“The ACT system, unfortunately, has no independent library board, as is commonplace elsewhere,” says letter writer DR CHRIS WATSON in his argument for a review of public libraries.
The onset of unexpected library closures across the ACT, apparently due to lack of relief staff, is alarming and disappointing.
It has been a regular occurrence at my local Kippax library. The ACT system, unfortunately, has no independent library board, as is commonplace elsewhere.
The role of libraries must also be seen as community hubs with lifelong learning activities. Moreover, there are currently relatively few professionally trained staff with qualifications for these tasks.
Furthermore, many areas of Canberra still do not have libraries-cum-community centres, eg the Molonglo suburbs. They are so necessary for education and voice in each of Canberra’s regions.
A public hearing investigating the situation with ACT libraries, by an Assembly committee, is long overdue!
Dr Chris Watson, via email
Steel’s ruses apply to the buses, too
May Fiona Carrick keep raising public awareness as she wades along the path of analysis and exposure (“Independent exposes Steel’s shonky budget ruses”, CN July 31).
Hopefully she and her MLA colleagues on the Assembly’s MyWay+ debacle inquiry will also be aware by now that there is still a lot not working, let alone well, in the public bus system, nearly 10 months after the new transport ticketing setup was lobbed at drivers and the travelling public.
It is clear that the treasurer, who is also the transport minister, is prepared to keep funding only substandard bus service operations and maintenance after the sub-par yet costly introduction of MyWay+.
Ad hoc bus trips in the past two months have revealed that on-board ticket readers are frequently out of action. On one fairly new bus, the reader also inexplicably broke down during a three-kilometre trip. Tapping on but then not being able to tap off has financial and tedious follow-up implications for the travelling public.
Both the reader and the on-board visual display screen of upcoming bus stops were not working on a recent nighttime bus trip. Many of the 20 or so passengers tried to peer out of reflection-filled windows, wondering where on earth the stops were as the bus wound its way through low-lit suburbs.
In addition, enduring the worsening level of amenity and sense of security at bus interchanges, especially at night in Civic and Dickson, is not helped when all the digital display boards of expected bus arrival times are still out of commission.
Mercifully, though, the incomprehensible and aggravating on-board voice-over descriptions of upcoming bus stops by their four-digit number now appear to have been removed from earshot.
Why was such poor-quality and useless audio reception not picked up in a testing phase across a range of buses? How much did this failure cost?
The transport minister finds it easy to blithely talk up public transport use but still appears reluctant to communicate openly and honestly about fixing the deficiencies that still plague the public bus service’s ticketing reforms and ongoing operations.
It is time that the overly light rail-focused Labor government worked much harder to make bus travel a far more appealing and convenient way of moving around the national capital, day and night.
May the MyWay+ inquiry produce a comprehensive list of fast-tracked, yet well-tested operational rectifications and longer-term actions that need to be committed to and regularly reported on.
Sue Dyer, Downer
Hanrahan should indeed be worried
Wonderful to read how Canberra local Dr Susan Orgill is helping farmers store more carbon in soil (“Passion for making soil a sexy subject”, CN August 7).
Globally, up to 10 gigatonnes of CO2 will need to be removed annually by 2050. The CSIRO estimates that Australia could sequester 5-29 megatonnes a year in soil, with additional potential from farm forestry and land regeneration.
Yet some correspondents (letters, CN August 7) still deny this science or the need for it. Dave Jeffrey cites the 1921 poem Said Hanrahan as evidence “nothing has changed over the last 100 years”, while Anthony Hordern claims only three per cent of atmospheric CO2 comes from “wayward human activities”.
In fact, the CSIRO explains: burning fossil fuels adds an extra 9.1 billion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere each year. Of this, 2.8 billion tonnes are absorbed by plants and soil, 2.2 billion tonnes by oceans, but 4.1 billion tonnes remain, driving up CO2 concentrations.
