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THE ABC
No one should have to endure harassment
Reading Stan Grant’s statement about why he is leaving the ABC, and then Osman Faruqi’s article (Sunday Age, 21/5), makes me despair. Why do so many white Australians and prominent leaders not speak out against this hideous attitude to Indigenous and other non-white people?
No one should be treated without respect. Stan Grant is an eminent, experienced journalist and writer. We need to mount a continuing revolution decrying such despicable behaviour. But we should stand up for all non-white members of our society, not only the high achievers. Everyone must be able to live their lives free from any harassment. I am ashamed of my fellow white Australians, and disappointed in the ABC.
Elizabeth Sprigg, Glen Iris
We need to stand up against abuse and racism
Dear Stan, I am so sorry. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men (people) to do nothing. (John Stuart Mill 1867). I for one, did nothing or certainly not enough. You should not have had to bear the hate and invective alone. I hope you will not stay away too long. You’re needed.
Karen Morris, Newport
The steady decline of our national broadcaster
Thank you, Stuart Littlemore and David Salter, for your beautifully expressed piece – “Partiality aside, ABC’s woes start with grammar” (Comment, 22/5) – with which I wholeheartedly agree. It is reassuring to know I am not alone in my dismay regarding the decline in the standard of journalism of our national broadcaster.
Hilary Hoevenaars, Newtown
Too many have forgotten obligation to be objective
Stuart Littlemore and David Salter’s main point is spot on. Broadcast staff at the ABC cannot express private opinions via its digital outlets. For a public broadcaster, doing so is almost bound to create public conflicts of opinion, which, of course, are the stock in trade of the commercial media. Witness the likes of the US’s Tucker Carlson and his ilk, where the more artificially whipped-up controversy, the better. With this issue, the ABC seems to have forgotten it is a public broadcaster, not a commercial one.
Tony Adami, Caulfield
Why I lost my ‘luv’ for ABC Melbourne
Thank you, thank you, Stuart Littlemore and David Salter, for your fine article. I have deserted ABC Melbourne on such grounds. The last straw was the presenter using the phrase “luv ya guts” when finishing her conversation with a caller. Enough.
Margaret Haggett, Cheltenham
Back to the future is the wrong way to go
Incredibly, Stuart Littlemore and David Salter write a piece which suggests that ABC journalists should inform their audience in the same fashion as in 1945. Contemporary broadcast media audiences, for better or worse, are more likely to stay tuned to a “flashier” product delivered by a range of modern-day presenters.
Andrew Smith, Leongatha
A little less conversation, a little more music, please
I used to listen with pleasure to ABC Classic over breakfast. Now my finger hovers over the mute button to cut out the trivia and the chit chat with which the morning program is filled. Classical music encompasses a huge range of music from Hildegard von Bingham to Elena Kats-Chernin and quite a few excellent males in between.
Classical music is not film music, game music or pop music. Especially, it does not include the endless “talk show” repartee between presenters. “Life is better with music,” ABC Classic keeps telling us. So, let’s have more classical music and less talking.
Nicholas Low, Cape Paterson
THE FORUM
Protect the vulnerable
The recent reports of incidents in aged care facilities involving the Tasering and handcuffing by police of individuals living with dementia, in response to their challenging behaviours, are dumbfounding. Inhumane and horrifying as interventions, such actions further highlight the continuing shortcomings of our aged care systems, including the inadequacy of training of many carers and insufficient specialised support.
Older age is hard enough, advanced dementia is gruelling enough, without the fear of corporal punishment. The management of troublesome behaviours in aged care facilities should come from well-trained residential staff with the assistance of increased expert services, including psychogeriatricians and mental health professionals, not from law enforcement officers.
Jane Sullivan, Kew East
True cost of the service
Re “Tougher laws for buy now, pay later” (The Age, 22/5). Many users think that, unlike credit and debit cards, the transactions are cost-free, provided they pay on time. Buy now, pay later is not cost-free. Providers typically charge merchants 2 to 8per cent of each transaction, often much more than with debit and credit cards.
Moreover, providers can and do prevent the merchant passing the cost to the customer as a surcharge on the purchase. The cost to merchants of providing buy now, pay later is built into retail prices and paid by all of us, applying upward pressure on inflation. I hope the new regulations ensure that merchants are not prevented from charging buy now, pay later users the true cost of the service.
