Because the quality of life for the elderly resident of Campbell Town is very poor and is due mainly to the busy, noisy highway passing through the town centre? The time is long overdue for Campbell Town to be bypassed. One of the odd projects planned for the town is for state growth to build a pedestrian underpass for school children to cross the highway.

Any inquiry would show the townspeople consider the idea, a huge waste of money when it will do nothing to help us oldies to cross at the shopping centre.

Some business owners won't agree but they are likely to be ones who have bought other businesses and closed them down.

Well, it's time now to get those businesses open again and more people living at Campbell Town by moving the highway east or west. Doesn't matter.

OVER the past 18 months to two years, due to chronic lung disease, I have required services from the following: Scottsdale Hospital, Tasmanian Ambulance, Launceston General Hospital, Accident and Emergency, Pulmonary Rehabilitation, LGH staff, palliative care, community nurses and district nurses.

I would like to express my gratitude for the wonderful treatment, care and assistance that I have received. Both my wife, Ann-Maree, and I cannot speak highly enough about the staff who work for these services.

We both appreciate the kindness, sensitivity and empathy that has been shown to us over this period. Our support from family, friends and the local community at Bridport and Scottsdale has been overwhelming and very much appreciated. Many thanks to every one of you. Best wishes and may 2020 be all you could wish for.

IT was great that the Falls Festival attracted thousands of young people, none of whom overdosed on drugs. No doubt if pill testing had been there that would be credited with the result. About 1 per cent of fatal overdoses occur at festivals which means 99 per cent occur in the community.

Pill testing is normalising drug-taking and no doubt many who have a drug tested as OK (as much as any drug can be) will be encouraged to continue taking that drug, even though it may be a different quality.

How many of the 99 per cent had drugs tested and then overdosed later? The only safe measure is to refrain from taking any drugs. No government has been able to legislate away stupidity if they could just think how road deaths, smoking and drinking to excess could be more than halved.

AFTER watching the local TV news on the bushfires on the mainland, I was appalled by the destruction incurred.

I am imploring the residents of Tasmania to donate to the bushfire appeal via the Red Cross or Salvation Army.

Let's alleviate the suffering and hardship of all those who have lost their homes and livelihood in these disastrous fires.

Please give generously.

AWARD-WINNING author, Richard Flanagan has lambasted the Liberals for their lack of action in presiding over the dying Great Barrier Reef and the firestorm that is ravaging multiple state landscapes, townships and causing the decimation of many animal and plant species. Liberal stalwart Eric Abetz refutes Flanagan's description of the fires, instead likening the wildfires to be a common event and that Captain Cook's view of Bay of Fires is proof of that.

What the explorers saw along the Bay of Fires, also known as larapuna, was a series of small fires of communication between tribes and the traditional burning of hunting grounds. A lot can be learnt from the old ways of fire management.

RECENT data indicates that 87 per cent of bushfires are man made the vast majority of these attributed to arsonists.

Maybe this moronic behaviour can also be blamed on climate change.

TOO many tears.

Not enough rain.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison is struggling in a situation of a natural disaster where spin and manufactured situations are replaced with unpredictable loss of life and property that requires leadership and humanitarian reciprocity.

Premiers Dan Andrews and Gladys Berejiklian, of Victoria and New South Wales, are displaying innate leadership skills, whereby the baffled Australian Prime Minister finds and Australian emergency one of a perplexity that can't be stage-managed.

Also, his Emergency Services Minister David Elliott has taken leave for a holiday in Europe, while Australia burns.

Kenneth Gregson, Swansea.