TALK about “The Truman Show”! That’s our new suburbs to a tee, with every aspect totally planned, controlled, and marketed, right down to the minutest detail in the infrastructure, landscaping, block size and configuration, and dictatorial dwelling design, all to satisfy the misguided, wasteful greed of a rampaging hydra-headed “market”.

It’s social engineering; it’s retailing gone mad and it’s destroying individuality, self-reliance and population health. I hope millennials reject this pernicious disease that’s sapping the resources of our young families drier than the Nullarbor.

Thanks to this creeping syndrome, housing affordability is no longer a social issue for the needy – it affects practically everyone. We’ve got to empower owner-occupiers, curb the banks and ban speculators and investors from this sick “industry”.

Expensive, stupid, dangerous and impractical “linear parks”, and other pretentious infrastructure doodads in new subdivisions have got to go, so saving land.

Well-supplied, decent-sized blocks of land have got to be made available for purchase directly to bona fide owner-occupiers only. They can then be free to procure the design and construction of a dwelling wholesale, to suit themselves, completely or in affordable stages.

Group owners can be encouraged to procure designs and builds, as pre-formed body corporates, eliminating costly, sad, image-driven developers who get unqualified operatives to dumb down their foolishly sacked architects’ original designs.

The ACT government is in a great position to implement these measures and maybe save society.

Jack Kershaw, Kambah

I’ll give you discrimination, Andrew

I AM sick and tired of Andrew Barr shoving his personal marriage equality and LGBTIQ personal agendas in my face on a daily basis.

I am sick and tired of his moaning followers crying discrimination when the best they can do is get 250 troubled souls to a meeting at a time when marriage equality is the hot topic again.

I quite frankly don’t give a tinker’s cuss about your love life and its ambiguities, but I do give a tinker’s cuss about and challenge your moaning of discrimination.

Discrimination in the ACT is genuine family motorsport participants and supporters, who have engineered race cars, many valued at tens of thousands of dollars in their sheds or business houses, having to travel interstate on a regular basis spending money that would be spent in the ACT to enjoy a sport that has been discriminated against by successive ACT governments controlled by Green and nimby personalities.

That, my LGBTIQ people and your supporters, is REAL discrimination.

Michael Attwell, Dunlop

What about the QE11?

I READ Danielle Nohra’s article on Karen Faulkner (“Finding sleep behind the baby’s tears”, CN, August 17). No mention of QE11, a residential hospital in Curtin for mothers and babies in Canberra which does and has done wonderful work at getting babies and infants to sleep for 80 years plus.

The staff there are all “gurus”. I also was a staff member for 15 years and saved many families. How about an article on QE11?

Susan Salvi, via email