This excess is what fuels global warming. As a result, over the last 100 years, average temperatures have risen nearly 2°C and sea levels by 20 centimetres. Hanrahan would indeed be worried.
Amy Blain, via email
Woeful decision and no-one’s to blame
Canberra has a terrific road system – it was built that way. It is not a city where you commute into the centre by day and return home at night. The satellite town centres and distributed work locations mean that traffic is moving in large volumes in all directions, all day, every day.
I am no transport expert, but I can’t understand how an elected government of sensible people could come to the conclusion that a fixed-line rail system – built at an incredible cost – would have any meaningful contribution to the daily workings of this wonderful city.
A woeful decision that the next generations will have to pay for and for which no-one is held accountable.
Peter Claughton, Farrer
CityNews should stand proud
Canberra CityNews should stand proud for how its columnists have over the last few months so eloquently drawn attention to the fact that the ACT has the highest indigenous imprisonment rate of any state or territory in Australia.
This highest rate translates into additional and tragic deaths in custody.
In my ignorance, I had simply assumed that the ACT had the lowest indigenous imprisonment rate. I am now better informed.
CN proudly leads the way in breaking important news. I need only mention Robert Macklin in 2019 breaking the news of a secret trial and imprisonment in the ACT that not even the ACT attorney-general was aware of.
I suspect that CN’s radio advertisements in fact understate the high quality of what it has to offer.
John Burge, Curtin
Please be advised, D is for dunce
We are in a glasshouse when it comes to throwing typographical bricks at anyone else, but… an irresistible note and photo arrived from a reader who spotted a howler on two identical signs, back-to-back, plonked on the Burley Griffin lakeside central basin footbridge near the statue of Menzies.
With the authority of the National Capital Authority, it warned that “no vehicular access” was permitted, but then in a burst of unnecessary pseudo politeness, says “Please be advise…”, sinking its authority with a missing “d”.
“Perhaps the NCA should be renamed the ‘Notional Capitol Authirty’,” writes our wag.
Then the penny dropped; the ACT is broke
In our submission to the recent inquiry into bail in the ACT, my co-writer argued for Electronic Monitoring (EM) to be introduced for offenders and alleged offenders.
As we know, there are almost no rehabilitation programs at the AMC. Would it not be better then to use EM and access support services in the community?
Not that long ago, I was told by two MLAs that EM would be implemented, and plans were being made.
How disappointed I was to read “there’s no money in the ACT 2025-2026 budget to implement the scheme, with leftover previous money still being used to conduct feasibility studies and ongoing policy work”.
Really? The studies have been done elsewhere. The necessary policies can be copied.
I had a think about it, and then the penny dropped; the ACT is broke, due to Andrew Barr’s refusal to call time on the light rail debacle.
So, I guess we ratepayers are saddled not only with the interest payments on the trams we can’t use, but also maintaining the most expensive, but non-productive prison system in the nation.
Makes me embarrassed to be a Canberran – a city that has a government incapable of admitting failure and making sensible plans for our future.
Janine Haskins, prison reform advocate
Lockup rates have nothing to do with Labor
Michael Moore’s rant on the ACT’s indigenous incarceration rates disgrace (“Labor finally lines up to face indigenous disgrace”, CN August 7) comes as no surprise, nor does his observation that action on this travesty is long overdue.
We need only go back a few years ago when one of our great newspaper cartoonists had a cracker showing two tough-looking, black-clad prison officers wearing silver reflective sun glasses in a fenced-off area with one saying: “There’s a lot of them in here these days” and the other replying: “Yes, that’s because more of them are getting caught”.
The lockup rates have nothing to do with the ACT Labor Party as Moore suggests; it’s all about a minority failing in the appreciation of civilised, commonsense law.
John Lawrence via email
Nuclear is all day every day
Re Ray Peck’s letter “We prefer sunshine to fission” (CN August 7): I’d like to know what Ray means by “even ordinary Australians are not keen” referring to nuclear power.
What is “an ordinary Australian”?
