What is happening to Lonny?

Are the lease costs too high for new businesses in and around the CBD?

Or is it that trade confidence is down in Tasmania's northern capital?  

I've noticed prime locations have been empty for far too long, and if the trend continues with more empty shops there is only one option left to regain some pride right here in Launceston.

Let's do a Smithton (along the North-West Coast) and go for next years title of Australia's tidiest town, for with a CBD like ours, we can't be a 'city' can we?

HORRIFYING and graphic footage was, once again, recently broadcast in the media of horrendous conditions sheep experience during their voyage to overseas slaughter, wallowing and covered in their own faeces, deprived of food, water and sufficient air prior to being callously dumped overboard as shark fodder following their eventual and inevitable demise.

As Australians, and humans, we should be ashamed of ourselves for permitting this to happen, and not for the first time either; it has to stop.

Australian animals for export should be slaughtered sensitively and humanely in Australian abattoirs restoring at least a little dignity to the trade, respect for the animals while providing jobs, and more jobs, to the once thriving meat trade industry.

MORE pollies for Tasmania, you have got to be kidding.

I am afraid the call for more politicians in Tasmania is an absolute nonsense.

With our population of approximately 500,000 and area, it is a joke.

With two tiers of government, 29 councils, plus the assistance of the internet, we are over govern now.

Apart from that, it is not the wages of elected members and their handlers that is prohibitive.

But the costs of their bureaucratic support.

Their wages have been allowed to blossom out to ridiculously exorbitant remuneration.

Politicians receive about $400,000 to $500,000 but bureaucrats equal that, and some department heads into the $600,000 to $700,000 per year.

Even if I do not have the correct numbers I am not far away.

With the right government in place we are amply governed and should instead concentrate on the amalgamation of some of the struggling smaller councils.

HEAR, hear Jo Palmer (The Examiner, April 8). What those men did on the cricket field was stupid and should never be condoned. But as Jo says, no one was physically hurt or killed. 

No one lost their life savings to a scam artist. No one had their house burned to the ground and lost all their worldly belongings.

For those several days it was almost as if the world stopped turning - there were no wars or terrorist attacks, no droughts or flooding rains.

What I find most abhorrent in this whole sorry saga is the social media trolls who, because they are anonymous, feel they have the right to denigrate, abuse and threaten not only the men who perpetrated this “heinous” act of ball tampering, but also their families.

Those trolls are nothing more than cowards and bullies. In my eyes that is much worse than rubbing sandpaper on a cricket ball.

A BIG thank you to University lecturer Dr Elspeth Stephenson for caring enough to make it her mission to make Tasmania a "trauma informed state (The Examiner, March 20).

I am so pleased that traumatised children, young people and adults will in time all get the understanding and a validation of their worth - they so deserve - rather than the sheer ignorance that has only served to re-traumatise and cause further suffering and pain.

For decades now I have been unable to recall what I looked like caused through trauma.

OUR first visit to the reopening of the Star Theatre.

A wonderful job of restoration and very friendly service, what Launceston needs.

Unfortunately the management is going to have to improve on the quality of films, if they want me back.

The film we watched Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri  is a prime example of the idiotic filth and limited language coming out of the yanky town. Half a star out of five.

HOW many drug dependent people are there now?

Could it co-join a retirement village with your addicts and help turn the addicts lives around, and also help the elderly feel useful again.

Home cooked food, loving hearts to all that have lost their way.

It would work both ways, I think.

Anyway it’s at least worth a thought.

Where is the NITV  information in the TV guide? Indigenous and other world information aplenty.

Tasmanians need that sort of education to catch up with themselves and the rest of the world.