Thank you to our youth for sacrificing so much

Credit:Illustration: Jim Pavlidis

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COVID-19

Thank you to our youth for sacrificing so much

Even though COVID-19 is not “over”, now feels like a good time to promote a spirit of thanks-giving. Frontline workers have been there for us through outbreaks and lockdowns. Young people especially have made sacrifices to protect the wellbeing of their elders, including curtailing their education and social lives.

Young adulthood counts for so much. As we get older, the years blur together. But looking back (if we are lucky), our teens and twenties stand out like jewels on a string, each year distinct and momentous in shaping our lives and identities. Imagine losing two of those years (or longer) to pandemic restrictions.

Past a certain age, it is easy to be critical of the young. Instead, we could remember how they have put their lives on hold during the pandemic out of care for us. And we could try saying thanks.
Robyn Annear, Castlemaine

Workers have moved on and the CBD must too

Melbourne City councillor Roshena Campbell – “Why are we still working from home when the rest of Victoria is opening up?” (Opinion, 16/2) – is worried that “our state’s economic trajectory in the absence of a thriving centre is uncertain”.

What a city-centric perspective. With many people having moved to regional areas over the past two years, or others like myself working from home and regularly spending at local cafes and stores, our “economic trajectory” is perhaps more suburban and regional.

What would be more helpful from a councillor would be to creatively re-imagine a new future for the CBD (and the workplace) in the wake of the pandemic, rather than try to take us back two years to what work was like then.
Andrew Laird, Malvern

Many don’t miss commuting, offices and dirty streets

We are still working from home because we have realised that our time and lives are worth more than commuting for an hour-plus to and from the city, every day, on an unreliable train line or paying for overpriced parking, only to sit in crowded offices and walk along dirty footpaths having cigarette smoke blown in our faces.

Melbourne CBD is still Melbourne. It does not need office workers to survive. It needs innovation.
Kat Perez, Mordialloc

It’s time to let children learn at school, mask-free

Recently I asked my eight-year-old son how he was finding wearing a mask at school for hours each day. “It’s hell,” he replied. “It’s uncomfortable and it gets really hot and sweaty.“

So, why are we doing this to our kids given the vast majority of children have mild, or even zero, symptoms from Omicron? Of course, children who are in a vulnerable health situation can continue to wear them if advised. But please, after suffering through nearly a year of at-home learning, can we now give our kids back the normal childhood that we enjoyed. They have gone through enough.
John Anderson, Mount Martha

Harsh restrictions were imposed to save lives

I am staggered at Chris Uhlmann’s article – “Roar of the convoy” (Opinion, 16/2) – particularly the sentence, “If you don’t have a right to protest being locked in your home, robbed of employment, separated from your family, forbidden from travelling overseas, barred from returning to Australia and forced to take a vaccine to keep your job, then what does constitute a just cause?” Doesn’t he realise (obviously the protesters do not) that all of this was done to save lives?
Bob Morrow, Eltham

Managing the pandemic to protect the elderly

Clay Lucas says TLC Healthcare’s “11 aged care homes in Melbourne and Geelong remained COVID-19-free until November last year” (The Age, 14/2). I do hope that federal and state health ministers, and other aged care providers, sit down and have a chat with the managers at TLC Healthcare soon. They might get a few tips on how to manage COVID outbreaks while letting their residents live well.
Ann Johnstone, Black Rock

THE FORUM

The move from the city

Roshena Campbell may well ask why office workers are not returning to the CBD. The pandemic and working from home are the short-term culprits, and may have permanently changed the cosy (for the powers that be) arrangements for which everyone else had to make a contribution.
Commuting daily for up to two hours, paying $200 plus per month for travel on public transport, or fighting congestion on the freeways and paying a motza for parking uses a significant part of life and income for many.

The other question is the lack of revellers in the CBD. The threat to the John Curtin Hotel (The Age, 16/2), which hosts live music as well as its historic Labor connection, is indicative of the greed and lack of forethought by developers and decision makers.

