Older transmission lines need urgent scrutiny

I have looked, in a state of some bewilderment, at photos of collapsed electricity transmission towers that apparently succumbed to winds generated by storms in Victoria, with the collapses triggering mass blackouts in that state (“Grid fail: 500,000 homes in the dark”, 14/2).

I am surprised that I can find no commentary anywhere that questions how and why this occurred.

Having spent much of my life in charge of the construction of large structures, including steel structures, and seen what goes into the design and then into the quality assurance checking of those structures during construction, I cannot understand how the towers in Victoria could fail simply because they were subjected to strong winds (as I understand was the case, from available information).

There are only limited reasons why these structures would fail. The first is that the structural design was based on loads on the structure, including wind loads plus safety factors, that were less than those loads experienced in service.

I cannot really conceive that this would be the case for structures that form a part of an essential service to the community where the designers would look to ensure the structures did not fail under any foreseeable loads that might be imposed, even in low likelihood circumstances.

Another and much more plausible reason would be the result of a lack of maintenance on these structures, with years of corrosion leading to failure at points where steel members of the structure are connected. A maintenance regime ought to have been in place to ensure this did not occur, but was it?

If indeed it was not, then the entire network of older transmission lines across the country could well be in danger of similar collapse.

Obviously such a situation should be addressed immediately by a rigid inspection of all of these structures.

Dave Anderson, Jubilee Pocket, Qld

Fatal flaws of leaders

Janet Albrechtsen doesn’t miss in summing up the third term of the Coalition government and its leader in particular (“Morrison’s failure was his lack of conviction”, 14/2). She correctly credits him with winning the 2019 “miracle” election.

Morrison will have a place in the hearts and minds of the Liberal Party faithful in perpetuity for that feat in the way that Paul Keating has with Labor Party faithful for salvaging the 1993 election.

Both leaders disappointed in the highest office but it should be noted that both came to the job at the end of the political cycle.

In any event, as Albrechtsen notes, Morrison too often walked both sides of the street. He knew his government was on borrowed time and tried to save it by appeasing the premiers and all manner of minority groups. It proved a fatal strategy.

The courage of conviction has eluded prime ministers of both stripes. Bob Hawke and John Howard are the exemplars. Sadly, the nation is in the midst of a prolonged drought.

Kim Keogh, Claremont, WA

A not-so-super system

While I’m sceptical that negative gearing will ever be reformed in my lifetime, we should also take a look at the superannuation system in Australia.

It began as a perfectly sensible way of encouraging working people, over a lifetime of employment, to pay for their own retirement, thus taking a load off the taxpayer. Across the decades it has been allowed to evolve into a system with two very undesirable qualities. First, it has allowed people from the big end of town to use it as a tax avoidance mechanism to accumulate sums well in excess of what they could ever spend in retirement and pass on the unspent millions of taxpayer-subsidised dollars to their heirs and successors.

And second, it has allowed the Labor Party’s paymasters, the union movement, to get their unqualified hands on the levers that direct the money flow. Thus we see all manner of projects being financed in the interests of Labor and-or the unions rather than the funds’ members, and many of these projects are leftist, woke or green.

These developments were unplanned and unforeseen. Or were they?

K. MacDermott, Binalong, NSW

Wealth trumps all

It’s apparent that the main and sometimes the only qualification to be the president of the United States of America is money – heaps of it.

If you’re just an ordinary person like many of our past prime ministers and our present one who grew up in social housing, forget it. In the US, there must be thousands who under our system would be ideal candidates but lack the money and perhaps are also unwilling to go through campaign razzmatazz.

If our electoral system were similar to that in the US, Clive Palmer would be a shoo-in.

Margaret Brabrook, Toowoomba, Qld