Poor Andrew

Malcolm Weatherup writes: Re. “Andrew Bolt’s five stages of grief” (Tuesday). Poor diddums, he seems a tad confabulated when instructs his “house-trained” Malcolm Turnbull that …

“He must convince Liberals their party still represents them, too, and they have a stake in making him succeed.

Isn’t that exactly the self-interest that drove them to kick Abbott out? Poor old Thunderbolt, the troopers are coming for him.

On MH17

John Richardson writes: Re. “Russia issued airspace warning the day before MH17 flight” (yesterday). While Ben Sandilands highlights the Dutch Safety Board’s (DSB) criticism of Malaysian Airlines (plus numerous others) for its lack of co-operation during its investigation into the physical and operational factors that may have contributed to the loss of MH17, it is unfortunate that Ben’s summary of the report’s “finger-pointing” is somewhat incomplete, at least in my view. In all likelihood, the conclusions of the DSB report doubtless reflect & amplify the motives of its authors, just as most would expect.

Notwithstanding that inconvenient truth, it is also a regrettable fact that the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) laboured against a fundamental lack of credibility from the outset, given that its fourth member Ukraine (the other members being the Netherlands, Belgium and Australia) was actually one of the prime suspects in the crime: so much for conflicts of interest.

As for Malaysia, its alleged “lack of co-operation” may have had more to do with the “junior” status that it was accorded in the investigative process, whereby it was treated as a participant and was not even entitled to see the results of the investigation unless the JIT partners unanimously agreed.

Given that the whole point of the DSB investigation was to make recommendations on how to avoid a repeat of the tragedy in the future, rather than to cast or apportion blame for the MH17 tragedy, the most relevant point that Ben makes in his piece is to report the fact that the Ukraine had not closed its airspace to civilian aircraft; notwithstanding the fact that some 16 military aircraft had been blown from the sky in the months before the MH17 disaster.

On multinationals

Peter Matters writes: Re. “Trade deal will provide new weapon against whistleblowers” (yesterday). The great majority of managements of multinationals have a combination of two features in common — stupidity and  greed. They do not understand that these two traits are counter productive. If they do not catch on quickly, very quickly, that the gross preference for shareholders rather than giving priority consideration to the interests of us, the people at large, will lead before the end of this century into turning this very small planet into a global, half dead garbage dump, resulting in no market, no customers, no profit.

Sustainable Power will be some small help towards pollution control and therefore global warming control. But then, seeing that the basic cause of pollution is the profligate, decadent, totally wasteful, out of control consumerism of our time, sustainable power will be but of minor help. As long as we live by the current values which we buy in the shopping centre and ignore the values we were born with, we will be the first species of mammal in history to commit suicide and in the process will do irreparable harm to poor little Mother Earth.

Even if we stop the total idiocy of giving the multinationals free reign, unless we, the people and big money with us, learn that we must totally change our values and with them our way of life – stopping plundering land, sea and air, it will not matter much whether big money can sue us for damages for stopping them from plundering the planet’s limited resources or not.