Ian Black, Essendon
Entrenched in poverty
The government’s decision to regulate the buy now, pay later industry is a positive move. However, it is counter-intuitive that Labor does not appear willing to ask why this form of credit is so popular. It is about poverty, and lack of options. It is not necessarily, as Assistant Treasurer Stephen Jones said on Radio National, about buying “make-up or jeans”, in a statement designed to throw the blame onto young people.
Could it be that people use buy now, pay later services to buy food, or clothes for their children because support payments for those in need are way too low and entrench poverty? Anthony Albanese and his Labor colleagues might consider how history will see their failure to properly support people and help them out of poverty. Do they want the nation to remember that Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg were, temporarily, able to offer liveable payments and they did not?
Lindee Conway, West Footscray
Save horticulture courses
Re the proposed closure of Swinburne’s horticulture courses at Wantirna (The Age, 22/5), following the earlier closure of its Prahran campus. This is a betrayal of the university’s founding vision as offering articulated pathways from TAFE to doctoral degrees and also of its more recent pledge to apply the proceeds from the sale of its Prahran campus to TAFE courses at its other campuses.
If Swinburne were serious about its strategic priorities, it would close its business and law faculty given the oversupply of such faculties in Victoria. Its quite recently and needlessly established law school, for example, emulated the structure and approaches of the Deakin law school, whose Burwood campus is only some 10kilometres from Swinburne.
Many law courses are, in any case, now taught substantially by distance education, suggesting a need for far fewer stand-alone schools. Practical horticultural courses, by contrast, remain stubbornly “hands on”.
John Carmichael, Hawthorn
Following your passions
“Re High ATAR, but I chose to do a trade” (Comment, 18/5) by Ashley Beeby. What a refreshing reflection on the intersection of passion, career choice and life satisfaction. Too often academically high-achieving students are cajoled down a particular pathway based on family and societal expectations, at times one that is not necessarily suited to their interests or aptitudes.
I can identify friends and colleagues in the listed professions – doctor, lawyer, engineer – who are miserable. To foster a society that is fulfilled professionally and personally, we must uncouple earning capacity and financial security from ATAR scores and university degrees.
Katarina Arandjelovic, Brunswick
Such dangerous praise
And the US president said to our man, “You guys are punching above your weight” – “Global allies ‘welcome’ PM’s plan to visit China” (The Age, 22/5). And I recall another president describing another prime minister as “a man of steel”. And our man went weak at the knees and in the head, and took us into the Middle Eastern maelstrom.
Peter Crisp, Marlo
We must seek true peace
When was the last time a war ended by supplying more weapons? US President Joe Biden’s announcement of supporting Ukraine with F-16 fighter jets will pour petrol on fire and spread the war even more. As an Ahmadi Muslim, I pray that our leaders come to their senses, let go of their egos and find a way to establish true peace or we might lose everything.
Foad Munir, Newstead, Qld
Where funding should go
It is naive to conclude that the increase in National Disability Insurance Scheme recipients is mainly due to an increase in autism diagnoses (The Age, 20/5).
As a kindergarten teacher, I am now not able to refer a child to more than one allied health service. A child who needs support for speech and occupational therapy for instance, must now be referred to the NDIS instead. Funding must be channelled into paediatric allied health services, not the NDIS. Early intervention through the public health system will provide the best outcome for our children.
Marisa Scerri, Greenvale
Everyone’s right to a home
Back in the 1960s, my parents were offered a government-built home to either buy or rent. They chose the buy option. Repayments were modest. If they had chosen to rent, their payments would have been capped according to their ability to pay. Governments must build and maintain all the homes that are needed.
Allan Patterson, Green Valley, NSW
A very disordered party
Greg Mirabella, state Liberal president, has identified three existential problem areas which he believes are confronting the party (The Age, 23/5). This is a pretty sensible and obvious summation for all who have been listening to the ongoing membership squabbles.
I then read, with disbelief, that the new Liberal state director, Stuart Smith, told members at the party’s state council meeting that now was the time to focus on federal Labor’s inability to control inflation and scrutinise budget blowouts. As important as it is to hold federal Labor to account, this is the role of Peter Dutton and his colleagues.
