“I suspect, despite its failures, the government was returned because many in the electorate had a superficial appreciation of policy and voted on the perception that Labor was more likely to address the needs of the disadvantaged,” says letter writer MIKE QUIRK, of Garran. 

Jon Stanhope and Khalid Ahmed and others (CN, October 3) outlined the consequences of 23 years of Labor/Greens rule – poor outcomes in financial management, public housing, education, health, transport, urban development and city maintenance. 

I suspect, despite its failures, the government was returned because many in the electorate had a superficial appreciation of policy and voted on the perception that Labor was more likely to address the needs of the disadvantaged. 

They could not support a Liberal party with a right-wing out of touch with their progressive views.

Labor has a massive task to turn around its performance and to address its election commitments. 

To competently respond, it needs to undertake a review of its priorities and management. 

Can the funds available be better managed to improve disability, aged, indigenous and mental health outcomes? How can the supply of public housing be most effectively increased? Is the light rail an effective strategy to reduce car use? What level of infill strikes the right balance between housing demands, housing affordability, environmental impact and infrastructure costs? 

Failure to do so could threaten its long-term electability as voters perceive it provides ill-informed and opaque responses to the challenges facing the city and only gives lip service to social justice issues. 

Its task would be assisted if the current compliant public service was resourced and encouraged to provide competent, frank and fearless advice.

Given Labor’s performance, there is every chance independents, offering hope of improved governance, will at the next election hold the balance of power.

Just as some in the Liberal Party do not care whether they govern, Labor needs to question why it achieves so little, especially for the less well off. The party runs the risk of being derided as chardonnay-sipping and latte-lapping ne’er do wells. 

Mike Quirk, Garran

Got what you deserve, serves you right!

There’s an old saying that we get the politicians we deserve.

Have you looked at the curriculum vitae of the politicians you voted for in the October 19 election?

Despite botching the ACT budget for your children to pay off, you returned party hacks committed to voting as their party calls and never thinking for themselves at all (to paraphrase Gilbert & Sullivan).

Being in any parliament carries responsibilities and needs skills similar to those of a company director, managing billion-dollar budgets plus knowledge to provide services that none of them have previously managed such as sewerage, electricity generation, curriculum development and public transport. 

If you chose wisely, you would elect candidates who worked in industry at a senior executive level with responsibility for a profit centre. Ideally, they will understand financial and technical issues and have developed strategic plans for new situations. 

But you chose unwisely, electing candidates without those skills, hoping against hope that there would be a change of direction to value for money and realistic project delivery.

Too many have voted for candidates promising them lots of money for circuses or to build more uneconomic, billion-dollar tramlines or pretending to save the planet. 

Serves you right!

Anthony Horden, Jamison Centre

Questions for independent MLAs to pursue

Any new ACT majority government or coalition would be foolish to ignore future calls by independent MLAs for improved approaches to governance and ACT public sector transparency during the next four years, starting with, for example, “the pending report of the ACT Integrity Commission on the Campbell Primary School” (“Will Elizabeth Lee regret conceding to Labor?”, CN October 24). 

The questions raised by columnist Michael Moore about this high-level investigation are certainly legitimate ones for any independent MLA to pursue, to help raise public awareness about ACT government and public sector procurement policy, practices and related considerations that have been the norm or that may be adopted from time to time.

Sue Dyer, Downer

Liberals’ loss could be ratepayers’ gain

The all-too predictable result of the ACT election, the return – yet again – of the Barr government demonstrated two “rules”: Canberrans are rusted-on Labor voters, suffering from a high degree of apathy. I can’t see either malaise being “cured” any time soon.

However, there are two less-obvious positives. Neither the Canberra Liberals’ extraordinary proposal to build a new satellite town in Kowen Forest, nor their ill-conceived plan for a new stadium at the New Acton waterfront will come to fruition.

