Give credit to workers and volunteers

While we welcome Baw Baw Shire mayor Joe Gauci’s support of our efforts, to give credit where it's due there are others at council who deserve credit in relation to the McNeilly tree clean up (Gaz 14/2).

Firstly, it was deputy mayor Mikaela Power whom I first contacted and got the ball rolling for us and even put in an appearance on Australia Day, even though she had many other engagements.

Next there is Jessie Ablett who provided us with the trailer stocked with all necessary requirements for a sausage sizzle. Finally Gary Websdale and his maintenance team, who commenced the clean up with some larger items and are committed to finishing with remodelling barriers to access to the hedge and signage.

Finally, the ever exuberant Jo Wolswinkel, who organised everything and the locals who committed their time and community spirit to keep this gorgeous land mark clean. Sincere thanks Ann-Marie Nobelius, Drouin in our community, and has actively sought the support of local residents in recent months. The response has been terrific with approximately 250 new or renewed memberships of the hospital association since December and we continue to get new applications and renewals each week.

All membership applications must be approved by the board according to the hospital constitution, after the application and payment is received. Outstanding current applications for membership will be before the board at its meeting next week.

The board has had no intention of disparaging any member of our community who has applied for hospital membership and appreciatively acknowledges the contribution of Barbara Hill and others who have been long standing members of various local community groups.

Under the previous hospital constitution, members who had not paid by the due date lapsed and there was no process in place to advise applicants that they were no longer members. The new board has updated the constitution and will ensure in future that members are notified of membership renewals.

The NDHS board appreciates and thanks association members and the broader community for their continuing support.

Sean Dignum, president - NDHS board

We may have a pluralist society, but if we want to maintain, an “Australian set of values” that every earnest parent would want, the moral teaching suggested above must be understood by their children.

More moral teaching early will go some way to heal the disease; more law enforcement agents later, while currently necessary, will do little to alter the numbers of youths with no sense of contributing to or helping in a civilised society. These young men on the extreme edge of society are also a prime source of the perpetrators of domestic violence, and are those most easily persuaded into extreme terrorism.

Educating early is a preferred response to locking up late, if we are to overcome our current problems. Geoff Dethlefs, Drouin

Christine Webb (Gaz 7/2) is not alone. We also are appalled at the way the DEDJTR (Department of Economic Development, Jobs, Transport and Resources) washes its hands of action on weeds. We have ragwort, thistles and blackberries coming up, all over our previously clean farm, caused by blow in seed from landowners who “don't give a proverbial”.

As did others, we risked our health and “busted our guts” “doing the right thing” by the environment, our farm, our neighbours and our farm's future owners, spraying and pulling until our farm was clean.

DEDJTR is throwing away all this effort through inaction. It is rapidly becoming known as the “Dead Janitor.” It does little and is giving out the message that weeds do not matter.

Weeds affect native vegetation and the environment, can be poisonous to stock and people, reduce pasture availability and contaminate crops. The Australian Bureau of Statistics determined that the total cost of weeds to Australian farmers alone was $3.4 billion in 2006-7.

We have shown through our efforts that the cost of weed control can be reduced to virtually nothing. If all landowners controlled their weeds effectively this huge cost, which is passed onto the consumer, can be reduced.

This cannot happen without effective action on the part of DEDJTR. The cost of effective enforcement would be a drop in the ocean compared with realisable savings.

We don't allow our farm to contaminate neighbours' farms with seed. It's against the law and it is not right. Allowing seed to contaminate another's property is stealing, it is stealing money and, worse still, the time a conscientious and law abiding landowner needs to spend on weeds.

Like Christine Webb we would like some effective action from the DEDJTR.

A. Bullen, Tetoora Rd limit it, but to expose the absurdity of much green rhetoric purporting to prescribe means to that end.

It is not merely harmless nonsense: it misleads people into thinking there are simple solutions that could readily be implemented, were there mainstream political will to do so.

The Greens’ favoured scenario of replacing fossil fuel generation entirely with renewable energy within a couple of decades would be logistically impossible, and economic madness.

In 2011, Andrew Charlton, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s representative at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, wrote: ‘Few issues in Australian politics are as polarising as climate change. The right remains immutably sceptical in the face of mounting scientific evidence, ….

The left oscillates between Henny Penny predictions of imminent disaster and Pollyanna assertions about a renewable energy fix just over the horizon’.

Six years later, little has changed at the opinion poles, but fortunately there are signs that the real world in between is edging towards strategies that have some prospect of resolving the planet or progress dilemma, thereby avoiding climate catastrophe yet giving substance to the aspirations of the world’s poverty-stricken majority. John Hart, Warragul