlled burning. However, I have not seen any references to cultural (or cool) burning by Indigenous people which occur in many areas of Australia, including country surrounding the ACT. Is cultural burning practised in the ACT? If not, why not?

I have to take issue with Virginia Walsh's suggestion Jack Wighton might want to return to the Raiders (Letters, 24 May). His replacement, Ethan Strange, is younger and a far better five-eighth. Wighton's departure meant Strange's career path wasn't blocked and Raiders fans are reaping the benefits.