The Kowen development, in effect a new satellite mini-city, would have to be built from scratch: power, and water supplies, access and internal roads, sewerage and drainage, a town centre, foot and cycle paths, and green spaces for community use would have to be provided, and many hundreds of new trees would have to (or should) be planted. 

The cost to the ACT government – hence ratepayers – would be enormous.

The New Acton stadium as per the artist’s impression would also be very expensive to build. The site lacks space for parking the multitude of cars used to convey spectators from and to homes that are beyond the reach of, or willing to use, public transport. 

The Canberra Liberals’ loss could well be ACT ratepayers’ gain.

Dr Douglas Mackenzie, Deakin

More of the same Barr rubbish government

You did it again. Why? Because you want to have more of the same Barr rubbish government. Nothing surprises me more. So you all want a multi-billion-dollar tram to Woden, more concrete highrise in the suburbs and higher rates taxes etcetera. Plus worse health care, fewer police, more dodgy development… bring it on, another four years of what Canberrans want and need really! 

They stole a pretty good hospital from the community of Belconnen because it didn’t align with their agenda and being more than $12 billion dollars in the red for a place like Canberra (ie population 450,000 pop) is criminal. 

Keir Hall, Florey

Lee doesn’t deserve to be a leader

I write to call out Ms Elizabeth Lee’s recent abhorrent and juvenile behaviour demonstrated publicly to a Canberra journalist.

What kind of adult even thinks about such disgusting, hideous acts, let alone commits them in full view of a national audience? 

Clearly she is not articulate enough to respond to journalists with appropriate comments. Her use of fingered air gestures represents her lack of emotional intelligence and absolute inability to control herself.

She does not deserve to be in any position of leadership. No wonder she is not in power, and never will be.

I hold a PhD and am fully versed in correct interpersonal behaviour. 

How disappointing that Ms Lee does not. I call for her to step down from her position, as an undeserving occupier of the post.

Nat Bourne, via email

Desperate need for an indigenous ‘sorry levy’

Desperate need for an indigenous ‘sorry levy’ Despite the government’s pitiful attempt to resolve disadvantage through a poorly constructed, expensive referendum on constitutional change, resulting in a slap down from voters, there still remains festering sores of disadvantage impacting indigenous folk that need attention with an out-of-the-box solution.

Australia desperately needs a “sorry levy”, which should be applied equally across the nation so all contributing people can rest peacefully, knowing they are making good for all the wrongs of the past and creating a yellow brick road for the future.

The intelligent way to achieve this would be to increase our GST by a percentage or fraction thereof and to quarantine the special revenue generated in a holding account, with collections being fully transparent for later transfer to First Nations’ representatives for wider distribution.

First Nations would need to elect a superior group to receive/manage funds and distribute to others, eliminating interferences that may cause hurt, criticism and shame further down the track. 

Such a scheme would demand that some government payments already being made to First Nation people be scaled down or eliminated to avoid double dipping.

Rather than living on handouts, they should be given the decency of managing their own affairs and the opportunity to distribute funds amongst themselves from a reliable source on a needs basis, with decisions taken from 60,000 years of experience, custom, caring and dignity. Managerial overhead costs would be met from the pool according to established business practice. 

A marginal percentage on the GST will not collapse the economy when double dipping and managerial duplication are correctly managed and economic efficiency and other outcomes are better understood

However, I can already hear howls of protest about increasing the GST, for fear of hitting the government’s tanked bottom line in search of a mystical wealth fund!

John Lawrence via email

Disrespectful Thorpe’s ‘reprehensible’ protest

Regardless of one’s political persuasion, I think most would agree that the action of independent Victorian politician, Senator Lydia Thorpe, at the Parliament House reception for the Royal couple in Canberra was, at worst, reprehensible with her use of vile language (quite unbefitting a Federal government representative) and also the height of rudeness to say the least. 