Will we encourage the revellers or have more apartments? Greed, laissez-faire planning rules and lack of empathy are coming home to roost. Councillor Campbell may like to also ask why inner-suburban residents are leaving in droves to take up rural residence away from the major capitals.
John Marks, Werribee

The unions’ glory days

My memory of the John Curtin hotel on Thursday nights after the Trades Hall Council meeting had ended, was of ALP and union members talking policy in the front bar, often leading to full and frank discussions out the back. Happy days, comrades.
Brian Sanaghan, West Preston

Downfall of a prince

Re “Prince reaches deal with accuser” (The Age, 17/2). The former entitled, now unentitled, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor would have turned out better if he’d had a paper round as a kid, with a mug of Horlicks made by Mum on his return to the Palace. It is lucky for him he will not be sent to The Tower to rot like some of his ilk were in the past, but he might as well have been.
Margaret Skeen, Point Lonsdale

The high cost of the Games

Our Premier appears keen to spend taxpayers’ money on the 2026 Commonwealth Games (The Age, 17/2). As Juvenal the Roman poet said, the public needs bread and circuses – to take our minds off our massive budget deficit and the pandemic. And real world problems.

No one else wants to stage these Games so our champion, Daniel Andrews, has stepped into the breach. The Commonwealth is no longer relevant or significant in world politics. The Premier needs to come clean on how much taxpayers’ money these Games will cost. Is it another nail in the deficit.
Brett Osborn, Mornington

Winning a one-horse race

Isn’t it amazing that in the whole Commonwealth, only Dan Andrews’ state has the wisdom, pertinacity and financial wherewithal to recognise what a beneficial opportunity hosting the 2026 Games will be. We are blessed to be led by such brilliant politicians and economists.
Bill Anderson, Surrey Hills

A firm no to more growth

Dan Andrews says the 2026 Commonwealth Games will be “a massive boost to growth”. Growth is just what we desperately do not need – more people, more traffic, more waste, faster depletion of resources, faster climate change, more air and water pollution, more land clearing, fewer birds and insects. The list goes on.
Graham Patterson, Briar Hill

Rudeness? Bring it on

Your correspondent says, “I won’t be joining the (small) queue to get into a Karen’s Diner restaurant” (Letters, 17/2). Customers of these restaurants know what to expect. Customers also know that they give as good as they get. My daughter and I did when we visited Chicago’s Karen’s Diner in 2001. We waited for the staff to be rude to us, and they were. Being Aussies, we spoke back to them. It was fun. Unfortunately, we ran out of time for a return visit.
Anne Kruger, Rye

A more logical approach

Benjamin Preiss’s article on rural communities in Victoria’s west fighting to get a major electricity trunk line put safely underground (The Age, 16/2) begs the question as to why we are moving vast amounts of electricity over long distances in a fire-prone landscape. Surely the regulators should regulate power generation closer to where it is used.

It seems the bigger the mountain of equipment built to generate power, green or otherwise, the further it needs to be from its biggest consumers. Maybe a better spread of more localised power generation and the decentralisation of heavy power-use industries might avoid the mountain having to travel to Mohammad on very big overhead powerlines.
Adrian Lanigan, Heyfield

Preventing bushfires

Wednesday was the anniversary of the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires, so your article calling for underground power was very appropriate. Rural Australia needs protection from bushfires caused by overhead powerlines. Just imagine if successive governments had started to put all rural power underground, we would have prevented several bushfires over the years.
Jenni Reside, Bairnsdale

Bullies and blusterers…

The Prime Minister and, increasingly, the Treasurer, communicate in the Parliament at a bellow. Shouting at close range across a table does not convey power, mastery or leadership. Rather, such a tactic is the province of those who are losing an argument, with the volume cranked up in inverse proportion to meaningful content.

Leonardo da Vinci is quoted as believing that, “Where there is shouting, there is no true knowledge”. Why do the key government ministers seek to portray themselves as empty blusterers, bullies and losers?
Ian McKendry, Kew East

…endanger our country

Watching Question Time on Wednesday, I felt as though I had been transported to the early ’50s at the time of the Korean War.

