Morrison government is facing a challenging decision on submarines

Paul Kelly’s analysis of the submarine imbroglio (“A deep dive into the unknown”, 22/2) is insightful, and invites conclusions. First, to actually prohibit a domestic nuclear industry in legislation, regardless of public sentiment at the time, was shortsighted at best. Second, Australia now has dangerously limited options in the most expensive defence procurement in its history.

That Australia does not have a nuclear industry is bad enough. That the federal government has not had the courage and ability to initiate a debate on it demonstrates weak resolve in the face of today’s technical, industrial and defence world.

Peter M. Wargent, Mosman, NSW

The submarine project had many incompatible aims: boosting a former defence minister; boosting the Coalition’s election prospects in South Australia; creating extensive hi-tech defence industries in SA with no apparent basis for them; and getting a submarine fleet for our defence.

The latter aim should have been the sole objective. The first question which should have been asked was: where will the crews come from? Who wants to work in a submarine? My understanding at the time was that Australia had difficulty crewing four of its six submarines. If you can’t answer this question, you can’t plan on a fleet of 12.

The government should ask what will be more damaging: scrapping the plan now and starting again from scratch; or presiding over a disaster unfolding over the next 15-20 years?

Michael Cunningham, West End, Qld

Our duty to ourselves

It has always been a paradox that we do the humane thing for animals in pain but do not do the same for humans in pain (“The patient never flinches: death doctor”, 22/2).

In an accompanying article, David Williamson says it is “fairly hard line Christians” who oppose more “enlightened states” which have introduced voluntary assisted dying (“Death a choice pick as a final act”). That claim needs to be tested.

At the fountainhead of Western enlightened thought, Plato had the more stoic Socrates rejecting taking his own life, even when facing almost immediate execution on the noble grounds that autonomous human beings are placed like sentry guards on their own lives. So they should never voluntarily quit their duty — no matter what the fear or threat.

He then gives the clinching argument against taking one’s own life — that one’s final moments may yet also be one’s finest moments.

French philosopher Jean-Paul. Sartre also decried taking one’s own life as the ultimate act of human absurdity because it reduces the conscious autonomous subject to a lifeless unthinking object.

And to add to that angst, the body is now a nuisance, a nauseating object, a corpse, which is then left for others to dispose of — even in the most clinical of settings — let alone when the act of self-destruction occurs in other even more traumatic circumstances.

So, as a thoughtful and enlightened society, let us think again and more carefully.

James Foley, Bishop of Cairns, Qld

Calamities in China

China is alone and friendless and a global alliance of liberal-democratic countries dedicated to countering Xi Jinping’s expansionism would reveal its potentially destructive consequences (“Letting the Beijing bully know this is our neighbourhood”, 22/2).

Xi and the communists have flourished on a diet of nationalist propaganda and the easy money of the first phase of industrialisation. That phase is now at an end and the calamities that befall all Chinese dynasties in decline are mounting.

A united liberal-democratic alliance prepared to defend freedom would widen the fissures that are fracturing support for Xi’s regime.

Jim Wilson, Beaumont, SA