National gas crisis was predictable and preventable

Australia can’t avoid catastrophe if leaders such as Daniel Andrews persist in denying reasons for the gas crisis.

The Australian has been at the forefront on reporting on our energy crisis (“Gas price risking industry exodus”, 6/3). This crisis was both predictable and preventable, but there is absolutely no possible chance of avoiding catastrophe if our leaders such as Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews believe that it’s an “urban myth” that onshore gas exploration bans affect gas prices.

It is impossible to seek leadership or solutions to this crisis from politicians actively undermining the natural gas industry. Heavy industry shareholders, management, employees and their unions will have to fight for survival on their own.

Don McMillan, Paddington, Qld

Selective attitudes

I see the National Tertiary Education Union wants Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Greg Craven sanctioned for explaining why he continues to believe in George Pell’s innocence (“VC faces backlash over Pell comments”, 6/3).

Does the NTEU believe that jury verdicts are infallible, like the Pope? Or that people have no right to campaign to reverse a verdict if they believe there has been a miscarriage of justice? Or that academics can campaign only in favour of “progressive” characters?

I ask these questions as someone who is not Catholic, not religious and perhaps even borderline anti-religion. The adage, justice must not only be done but be seen to be done, cuts both ways.

Ramesh Thakur, O’Connor, ACT

Dialectics of oppression

Tanya Plibersek clearly indicates Labor’s priorities for tertiary education when she declares “as publicly funded organisations, Australians rightly expect universities to contribute to our social, cultural and economic development”. Accordingly, the first things to fix are, “raising standard of entry into teaching courses and addressing sexual assault and harassment on campus and in residential colleges”.

We need better teachers to better teach the social and cultural expectations of the virtue-signalling Left. After all, teachers need to be intelligent enough to be inducted into the latest version of Marxist ideology. The best targets for indoctrination are those who are half smart. At the moment, many trainee teachers are protected, by their lack of intelligence, from the complexities of intersectionality, diversity, equity, trans-generational disadvantage, victimisation and the dialectics of oppression.

Keith Russell, Mayfield West, NSW

Drone subs the cheapest

Greg Sheridan has pointed out the obvious and worrying deficiencies in this country’s defence, particularly in the matter of the submarine fiasco (“As threats mount, we must start taking defence seriously”, 2/3). Filling the gap between the time the Collins fleet becomes obsolete and the time the new subs are operational is of the utmost importance.

This is especially true of Australia’s northern littoral — our last line of defence — which if not totally impregnable, should be rendered so that an enemy attack would be too expensive to contemplate.

Paradoxically, the cheapest answer is likely to be the most effective. It is that of a fleet of small drone subs, scattered and undetectable throughout this littoral armed with missiles and torpedoes, and controlled from a few remote centres to be relayed through drone aircraft to even more undetectable surface receptors.

Such subs are already being developed. No need for crew, no loss of navy lives, no huge investment in vessels, the loss of any one of which would be a severe blow.

Australia has the time, the money and the capacity to do this and to possess such a sting in our tail as to deter any enemy.

John Stephen, Merimbula, NSW