Pigs
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IN response to Leon Cooper’s letter regarding wild pigs in northern Australia, these pigs are feral and are very dangerous if cornered, damage the ecosystems particularly in Kakadu and also on farms and can and will transmit disease.
— BRUCE ANDERSON, Hadspen.
Cheats
AIRLINES boast they have cheap fares, and invite us to book flights on their websites.
Look carefully at their invoice, and you will find a section headed “other charges”.
In it appears a booking service fee of $7 plus GST of 70 cents.
Of course, there is no other way of booking your flight and not incurring this fee.
It is levied every time.
This is blatant cheating.
Airlines should incorporate all fees in the quoted air fares and stop these extra fees which are not avoidable.
— BILL CARNEY, Riverside.
Health
AND SO the chickens come home to roost.
When a prosperous civil society has no other place but the hospital floor for a 95-year-old something is seriously broken.
Maximising profit and minimising tax is just plain greed and contempt masquerading in the guise of smart economics.
By all means make a profit but pay your tax.
Taxation is fundamentally a social good.
It is not evil.
Both sides of politics need to grasp this nettle now.
Blaming the health system or each other will not do.
Evil is knowing what is required and not fixing it because ideology comes first.
— TONY NEWPORT, Hillwood.
Communications
YOU CAN get a phone fault at any time, particularly now with the heavy rains.
Most people accept this, and try to get it fixed as quickly as possible.
What can make the process particularly irritating is the process of trying to report the fault to Telstra.
In some areas owning a mobile won’t help because there is no mobile coverage.
There are no public phones any more because of “rationalisation of services’'.
If you are lucky, and you have a computer that works, in theory you can report the fault.
Try it.
You get a series of options, but none of them work.
You get advice about unplugging other devices and threats of heavy additional fees if you don’t do this.
You get “granny caring” advice about reporting life threatening medical conditions (these all ignore the fact that any medical condition can be life threatening if you can’t get any help).
You get words, but you can’t communicate with anyone to tell them that your phone is down.
This is the new world order of communication, not just a Telstra trick.
Try contacting any government department or “service”.
You will find that the site is down, or does not respond, or given copies of regulations or instructions which have no bearing at all on your query.
I have tried emailing friends who live in Australia to ask them to report my phone problems.
Apparently this is called “crowd service support” (which appears to be a gibberish phrase for “phone a friend, they may have more luck).
Another new copout loop is to “use our app.”
If you do this you will go around in circles, perhaps for hours, and still get nothing done.
There is nothing wrong with new communication technology except for the fact that it doesn’t work for most people.
I believe that this is intentional.
— COL HAYWARD, St Helens.
Remote Fires
A NEW way of dealing with remote fires in our World Heritage Area needs to be addressed by our community and our elected representatives.
It is obvious that we lack the capacity to deal with the new reality presented by climate change.
And no, these fires are not natural.
The fires that have devastated ancient fire-intolerant ecosystems in areas adjacent to our iconic and much-loved Cradle-Overland Track and The Walls of Jerusalem have been directly linked to human-induced climate change by Professor Bowman of UTAS.
The fact that 1000-year-old pencil pine trees and cushion plants grew in this area shows that fires have not occurred there in all that time.
The increase in dry lightning strikes and the absence of rain means that we can no longer take a wait-and-see attitude when fires start in these incredibly special places.
Many thanks must go to renowned photographers Rob Blakers and Dan Broun, who undertook the heart-breaking task of documenting the devastation caused by fires that continue to burn.
These ecosystems are unique and have been recognised as such by UNESCO.
So let's not have the normal political bickering or finger pointing as evident in the editorial (February 2).
How about we recognise that our World Heritage Wilderness requires the same protection that is afforded cultural treasures such as the Pyramids - which we wouldn't want to see destroyed either?
Our wilderness is irreplaceable - this type of ecosystem doesn't grow back.
— LAUREN FAULKNER, Riverside.
Cats
ON the ABC I often hear a lady showing her dislike for cats.
She accuses cats of killing native birds and so on.
Yes this could be true of feral cats, but a well fed, spayed or neutered town cat seldom kills native wildlife.
Our cats for the past 45 years have never killed native birds.
We saw on Macquarie Island an explosion of vermin when the cats were removed.
Any new laws should take into account the lifestyle the cat enjoys, rather than the idiotic blanket laws proposed.
— JIM CAMPBELL, Ulverstone.
