Attracting Tourists
ONE of the best ideas I have heard for attracting tourists to Tasmania is free fares on the Spirit of Tasmania boats. If this is too expensive, just the fares and the passenger pay for their vehicles. This would attract more tourists who, I assume, would spend a longer time travelling around the state than the fly in tourists who just do the lap of the state and then fly home.
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Another idea is to have a person to head up an office for attracting motorbikes to tour the state. Tasmania is regarded as one of the best touring destinations for bikers luring people from all over the world and like the passengers on the Spirit would travel more kilometres around the state thus spending more of their tourist dollar
Anthony Galvin, Launceston.
What you need to know about the state budget:
Gratitude
THANK YOU to Mike Gaffney and the Grey family for all of the blood, sweat and tears for our loved ones to die with dignity.
My father in his 50s, my beautiful sister in her 40s and my mother and all of my relatives who died of lingering deaths from cancer - I say thank you. Their pain and suffering is with me each and every day. As a teenager to hear your father crying and begging his beloved son-in-law to put him out of his misery will be with me forever.
Beverley Wallace, George Town.
Empathy
EMPATHY may not make good policy for the Liberal party, but it makes good people. Thank you, Sue Hickey. You are a good, courageous and empathetic woman. Thanks also to Mike Gaffney and every Leg Co member who voted with empathy for the VAD bill.
Heather Donaldson, Westbury.
US Election
WELL, the great American presidential election is finally over and the good guys won. Or did they? With the amount of ifs, ands or buts attached one wouldn't really know. Meanwhile Donald Trump sits in his sandpit, throws his bucket and spade at anybody and everybody and sulks and won't concede. Why am I not surprised? Don't count him out yet folks. Anything could happen and probably will.
Richard Hill, Newstead.
Change focus
PREMIER Gutwein says he has taken the advice of a top public servant in maintaining secrecy over government grants to businesses. How about him taking advice from those who employ him, those who elected him to represent them and exercise stewardship of public finances?
How about considering the mental health of those who did not receive any government support - the homeless? There are large buildings on the market in Launceston and motels in Hobart that the uni will now find redundant. How about purchasing these, instead of squandering more money on unnecessary road infrastructure? Public housing is a form of infrastructure too.
Bridges and overpasses don't provide adequate shelter, or protect people's health.
The government has a warped sense of humour. Grow the economy and create jobs. How about growing mental health and creating sanity?
But then, the economy is not about meeting people's needs, but looking after one's mates, and the homeless are not in the same category.
Peter Needham, Bothwell.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
THE Dunning-Kruger Effect is a research-proven phenomenon in which the people most ignorant on an issue often display the most confidence in their opinions on it.
Barry Campbell has claimed (The Examiner, November 10) that the world needn't worry about anthropogenic climate change because his intensive research into house histories from "times past and happenings in all states of Australia" has revealed that "the number of fatal bushfires in Tasmania occurred with astonishing regularity throughout earlier generations".
Barry seems to assume that this poorly expressed and barely relevant claim is enough to dismiss the lifelong research of thousands of dedicated climate scientists from around the world. Meantime his own expertise in the area is revealed by his simplistic, irrelevant assertion that "A famous example of climate cycles would be the Ice Age millions of years ago".
Barry's knowledge of the earth's climate history must come from computer-animated comedy films if he chooses to refer back to "the Ice Age millions of years ago". There have been at least five, and the last ended about 11,000 years ago. Barry is entitled to his own opinions, but not to his own facts, and that he also wants to broadcast them via the pages of a newspaper smack of Dunning-Kruger hubris.
Gary Bakker, Upper Rosevears.
Climate Change
BARRY Campbell is on target with his summation of climate reality vs eco-doomster fantasy (The Examiner, November 10). We live on a planet which spins, has an orbiting moon causing cyclical tides and the pair orbit about a star in the company of a set of other planets. The star exhibits cyclical behaviour in its phenomena which affect the planet. The planet manifests cyclical behaviours. There are major oscillation phenomena in the larger oceans such as the El Nino - La Nina pattern in the Pacific. But of course this can all be ignored by the heady fantasy world of the audio visual media in particular who put a zoom lens on weather events with hyperbolic voice over scattered with catastrophic, deadly, unprecedented, highest/largest/hottest/wettest word bombs. If they could confect the right narrative and generate the right level of angst, they would zoom in on ants then talk endlessly about the invasion of deadly spiders from Mars. Wait until the first manned mission crew return folks, you just never know. Why, because there is a buck in it.
M Seward, Port Fairy.
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