There is more than enough holding-to-account business to be directed at the Andrews government.
More importantly, though, the Victorian Liberals need to get their own house in order to stop the “cultural cancer” and “demographic time bomb” destroying their credibility.
Jennifer Quigley, Balwyn
Celebrate quiet achievers
Mark Morrison, my husband and I would like to join your support group that “includes others who share the same fate of not having watched The White Lotus or Killing Eve” (Letters, 19/5. We can bring along our DVDs of Detectorists, the best thing ever shown on television but somehow left out of the hype.
Vivienne Bond, Warburton
The art and the fun …
What a cracker. Paul Dyer (Comment, 20/5) brings the sub-editor and the art of headline writing out of the shadows in light of the Walkleys dropping the headline category from its awards.
As a journalist of the old (hot metal) school, I recall an ace sub-editor in Fleet Street who succumbed to the occupational hazard of too much whisky and too many cigarettes.
At his funeral, his eulogy comprised his best headlines, including one on a story about the US Postal Service honouring actor Humphrey Bogart with a stamp – “Here’s licking at you, kid”.
Don Knowler, Hobart, Tas
… and the cheekiness …
Vale Walkley Awards for headlines. When my late husband worked for the now defunct Truth, office lore had it that one of its best-ever headings was: “Marriage wreck for Soldier Zeck, wife plays heck with Upper Deck”. And this in The Age with a photo of a snake stuck in a drink can: “Snake slakes thirst, dies for drink”.
Jane Ross, San Remo
… of brilliant headlines
Paul Dyer laments the demise of the Walkley Award for best headline, citing some fine examples, but he omits my nomination for best ever, from The Australian Financial Review 20years ago: “Bouncing cheques plague Prague”.
Paul O’Brien, Fitzroy North
Our right to choose
With autumn turning into winter, my wife and I are beginning to worry about the prospect of an undignified death where mental incapacity deprives us of the legal agency to choose the ending. More than gradual decline, we fear the vegetative state from sudden traumatic brain injury.
Therefore, we have a pact that we will not allow the other’s undignified vegetative existence. We trust each other’s judgment on the if and when, and will find a way. There can come a point when a higher law must override those made by politicians.
Ralph Bohmer, St Kilda
The path to victory
If you want the Indigenous Voice to parliament to pass, simply vote Yes in the referendum.
James Lane, Hampton East
AND ANOTHER THING
Credit: Illustration: Matt Golding
Politics
There should be a criminal investigation into PwC and it should be banned from all government consultancies. Its actions robbed us of much-needed tax dollars.
Tony Danino, Wheelers Hill
Nick Bryant (20/5), the bedrock truism in Australian politics is that opposition parties aren’t voted into power, governments are turfed out.
Patrick Alilovic, Pascoe Vale South
It would seem the Five Eyes have more courage than the Quad.
Russell Brims, Bentleigh East
Any government is only as effective as its opposition. As a Labor supporter, I urge Liberals to support Pesutto in the interest of good government.
Roger Christiansz, Wheelers Hill
How magnanimous of Beijing to lift a trade ban on $600million worth of our imports. What’s the catch?
Helena Kilingerova, Vermont
Indigenous issues
Sir Doug Nicholls round. Carlton v Collingwood. Channel Seven had an all-male, all-white commentary team. Oh the diversity.
Katherine Dretzke, Chewton
I was super-impressed by Stan Grant during the ABC’s coronation coverage. This is weird, but if we must have a monarchy, he’d make an outstanding GG.
Monty Arnhold, Port Melbourne
The Yes campaign can recover and succeed only if Hanson takes up front and centre for the No vote.
Benedict Clark, Ryanston
Furthermore
To paraphrase tennis player Vitas Gerulaitis, nobody beats the Bombers more than 13 times in a row.
Lou Novak, Rosanna
George Cochrane (22/5), thanks for all your unbiased financial advice over the years. Enjoy your retirement as I am enjoying mine.
Mick Beeck, Eastwood
Well done to the team who worked hard to have the new Union railway station in Mont Albert open yesterday. I was very pleased to be back on the train.
Kate McCaig, Surrey Hills
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