Perth Voice Interactive

Stolen stroller a buggerboo!
ON Wednesday September 16, 2014 a rather sad thing happened to us at the car park close to the driving range of Maylands Peninsula golf course.
My wife and son took our grand-daughter for a walk in her pusher.
On return, we left the pusher next to the car and found a nice shady tree nearby to sit and talk and feed the baby.
Imagine our surprise and anger to discover someone had taken the pusher while we were there. What a thing to do!
We went looking for it but couldn’t find it. We reported the loss at the golf course pro shop, and to a policeman on mobile patrol. He was helpful, but did not rate our chances of recovering the red-coloured (bugaboo) pusher highly.  Sad indeed!
Peter Callan
Dumaresq St, Dickson ACT

Fungal disease
BAYSWATER councillor Chris Cornish is to be congratulated on his “greening of Bayswater” initiative (“Tree city,” Perth Voice, September 6, 2014).
One has only to travel along Vincent’s Mary Street in Highgate where power lines are not an issue, to appreciate a wonderful arch of trees providing beauty and coolness.
Whilst it is essential to control tree height for fire prevention, street trees beneath power lines in Bayswater are pruned to look like Paddle Pops, or, at best, mushrooms.
The trees would look more natural and colourful and the extended canopy provide more shade if the sides and lower branches were left untrimmed. This happens in other leafy suburbs where power lines are not underground, why not our Garden City?
J Wheare
Wall St, Maylands

How quickly we forget
THE decisions made by our politicians are all too often made with only the short-term result in mind, often to fit with the three-year term and to bolster the image of the government of the day.
However, these decisions can have effects, sometimes catastrophic, far into the future, and across the world.
In 2003, the Howard government made the decision to support the US in its “shock and awe” invasion of Iraq, despite the protests of many and the advice of experts that it would lead to the deaths of many thousands of innocent people, to civil war amidst the wreckage of their shattered society, and increase the risk of terrorism many-fold.
Now, as we look on the dreadful mess that has evolved in Iraq, it seems those experts were right.
The monster that was Saddam Hussein has been replaced by the many-headed monster of terrorism that is ISIS.
Now we are faced with a further far-reaching decision made by Tony Abbott, a decision which flies in the face of common sense and again goes against the advice of experts.
At a time of world unrest, we are to supply uranium to India, a non-signatory of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, and a country involved in a nuclear arms race with its neighbour, Pakistan.
Even if the uranium is used only for peaceful purposes, we would be selling to a country renowned for corruption, when all we have to do is look to Japan, and the Fukishima reactor, to see how disastrous a combination of the forces of nature and corruption can be.
The Japanese are clever, well-organised and well-funded, but there is no clear answer in sight to their problem of nuclear contamination. This is in addition to the fact that enthusiasts for “clean” nuclear reactor power seem to have overlooked the reality that no-one has yet come up with a satisfactory way to deal with nuclear waste, including getting rid of the rubble from demolished reactors when their life is spent.
It is time to remind our government we cannot make decisions as if we live in a vacuum. We have responsibility to chart a course to a sustainable and safe future for the world.  But then, why should Mr Abbott worry? Like Mr Howard, he will be enjoying his retirement, with no-one to ask him to take responsibility for the decisions he made.
Dr Jean Foster
Crawford Rd, Dianella  

What’s in a name?
THE Abbott government is making changes to the Fair Work Act that will be bad news for employees around the country.
He may have said before the last couple of elections that “WorkChoices is dead buried and cremated” but the last federal budget showed how much that promise was worth.
You can drop the name WorkChoices and just bring back the policies. Individual “flexibility” arrangements, for example, are just individual work contracts by another name. The pressure on workers to sign these, particularly on young workers in times of high youth unemployment, will be intense. Weekend pay rates will be “traded” for just getting a job, or for so-called non-money benefits such as vouchers.
People should not be fooled that these are just minor adjustments. They will undermine working conditions for young workers, and begin eroding the conditions for older workers as well.
Tim Dymond
William St, Mount Lawley

FIFO a false economy
I NOTE Brendon Grylls told the Sunday Times (August 24, 2014) that, “mining companies should be fined if they insist on using a fly-in, fly-out workforce instead of housing employees in nearby towns”.
This is a debate that deserves more attention because current practice leaves WA very much short-changed. After years of FIFO myself, I am acutely aware that wages earned in WA FIFO are not spent here. Money spent on everything from mortgages to groceries, from school fees to school shoes, from car repairs to child care is spent tutherside or offshore.
That money does not recycle through the WA economy, neither does the tax it generates fall into WA coffers. WA supplies the infrastructure but the benefits go elsewhere.
Mining town life has a lot going for it. It’s a more balanced society for one thing.  Stress, and consequent depression and marital strain are unsung outcomes of FIFO living, and effects are felt well outside of the homes of workers reaching right through the societies from whence they come.
My personal feeling is some resurgence of pioneering, self-reliant spirit would not be un-Australian. Brendon Grylls is on to something. Nitty-gritty detail is not defined yet, but the idea is there. It should be growing.
Rick Duley
North Perth