Non disclosure of information
AFTER a good COVID-19 response things are souring pretty quickly for Premier Peter Gutwein as he hangs onto information that should be released.
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Unfortunately, this government is getting pretty good at this and they need to be called out for it.
Firstly, there is the $26 million small business hardship grant where he refuses to release details of the recipients despite it being mentioned in the approvals process.
Secondly, my Hydro RTI request for information on the BassLink failure has not been released. On October 26 I was informed this matter has been open for 1348 days. Just sitting obviously?
Thirdly, it was interesting to hear Chief Justice Alan Blow's comments on November 9 in relation to TT Line and the 16 polo pony deaths.
My RTI request for the Spirits' vehicle deck air quality reports has been open for 475 days.
Yes they have got them but they just won't release them. And I will say it again. I was a former city branch vice president of the Tasmanian Young Liberals.
Imagine how much longer if I wasn't?
Clive Stott, Grindelwald.
Reconciliation a one way street
COULD the Aboriginal Lands Council please explain to us what it intends to do with these.
Will they be accessible by the general public or are they to be locked away as has happened with other heritage items?
Tasmanian ancient relics like this offer an opportunity for communication between the public and the Aboriginal community, something which would be a positive move for reconciliation.
However the current attitude appears to be non cooperative. Any public land handed back for TALC control is similarly not used as a vehicle to share knowledge and communicate with the rest of us as any attempt at public access is met with deep hostility.
Sadly it seems reconciliation is a one way street where the TAC does not consider it is obligated to do anything to help the process.
John Coulson, Dilston.
Society on brink of collapse
I have recently watched a documentary about the Mayans, a civilisation that sprang up in central America.
They were very advanced, building huge cities with magnificent buildings.
They developed ways to turn unproductive jungle into farmland, and had astronomy done to a fine art.
But surprisingly to our way of thinking, they also practised human sacrifice.
We think that our modern civilisation is beyond that kind of thing.
But despite our great advances in technology that should have made it possible to fix all our problems.
We still have wars, poverty and all sorts of inequality.
I wonder if there will come a time when we get all our problems sorted out.
Or will there be a time in the dim distant future when there will be archaeologists scratching their heads and wondering how such a highly developed civilisation could have collapsed just like the Mayans.
Malcolm McCulloch, Pipers River.
A commitment to earth's future
SENATOR Eric Abetz can be quite plausible in refuting climate change. He does this by listing a number of extreme claims to bring all such claims that our climate is changing into question.
There is one thing we have all learned over the years and that is it is always possible to have more extreme weather events, there will always be hotter, wetter, colder, windier or whatever days to come. That is the nature of weather. It is only when we look at longer term trends that we can discern significant changes.
And these tell us the world is getting hotter, the oceans level is rising, glaciers are melting. However, we are also becoming more aware of this and importantly our ability to reverse trends.
We can reduce our carbon emissions, our wasteful use of finite resources and our non-green footprint on the environment. It is all part of our commitment to our earth's future.
Dick James, Launceston.
Credibility of evidence
M FYFE (The Examiner, November 11) offers his take on global warming/climate change citing: "the observations are of a rapid and persistently rising global temperature". Well unfortunately the observations are so heavily post processed from data collected from an instrument set never originally intended for other than local temperature measurement.
They are not reliable to the level of accuracy to determine a truly accurate global mean temperature let alone a realistic trend estimate. CO2 might have increased and increased its greenhouse effect, but the amount of bitumen, concrete and steel on the planet surface not to mention the number of trees reduced in certain areas, for example Australia is far greater.
Any perceived warming might well be down to other causes. In addition, modern sensors can record local short term temperature spikes as the daily maximum whereas the older thermometers were always showing a moving average and only recorded relatively intermittently. Sea surface temperatures are now done by a fit for purpose, world wide set of buoys by a century ago were manually taken, ad hoc from ships at sea. A trend would far more likely be simply due to the change in measurement system.
Finally the other modern, fit for purpose global temperature systems, two satellite based and four balloon based sets show much lower temperature trends than the other systems let alone the models. This is not about the science, it is about the credibility of the particular evidence and just what definitive conclusions can be drawn.
M Seward, Port Fairy.
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