Particularly, after the gracious Welcome to Country extended to the Their Majesties on their arrival at Canberra airport by other familial First Nations representatives. Her disrespectful outburst was later deplored by Aboriginal elder Aunty Violet Sheridan, who distanced herself from the honourable member by saying: “She does not speak for me.”

Surely there would have been an opportunity at some stage of the Royal visit for a quiet and more gracious comment by this parliamentarian for her to voice her disaffection with the Crown over the treatment of the First Nations people in the past by “colonists”, and the urgent need for the formulation of a national treaty by which future generations of indigenous people would have their connection to country protected and respected. 

Patricia Watson, Red Hill

Enough of the vitriol and wokism, Robert

I do pity Robert Macklin. Writing articles full of vitriol, loathing and derision must be exhausting. 

This must be particularly so after his recent distasteful put down of Antiques Roadshow host Fiona Bruce et al and his usual well-worn tropes about the British Empire. 

In this instance he incorrectly tries to make the case that all the British aristocracy’s wealth came from the slave labour of Caribbean colonies. Most of Britain’s economy, from the Napoleonic wars forward, was based on manufacturing and iron production and supporting what today we’d call the “military industrial complex”. 

He does not mention that Britain banned slavery in the UK in 1772 and across all its colonies in 1834. He tries to elicit the “black arm band” version of history with mention of sackings of cities. 

Yes, by the standards of today, that is deplorable, but all nations, not just western nations did this and a lot worse as part and parcel of warfare. The Japanese did it in Korea and China, the Chinese did it to Vietnam, and the Maoris did it to other Polynesians. To infer by exclusion that Britain was the sole perpetrator is a mistruth. 

He then returns to his deplorable personal attacks on the Antiques Roadshow hosts and experts. He speaks of Tom Gleeson’s caustic remarks, yet neglects the caustic tone of his whole article. 

Enough of the vitriol and wokism, Robert

Robert Curtis, via email

Scomo never got his due credit for covid stand

Columnist Robert Macklin (CN October 24) can’t get past his own rusted-on leftist views calling Scomo racist. 

His reasoning? Something to do with standing up to China after the worldwide pandemic that killed millions originated in a wet lab in Wuhan. Morrison’s crime; that he quarantined travellers from Wuhan and prevented people from China entering the country. Remember the howls of the left calling this racist. 

Morrison never got his due credit for this, even going against the WHO recommendation. This saved Australia from thousands of deaths. If we had been under Labor’s rule then, with their immigration record, you can bet we would have been swamped with covid. Remember the previous Labor government letting in 50,000 illegal immigrants, that we are still paying for today.

Macklin’s anti-conservative rants are getting very predictable and boring.

Ian Pilsner, Weston

What price compassion for a puppy?

An image keeps recurring to me from Tony Magee’s letter about the building of St Andrew’s church in Forrest in 1934.

A builder’s pet puppy fell down a gap in the stone work and plunged to the ground where it whimpered prior to dying, one has to conclude, a slow and painful death.

Dismantling a wall to rescue the dog “just wasn’t feasible”, according to Mr Magee.

In fact, it would have been perfectly feasible – just inconvenient and expensive.

But what price compassion, particularly when building a “light on the hill”?

John Griffin, via email 

Dead wildlife would have concerned the King

King Charles is a keen conservationist who would have been concerned if he had travelled from Canberra just a short distance by car and seen the dead bodies of wombats and kangaroos lying on the sides of the road. 

Some wombat bodies may have been blue crossed for removal, but what is being done to prevent such cruel accidents from happening again?

More effective road signage and strict follow-up of those motorists exceeding the speed limits are needed to help save lives.

Susan Cruttenden, via email

Reminding Eric about the Voice outcome

Now that the data is coming in on just how much the PM misjudged his approach to the Voice, which I raised in CityNews early in the process, I remind letter writer Eric Hunter, who criticised my views, that his constant promotion of the Voice in various media contributed to the negative result. 

Ric Hingee, Duffy