Making the nuclear case

July 18, 2021 â€" 12.03am

Illustration: Matt GoldingCredit:

To submit a letter to The Age, email letters@theage.com.au. Please include your home address and telephone number.Making the nuclear case

Your correspondent (“It’s only a dress rehearsal”, Letters, The Sunday Age, 11/7) incidentally makes the case very eloquently for moving to nuclear power generation as quickly as possible.

With enough electrical energy to power industry and transport reliably, it would solve all our emission problems.
Peter Walsh, Beaumaris

A recipe for success
David Attenborough and Swedish scientist Johan Rockstom’s Breaking Boundaries documentary provides the clearest explanations I have yet viewed of Earth’s biodiversity collapse and how the crisis can still be averted.

Attenborough’s conclusions are: that by ceasing fossil-fuel emissions and planting billions of trees, we humans can wake up one morning to find more life diversity than was present the previous night before we went to sleep.

If all Australians aware and concerned about the present dangerous state our world is in regarding climate change can work to achieve just these two outcomes, we can help reverse the present global trends to our actual demise.
Jennifer Gerrand, Carlton North

It’s called responsibility
Vocal advocates of individual freedom such as Liberal Party PR person Parnell Palme McGuinness (“Our year of quality-adjusted wellbeing”, The Sunday Age, 11/7) always highlight individuality but never responsibility and accountability.

McGuinness states uncontroversially “what makes life worth living is highly individual”, but then goes on to make a false comparison between the health risk-benefit of drinking alcohol, eating ice-cream, bacon or Mars bars and exposure to sunlight, to the current COVID restrictions.

Parnell, if you want to get smashed in the sunshine while stuffing yourself with junk-food that’s your business. No one else suffers but you.

If, however, you transmit the highly infectious COVID Delta variant while you are doing it, then it becomes everyone else’s business. It’s called social responsibility.
Dick Davies, North Warrandyte

Success by accident?
Is it just me, or is it weird that the Prime Minister is spruiking record vaccination rates on the back of the pain inflicted by the COVID-19 outbreaks and subsequent lockdowns in NSW and Victoria that are most likely worse than they would otherwise be if we had a functional vaccination program?
Gavin Rossetti, Glen Waverley

A man who took sides
When future generations reflect on Australia during its time dealing with COVID-19 and lockdowns, they won’t be able to look at the leader of today as one who was able to bring his country together to defeat the pandemic.

Instead, he will be viewed as a man who took sides with his political allies and showed contempt and vilification for his political opponents before realising after 18 months that as the Prime Minister during a pandemic he actually needed to roll out the same financial support packages for future lockdowns to appear even-handed with all states.
Bruce McMillan, Grovedale

Diminishing our future
Scott Morrison’s “it’s not a race” assurance earlier this year was emblematic of his misreading of the urgency and seriousness of the pandemic. It also served as a cover for the fact that he had not acquired sufficient vaccines.

The clear message to Australians was that we needn’t get too fussed about vaccination. Now we see the disastrous results of this casual approach.

The same hubris is evident in the Prime Minister’s refusal to acknowledge the urgency of the far greater threat of global warming. In his mind, this is also not a race. He cannot commit even to zero emissions by 2050.

Unfortunately for younger generations, the Prime Minister’s contemptible failure to act decisively now will result in a much-diminished environmental and economic future for Australia.
Fiona Colin, Malvern East

Losing my religion
Bravo, Heidi Nicholl (“Census time to mark ‘No Religion’”, Comment, 16/7). For those like me who don’t practise, yet â€" out of some weird nostalgia or loyalty â€" tick Catholic (or other faith), let’s, for the love of God and the advancement of society, choose “no religion” this time around.

Let’s not allow governments to justify church tax exemptions, support for rich private schools and recalcitrance on a host of social issues, from women’s reproductive rights to assisted dying, on the basis of insubstantial census data.

I would even suggest those who do practise their faith, but who have what is called a social conscience, might consider the “no religion’ box because they might agree that powerful religious organisations are often a constraint on progress towards a more just, equal and inclusive society.
Patrice McCarthy, Bendigo

Competing ‘best’ advice
If Gladys Berejiklian is working on the best medical advice and Daniel Andrews is working on the best medical advice one of them needs different advice.
The next few weeks will tell us who needs to shop around for a second opinion.

Gary Sayer, Warrnambool

It’s our money
Scott Morrison, your message to the states saying “there is no endless supply of federal money” is incorrect.

It is not “federal money” it is our, taxpayers’, money and your job is to distribute it equitably â€" that is, without fear or favour.
Judy Paphazy, Cape Schanck

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