Nancy off the leash

Mike Carlton writes: Re. “Nancy to Press Council” (yesterday). You can only sympathise with Kate Durham finding herself on the end of one of silly Gerard Henderson’s slanderous errors. But heavens, if we reported them all to the Press Council poor Professor Disney would find himself dealing with nothing else.

I actually enjoy Henderson’s stupid mistakes whenever he writes about me. There’s always one, often two or three. No, I don’t drink gin;  no, I don’t live at Whale Beach; and, no, I wasn’t tweeting about him at 3am one day, as he alleged so oddly a few weeks ago.

Frankly, I think he never recovered from the death of the late and unlamented B.A. Santamaria, poor sod. But whatever happens, Ms Durham should never write to him.  She’ll never hear the end of it.

Defence the end of the line?

Keith Campbell writes: Re. “Iraq debacle complicates Johnston’s tenure at Russell Hill” (yesterday). A nit-pick:  Malcolm Fraser had Defence before going on to be PM.

Christine Brierly writes: I have been wondering about this non-minister for ages, even before his interview with Leigh Sales.

Kim Beazley loved being defence minister. I had to respond to Kim’s office when he was defence minister and later when education minister, and he lamented no longer being in the defence portfolio.

Tasmania off the information superhighway

Nick Storr writes: Re. “Loophole could allow telcos to squeeze out the NBN after all” (yesterday). I appreciate Paddy Manning’s critique of the Coalition’s NBN solution, but as with much of the coverage it appears to completely ignore those already suffering the most disadvantage in the digital divide.

He glumly informs us that the NBN losers “will be relying on souped-up copper, the slowest option, for an indefinite period”, but to be honest, I’d happily pay several thousand dollars to get Manning’s “slowest option” at my place. Instead I’m going to be on the real slowest option — satellite.

I can drive out of my driveway and be in the Hobart CBD in 30 minutes, yet I’ll be relegated to the decidedly third-rate satellite solution under either party’s policy. While everybody else quibbles about 50Mb/s vs Gigabit, we’ll be looking at 25Mb/s at best, with 600+ ms latency. VoIP, Skype … nope. Not unless you’re happy to wait a second or so for a response from the other party — an experience more akin to a walkie-talkie.