The first petition with 800-plus signatures was dismissed by council on a technicality, the second with 1000 signatures that even the autocratic general manager had to grudgingly accept.

The success of the meeting was remarkable in that somewhere between a reported 200-300 people turned up to the unheated facility, on a cold, rainy night.

This was despite the council publishing two erroneous, confusing, non-compliant notices in the newspaper, and only publicly advertising the event on their website.

The meeting was dictated by council to be held in the early evening on a week night in Deloraine to make attendance difficult for a proportion of valley residents.

The meeting, supposedly between residents and the council, eventuated as an address from the prison project manager, six speakers for and against the proposal, but with the councillors gagged yet again by the autocratic general manager, probably because at least one councillor is implicated in applying for the prison to be built here (December 12, 2017 and September 26, 2018).

The mayor eventually accepted that it was probably a mistake not to have surveyed the people before applying for the prison.

The overwhelming message, clearly given and grudgingly received at the meeting was that the council caused this mess.

It is up to the council to get us out of it.

I'M SAD to say this, but the road conditions in Tasmania are caused by the 1990s decision of the government to divest itself of its looming superannuation crisis.

In doing so it stopped building roads itself and put it in the hands of private enterprise.

If this wasn't bad enough they have since put the quality control for road construction and repairs into the hands of private entities many of whom work for the contractors doing the work.

This has led to a mind set of low quality construction, which in turn leads to massive numbers of repairs needing to be carried out thereby keeping the contractors in a never ending work cycle.

The expense of having all road construction carried out and supervised by the old DMR led to a slower, but definitely more methodical, higher quality of construction that we are not seeing now.

Sometimes older is better.

WITH respect, Launceston has some wonderful colonial-built buildings - our history and heritage. Do we not rely on this aspect of our city for tourism?

How is it that the owners of some of these amazing buildings are permitted to allow them to disintegrate and fall into such visible disrepair as to cause repair to become so expensive?

It will inevitably become the burden of the ratepayer, when these owners sell or move on. It truly is a disgrace, where is the respect?

WHAT shambles the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. No country ever expected the Taliban to gain control so rapidly. Why did the Afghanistan Army give up so easily?

The American troops only amounted to approximately 20,000 and the Afghan Army approximately over 150,000, but they abandoned the City of Kabul without any resistance after the Americans withdrew.

Part of our and Americans involvement was over the destruction of the Towers of 20/11 and the terrorist cells trained there. And the retaliation was justified. Can you trust the Taliban? I think not.

They are an evil, fanatical, draconian, religious Muslim group, who believe it is OK to marry 12 year-old girls and treat women so poorly, plus their totally immoral terrorist activities.

Anyone who un-ashamedly kills innocent men, women and children in the name of God is barbaric. It is a complex situation, should we be there, I truly don't know. Is it better to fight the Taliban in their country and not ours?

But without question we should assist the Afghans who help us, and are now faced with death and torture in the hands of this ruthless fanatics. May we all be blessed with the right answers.

IT is not unusual for people such as Gordon Thurlow (The Examiner, August 18) to accuse the ABC of left-wing bias without any supporting evidence to back such a claim.

As a regular viewer, listener, I am at a loss as to how reporting of the news and human interest stories are biased.

Programs such as Insiders, Q&A and The Drum, for example have a wide representation of panellists.

The real problem, of course, is defining which is left wing. As a prime example, since when has concern about climate change been a "left-wing issue"?

Its mainstream as also are issues related to human rights, refugees, republic to name a few.

Too many right wingers, any opinion not to their liking must be automatically left wing. I look forward to being provide with examples of ABC bias.