Credit: Illustration: Andrew Dyson
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POLITICAL DIVIDE
I have been dismayed at the cruelty of the Gaza war. I feel strongly for the Palestinians’ plight and believe that Israel is committing genocide. I back the Palestinians on this. But I don’t agree with Fatima Payman’s actions to discredit the government in what looks like an attempt to oust it at the next election.
I hated living under the Coalition for the decade they were in power. It did little to contribute to progress Australia. Its ineptness and inertia was depressing. Labor has done more for our country and cared more for the community than the Coalition ever did during its leadership.
Australia offers everyone a right to voice their opinions, but to harness support among Muslim Australians to vote against Labor doesn’t enamour me to their cause. Australia is not responsible for calling on or insisting on a Palestinian state. I respect Payman’s passion for change, but if her actions as part of a coalition of Muslim groups results in reinstating the Coalition, she’ll lose the respect from other Australian communities.
This government is not here to be used as collateral damage in Payman’s stand against Israel’s actions in Gaza. Try to negotiate with respect, please.
Sally Chesna, Melbourne
Quest for diversity leads to silos and ghettoes
“Diversity” has become a sacred Western dogma. Senator Payman cited diversity as part of her defence for crossing the floor, saying there can be no diversity in personality and representation among Labor MPs without diversity of views and opinions. A truism of any human organisation. However, if every individual or group only adhered to, upheld and obeyed their own “views and opinions”, what then?
Senator Payman also said she is motivated by the desire for “freedom from violence, freedom from oppression and freedom of equality”. Who would argue with such goals? But is diversity the way to achieve them?
When the wellbeing of the whole is threatened by disparity between its parts; when diversity translates into silos or ghettoes – whether communities or political parties; when diversity becomes divisive, fuelled by conflict over ideology, culture and politics, overriding collective Australia’s interests, then dysfunction and hostility flourishes. Sadly, Australia’s uplifting, “We are one, but we are many” is at risk of becoming a mere platitude, veiling an increasingly divided nation.
Deborah Morrison, Malvern East
The Catholic DLP stymied the ALP for decades
A Muslim political grouping has indicated it will campaign against the Labor Party with the possible emergence of an official Muslim political party. The last primarily religiously-based party in Australia that also campaigned against Labor was the now diminished, and predominantly Catholic, Democratic Labor Party (DLP) led by the Catholic activist BJ Santamaria with support from the then Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne Dr Daniel Mannix. From 1955 until the mid-1980s, the DLP gave election preferences to the Coalition, keeping Labor out of office in a number of federal and state elections.
Malcolm McDonald, Burwood
Above, beyond the line
If a senator is permitted to serve their entire six-year term after leaving a party and taking on the mantle of “independent”, we must remove the “above the line” option from the Senate ballot paper.
The vast majority of Australians vote for members of a party to represent them in the Senate.
It cannot possibly be ethical to leave that party and stay on as an independent senator without referral to the population of the state or territory they represent. The least that should occur is that their Senate seat is included in the next half-Senate election.
Kristen Hurley, Seaholme
All party mansplainers
Julia Banks, Bridget Archer, Lidia Thorpe and Fatima Payman all hung out to dry by their parties and the media. If they were men, I wonder if the treatment would be different? Actually, I don’t “wonder”, I know it would be. No mansplaining, please.
Belinda Burke, Hawthorn
Dutton’s short memory
It’s a bit rich for the opposition to suggest that Anthony Albanese may have intimidated Senator Payman in the meeting he held with her last weekend.
Dutton must have forgotten that then Liberal leader Scott Morrison was accused of being heavy-handed in a meeting with Liberal MP Bridget Archer after she crossed the floor in 2021 to support an independent MP’s integrity commission bill.
Garry Meller, Bentleigh
Broad church
Peter Dutton cannot – without hypocrisy – object to a potential Muslim vote bloc. After all, the Liberal Party has boasted for years that it is a “broad church” – clearly a reference to Christian worship traditions.
Bronwen Bryant, St Kilda West
THE FORUM
State cuts hurt public
The Allan government will soon have to draw a line in the sand and be crystalline clear who it is governing for in Victoria.
Is it to please the CFMEU, and keep it on side with basically a job for life (vis a vis the SRL), or the needs of all Victorians who see so many things not properly financed or supervised?
Now, with barely an announcement, motor registration has gone up again. There are also higher penalties for traffic infringements as reported in The Age last week, whereas Queensland has reduced them, particularly on smaller cars, to encourage less pollution.
If the Allan government taxes the maximum out of the public and continues with this obduracy and “tunnelled” vision, it may find next election it is not the popular party that it once was.
Tony Davidson, Glen Waverley
Be upfront on cuts
While the cuts to the health system are very concerning, all state government departments, including front-line services, have suffered budget cuts. The media is full of stories of delays in service provision, such as the Coroners Court or VCAT.
It’s disappointing that the state government isn’t upfront about these cuts, and expects public servants to do more with less.
Rosa Wright, Coburg
Rail loop puzzle
Three suburban councils unable to obtain further information concerning the suburban rail loop (″Three councils allege being frozen out of planning for rail loop″, 4/7), echoes what the federal government is experiencing.
With more information required before further funding is considered by the federal government, the project becomes a greater puzzle by the day.
It is almost as if all the details are yet to be worked out, and the state government is simply stalling. Various local infrastructure requirements such as schools and recreational spaces appear set to be overlooked. Meanwhile, we have a health system suffering savage cuts, which has many asking whether this project should even go ahead at all.