I am not sure how ridiculous we look to the rest of the world, but this farcical tactic of claiming the leader of the opposition is a stooge for Communist China is not only pathetic, but dangerous.
Poking China in the eye for internal political advantage is at the least stupid and at the worst putting us at the pointy end of the attacks on China instigated by the United States.
Pete Steedman, Heidelberg

Oh, the embarrassment

The government’s mindless and foul desperation to retain power makes China the winner and Australia the loser. Does the Prime Minister and his ministers not understand irony?
Pam Garton, Alfredton

Complexity of forgiveness

Scott Morrison would do well to ponder on what might elicit forgiveness (The Age, 15/2). First the apology, inextricably linked, needs to contain four elements: acknowledgement of offence; explanation (not excuse); evidence of genuine remorse, shame and humility; lastly, reparation either material and/or symbolic. The first two might be evident but the last two not so much. Forgiveness is hard but impossible while some elements of the apology are absent.
Carol Fountain, Mentone

An unnecessary bill

The bill allowing the deportation of people who are guilty of minor criminal offences – unnecessary because the Immigration Minister already has discretionary powers – is blatant dog whistling with the election in mind. Why the hell did the ALP not oppose it in the House of Representatives?
Mirna Cicioni, Brunswick East

Well, what a coincidence

I had been patiently waiting for a month for an “immediate” refund from Ticketek after a show we had bought tickets for was cancelled in mid-January. Imagine my surprise when the funds showed up in my account on Tuesday night, a couple of hours after A Current Affair did a story about Ticketek’s slow processing of refunds.
Scott McIntyre, Elsternwick

Support the Afghans

According to a recent interview on Phillip Adams’ program (ABC Radio), children are starving to death in Afghanistan. Girls as young as three months are being sold to buy food. Ninety per cent of the population have little or no food, with some reduced to eating grass. After 20 years, our country walked away and in doing so it has, we all have, deserted the people, the children, the babies of Afghanistan. Whatever we may think of the Taliban, we cannot in all conscience let this go on.
Vicki Fairfax, Warrandyte

Our shameful treatment

It is reassuring that Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo wants a guarantee there will be no “backdoor” for refugees resettled in New Zealand to come back to Australia. He need not worry.

Having escaped their shameful mistreatment here, who would wish to return? All have had plenty of time to reflect on the gap between “Australian values”, so piously repeated by our politicians, and their experience in the multicultural land of the fair go. And if a large majority of Australians are not deeply ashamed of our passivity, then it is time to honestly reassess what it means to be Australian.
Norman Huon, Port Melbourne

Ukraine’s right to decide

It does not make sense for Russia to complain about Ukraine becoming part of NATO, and therefore a threat, when there are already three NATO countries (Norway, Latvia and Estonia) on its border. Furthermore, if Russia invades Ukraine, it will result in an additional country being on its border, ie Poland. Surely it is simpler to let Ukraine decide whether it wants to be part of NATO. There is no need for war.
Dennis Crowley, Brighton

Art, politics and grammar

Just when I thought Cathy Wilcox could not get any better, up pops another brilliant cartoon (this time on Putin) and the use of the subjunctive mood (Letters, 16/2). It made my day.
Helen Hart, Berwick

AND ANOTHER THING

Credit:IllustrationL Matt Golding

Politics

It’s a miracle. ScoMo’s prayers are answered with Chinese and Russian communists under his bed.
Pete Wilkinson, Shoreham

Reds under the beds worked for Menzies but it won’t work now.
Keri Chater, Williamstown

Read the Australia-China Free Trade Agreement, signed by the Abbott government, to see who wants to be in bed with China.
Marilyn Hoban, Mornington

Question time: two gangs in suits, with no intention of agreeing on anything. And this is the rabble running the country.
Ron Mather, Melbourne

Does Jenny think Scott has good manners when he turns his back on opposition speakers and plays with his phone?
Kay Browne, Williamstown

Ukraine needs to ask Tony Abbott to shirtfront Putin.
Bob Whiteside, North Warrandyte

After Tame and Higgins, another Australian I’m in awe of: Simon Holmes a Court. We need people like him running this country
Judy Hosfal, Malvern East

If the AUP changed its name to the Claytons United Party, it might get some sympathetic traction.
Tom Blackburn, Croydon

The equity problem between private and state schools would be solved if MPs were forced to educate their children at government schools.
Ross Hudson, Mount Martha

Would-be politicians should have to pass a character test.
Rod Matthews, Fairfield

Furthermore

Her Majesty should give Andrew a proper job that involves a hard day’s work like other people.
Bill Mathew, Parkville

E-scooters: silent, dangerous and ending up as detritus on suburban streets.
Katriona Fahey, Alphington

Novak’s skill with a brush doesn’t match his skill with a racquet, considering the corner he’s painted himself into.
Barbara Abell, Essendon

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