Then we could pay respect to the indigenous owners on that same day, thereby making it a day that includes all Australians without favour to anyone.

Let's not call it Australia Day, could we not find a word that recognises the long history of this country before we arrived?

As a nation, we have disrespected the rightful owners for long enough and it's time someone had enough guts to make the call to bring it to an end.

What does Australia Day mean if it does not include all of the people?

Australia Day officially became a public holiday for all states and territories only 24 years ago, in 1994.

Over the years, it has been moved around a lot. Many people find January 26 offensive, so let's move it again.

Australia Day should stay on January 26 says Steve Rodgers (The Examiner, September 17), saying Leanne Hurst is not an elected member, she is the council's development services director.

Steve Rodgers then claims that "nobody can change history, January 26 is the day in history that Australia was discovered".

Two points Mr Rodgers, Australia was discovered some 60,000 years ago by people who walked out of Africa, and who ultimately were invaded by white colonisers 60,000 years on.

History is continually being rewritten in the name of history and justice.

That is why the town council has employ "development" services officers.

They say you learn something new every day.

Steve Rodgers (The Examiner, September 17) says Australia was "discovered" on January 26.

I assume that carbon dating has advanced to a point where science now knows that Australia was discovered by the Aboriginal settlers on that day in 8000 BC.

Many other races also discovered this land before the English came to exploit nature's God-given bounty.

IT looks like Tasmanian Liberal Senator Jonathon Duniam just does not get it when he put forward draconian, anti-environment federal legislation to imprison protestors against a pulp mill (The Examiner, September 14). I say this as a former city branch vice president of the Young Liberals; as someone who worked in a pulp mill and as someone who worked in health.

On the eve of the student's climate strike this Friday, the law was passed by the Senate last week. Our school children do not want to be saddled with a climate-wrecking, dirty stinking, toxic pulp mill here in Tasmania. We have been through this and it does not have a social licence.

So now we are going to lock kids up that protest are we? All the more reason for schoolies to strike; it is their future.

COMING from an industry where compulsory and random drug tests are the norm I understand the thought process in testing people that receive government benefits.

So how many is this going to catch if it ever comes in? Stuff all. By telegraphing the program it gives those who don't want to work and keep on drugs, time to move. And those who want to get off the drugs have already applied for government assistance to gain rehab.

All this will do is subject genuinely unemployed people to drug tests and put money into the drug testing companies' pockets which would be far better spent in creating more rehab facilities.

HAVING read the federal Religious Freedom Reform document I am both surprised and relieved. It seems to me, from a freedom of speech perspective, to be pretty reasonable.

The religious are free to say that atheists like me are going to their imagined Hell.

I am likewise free to say that the religious have adopted an ancient set of myths and magical ideas, mostly unconnected to reality and actual history. My beliefs at least are factually based, but being factual never has had much standing, it seems, in the field of human belief and politics.

But the new Laws, tested against the yardstick of how well they might work in the Space Bar of Star Wars, have some problems.

Diversity would be recognised well enough, but with everyone claiming everyone else is going to Hell or wherever, and humans claiming only a man and a woman can have a decent union, I reckon there might be some fisticuffs amongst the species present.

Full circle back to the unsuitability of primitive, religious concepts for building harmonious-multispecies communities.

After all, Israel Folau was only the fall guy for the Bible.

He didn't think up that bit of discriminatory "brilliance" all by himself, he had a lot of help from ancient goat herders.

There is still some work to be done.