Mathew Knight, Malvern East
Ratepayers’ revenge
Further to “The great state debt” (Letters, 5/7), the Allan government is demanding local councils pursue unsustainable population growth without the requisite hospitals, schools, libraries, parks and other infrastructure revitalisation, let alone SRL displacement and debt.
What if local councils refused to comply? Councils standing up for their residents and saying “enough” – a vote of no-confidence in the state government.
Let Labor sack our councils, and we can exact retribution at the federal and state elections.
James Richardson, Langwarrin
Landlord anxiety
Your article “Rental anxiety” (4/7) details the stress of ever-increasing rental accommodation in Melbourne.
As an owner of one rental property I received my first Land Tax Assessment from the Victoria government.
It was the minimum under the new assessment system of $925, or almost $20 per week. Greedy, rich landlord squeezing renters? No, greedy cash-strapped Victorian government squeezing investors.
Chris Link, Ocean Grove
Teacher abuse
After investigating a secondary college, WorkSafe found 80 per cent of the school’s staff were regularly physically attacked or abused by about 70 out of its 1200 students, and it recommended on-site psychiatric support for teachers. The education department is legally challenging that decision as it is expensive, and it doesn’t want to set a precedent.
Maybe the real precedent being set here is don’t teach in state schools.
Marianne Dalton, Balnarring
Drug testing
With the detection of a synthetic opioid in the bodies of four people found tragically deceased in Broadmeadows last week, the state government must reconsider a trial supervised injecting and overdose prevention facility in the city as recommended by Ken Lay. Australia is not immune from the devastation that these deadly opiates – at least 50 times more potent than heroin – are having in the northern hemisphere.
Judy Ryan, Abbotsford
Olympic challenge
Re the likelihood of boats carrying Olympic athletes on the Seine not having a toilet (“A wee problem with the opening ceremony?” 5/7).
Anyone who has been to Paris knows that the only way to find a toilet is to pop into a café and buy an expensive coffee. Perhaps if the boats all had a coffee machine on board, the problem would be solved.
Dave Barter, Hawthorn
Europe beckons
DFAT is once again “exercising a high degree of caution”. There are millions of Asian tourists in Europe. I was recently at the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland, and I would estimate 80 per cent of the people appeared to be Chinese or Indian, and none of them looked frightened.
Aidan Sudbury, East Malvern
Hell is a meeting
The profusion of modern-day work meetings risks being unproductive due to sabotage by a routine cast of misfits (“We need to get out of ‘meeting hell’. Here’s how”, 4/7). The talk-fester that meanders off-topic, the dogged dissenter unmoved in his fixity, the chair warmer whose stony silence epitomises the see nothing, hear nothing, and say nothing ethos to remain safe, secure and uncontroversial. These are but three archetypes that demoralise the forums I have attended.
Meetings, an entrenched workplace scourge, are not proven to measurably improve policy and employee morale. In my experience, face-to-face meetings divert hospital doctors from urgent patient care that cannot be delayed. Ten senior doctors slugging out it out for an hour in talkfests with mind-elsewhere colleagues glued to their phones could pay for a day’s doctor wage to look after patients.
The stressed senior doctor drawing the short straw of deputising for absent colleagues quarantined in a gabfest suffers as he alone tackles the long list of patients forced to wait. Meetings are costly, wasteful of staff time, and even harmful if the junior colleagues we supervise, or time-critical issues, are put on hold while meeting participants are not to be disturbed. Harm is done if pointless meetings divert us from the task at hand.
Joseph Ting, Carina, Qld
AND ANOTHER THING
Health cuts
Public health and hospital funding is way more important than a suburban rail link. Jacinta Allan, please give adequate funds to our hospitals. The rail link can wait.
Katriona Fahey, Alphington
Energy providers
My gas provider has notified me of a price ″variation″ commencing on August 1. It was, in fact, a notification of a price ″increase″. Anything to avoid telling the truth. Consumers are being treated like fools.
Michael Gamble, Belmont
What’s your preference? Cheap energy when it suits the supplier or certainty of energy when it suits you? Or a mixture, so all your eggs aren’t in the same basket?
Gordon Thurlow, Mooloolah Valley, Qld
Payman exit
When you sign up to play the game called politics you should follow the rules and strategies of your team. You don’t let down your teammates.
Michael Brinkman, Ventnor
The Labor caucus should have allowed Senator Payman a conscience vote as was allowed for abortion rights as neither has anything to do with the running of this country.
Ian Johnson, Brighton
So the ALP has not strayed too far from its roots, after all. The alleged treatment of Senator Payman bears all the hallmarks of union thuggery.
Dale Crisp, Brighton
Australia will recognise a Palestinian state. The moment the US does.
Ruben Buttigieg, Mount Martha
Well played, Usman Khawaja. Picked Dutton’s wrong ‘un early, stepped down the wicket and smacked it back over his head for six.
Nic Mesic, Glen iris
Furthermore
It is a sad fact that despite his ″diminished cognitive difficulties″ Biden would still make a better president than Trump.
Susan Munday, Bentleigh East
Can the Democrats pull off another four years of ‘Weekend at Bernie’s’?
Tony O’Brien, South Melbourne
In due course, Keir Starmer’s message to Europe’s resurgent far right will be along the lines of “We will fight you on the beaches”.
Bernd Rieve, Brighton
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