As to the surveys, it depends on who is doing the survey. If wind turbines are so popular in the surveys, why are there so many protests about the on and off-shore turbines?
Regarding the results, I have seen surveys where people prefer nuclear power because it is available 24 hours a day 365 days a year.
Nuclear plants last about 60-80 years, whereas solar and wind last 10-15 years.
Minister Chris Bowen has never given the true cost of wind, solar, power lines, firming, and all the incentives, plus the fact they will have to be replaced. If nuclear power is so unpalatable, why is the rest of the world switching to nuclear?
As to the renewables: the wind does not always blow, the sun does not always shine, nuclear is 24/7/365.
We are nowhere near up to having enough wind and solar to power Australia and at the rate we’re going, it will be years before we do.
Vi Evans, via email
Not so proud about ACT climate action
Global heating is driven by the top 10 per cent of emitters, who cause 30 per cent of annual emissions. Australians are in that top 10 per cent.
The Commissioner for Sustainability and Environment tells us that the ACT’s per capita carbon footprint is higher than that of any Australian state.
The new Chair of the ACT Climate Council thinks that Canberra needs to plan for temperatures up to 55C. If the rest of the world follows our example, those 55-degree days will arrive even sooner.
We of the top 10 per cent can cut the world’s emissions by one fifth, by simply bringing our emissions down to the world average. The ACT government’s “zero net emissions” target applies only to Scope 1 emissions.
The Commissioner says that 94 per cent of the ACT’s emissions are Scope 3. She made 12 recommendations for addressing Scope 3 emissions. The ACT government agreed to act on only one of those recommendations, to “talk to other states and territories to ensure progress is taking place across Australia”.
Climate Action Canberra is a member of the ACT-government-funded Conservation Council ACT Region. We do not endorse the council’s claim that Canberrans are proud we are leaders when it comes to climate action.
Leon Arundell, Climate Action Canberra, Downer
But unis have ‘important’ tasks
Gosh golly. Sue Dyer, of Downer, (“Throwing the Bach out with the bathwater”, letters, CN August 7) has seriously mistaken the role of today’s universities.
In the pursuit of excellence they have the important educational tasks of defining what a woman is, teaching Aboriginal mathematics and advancing grammar by correctly defining personal pronouns.
Universities really don’t have the time or finances to fuss about with such Western Enlightenment nonsense as Bach’s or Beethoven’s music. And anyway, there are loads of contemporary guitar and drum thrashers out there who “do” music.
Anthony Hordern, Jamison
We should expect more humanity
In Michael Moore’s August 14 column addressing atrocities from around the world under the headline of “How do people treat each other so Abominably” he says: “The images reveal returning to a time where some people have no humanity for others, no compassion
“In Australia, and perhaps in Canberra specifically, we have the good fortune to look through a very privileged lens at the rest of the world.
“It is incomprehensible, when looking through this lens, to understand how people can treat each other so abominably. Starving and killing babies, small children and teenagers is simply barbaric.”
He finishes his article with: “We should expect more humanity and compassion from the Australian people and especially from our governments”.
I agree, we should expect more humanity and compassion and stop killing innocent babies through abortion.
Bob Wilson, Kambah
Are they just closing the stable door?
I’ve lived in Canberra for three years (loving it, thanks for asking), have yet to catch a tram, but with the traffic chaos around light rail construction, it’s hard to ignore.
Can’t be easy developing new public infrastructure. Jon Stanhope and Khalid Ahmed’s Stage 2b autopsy report (CN August 7) confirms that the operators won’t make a profit.
No surprise there; no public transportation service, that I’ve heard of, covers costs by fares alone. It lives or dies by a sum total of benefits.
They also dance around procurement procedures. No actual suggestion of anything dodgy, just that the auditor-general’s eyebrow might be raised. So what?
These fine authors have put hours of research and analysis into dissecting the scheme – it took almost as long to read – but if the scheme is as bad for Canberra as they imply, what’s their solution? Are they just closing the stable door?
Dick Bauch, Latham
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