Competition winner

Congratulations to Pauline Seddon, who has won her choice of an Apple Watch or Samsung Gear.

A grim future awaits

Roy Ramage writes: Re. “Temperature’s rising: acid rain of govt intervention leaves BOM high and dry” (Friday). All hope that humans will avoid the minimum 2% increase in global temperature must inevitably be abandoned. It is deeply disturbing that the well respected BOM staff, whose record of accuracy has improved year on year must now recoil from the truth. Tony Abbott and other neo-Liberal governments around the globe press on with business as usual despite overwhelming evidence that all is not well. This dreadful “human nature” guarantees that our continued industrial scale extraction of everything, will not just overshoot the 2% but almost certainly cruise past 4 degrees of warming.

Large parts of Australia remain in drought and our BOM staff have warned that the El Nino event is  about to return. Our oceans are acidifying at an increasing rate and vast amounts of plastics are killing many forms of marine life. California has just instituted water restrictions as it is affected by its worst drought in memory. Bees are dying right across the US and massive floods are hitting parts of Southern America. The severity and cost of these events is staggering. We have been warned and continue to be cautioned by our own CSIRO experts who have global recognition of their many scientific achievements by all but Abbott and Co. That Abbott and his acolytes can cower our public servants into avoiding sound science shows that we are truly rooted.

Christians not standing idly by

Cameron Smith writes: Re. “On asylum seekers” (Friday). In response to John Gleeson’s call-out to church leaders to advocate for the plight of asylum seekers, I’d like to point him towards movements like Love Makes A Way, Common Grace, Welcome To Australia — members of which have engaged in social media campaigns, community organising and nonviolent civil disobedience in the form of prayer vigils and sit-ins in order to resist the violence of the government towards asylum seekers. There are also many other local initiatives, like Simple Love in Sydney’s inner-west, that have attempted to help those asylum seekers that are within the community with provisions and legal advice.

Is Abbott trolling us?

David Havyatt writes: Re. “Hockey bungles the message, but Abbott’s is a failure of conviction” (Friday). Bernard Keane is wrong when he says of Tony Abbott, “he appears (extraordinarily for a politician so frequently identified as an ideological warrior) to lack a core policy vision that informs his handling of the vicissitudes of public life.” He is right that Abbott doesn’t really stand for small government, even though he genuinely believes that government shouldn’t do anything people can do for themselves. What he simply believes is that all government is bad. But by definition that includes his own government. So every morning he wakes up to his eternal contradiction. His only saving grace has been that three Labor leaders in succession have been equally devoid of conviction.