Playing the good Samaritan in Syria is a big gamble

News of the Albanese government’s plan to return the women who left Australia as wilful teenagers to join terrorist armies in Syria along with their children is confronting for all Australians (“ASIO plan to return IS families”, 3/10). The proposed reculturation and rehabilitation of these families is a service never offered to returning troops who gave great sacrifices to serve our country. These women grew up in freedom with education and privileges not available in many other countries, flung it in our collective face and now want rescue. The children never deserved an entry into life such as they received.

Playing the good Samaritan comes with many complications and cannot guarantee a 100 per cent success rate in a very long-term commitment. They will be high-risk experiments at great and continuing cost to all taxpaying Australians. What is the gauge of success? One, some or all becoming independent, creative contributors to the Australian community? What is the gauge of failure? Further damage to them or further criminal damage or death to Australians who have hosted their recuperation?

Gamble, investment or duty? Shades of the prodigal son arise.

Rosemary McGrath, Dulwich, SA

Reckless on energy

Further to your editorial “Less gas and coal a recipe for high costs for everyone” (1-2/10), when the history of 21st-century Australia is written, the single largest government-induced calamity will be energy policy. During the past 20 years, federal and state energy ministers and their opposition counterparts of every political hue have wantonly destroyed our energy systems with their Jacobin attacks on coal and gas followed by their ignorant rejection of nuclear. Cheap and reliable energy is fundamental to modern life – as access to energy is lost, every major achievement of civilisation, from shelter and abundant food to healthcare and technological innovation, becomes increasingly scarce. In Germany, where the political class wilfully destroyed both hydrocarbon and nuclear facilities, businesses are collapsing, heating of buildings is restricted and street lighting turned off. In scenes reminiscent of 1945, people are collecting wood to heat their homes.

In Britain, the government has been forced to cap residential energy bills at £2500 a year and subsidise limited business usage for the next two years at an eye-watering cost of £150bn ($260bn); while overturning limitations on oil and gas exploration. Yet our political class remains hellbent on its “net zero” trajectories, with reckless indifference to the costs and consequences, condemning all but the elites to poverty, illness and misery.

Stephen Sasse, Glebe, NSW

Stand up to despots

I feel duty-bound to take issue with David Karonidis (Letters, 3/10) about how to end the war in Ukraine. His Chamberlain-esque solution basically means throwing Ukraine and Ukrainians under the Putin bus to save Vladimir Putin’s “face”. This is very personal. My father was a Ukrainian Jew who fought in Europe with the Czech 1st infantry brigade. While he was doing this his parents (my grandparents), uncles, aunts, siblings and cousins were being rounded up and murdered in Auschwitz. Living in Prague post-war, my father and English mother had to flee the country (to England) to escape the communists.

If the free world does not stand up to this despotism, Putin and the like will take this as a sign to further their dangerous adventurism. No one wants any kind of war, especially nuclear, but allowing Putin to get away, literally, with murder is not a solution.

Dr Simon Marston, Eltham, Vic

Wilting Greens

In light of “Bandt unmasked” (3/10), 40 years ago Bob Brown’s leadership inspired me to join the Wilderness Society and the Australian Conservation Foundation. In the years after I followed his leadership of the Greens and while it got a bit wobbly at the end, fellow Earthlings, I never doubted his integrity or genuine humanity. But what happened more recently to that shared vision and party? Sadly, it became a share-house of fellow travellers. In one room old communists lamenting their failed ideology and in another hyphenated elites decrying a lack of integrity in government on the one hand while up to the armpit in the public purse of privilege with the other.

The Greens have now mutated into The Gestures. Action, a shared commitment to consultation or constructive dialogue, has given way to media-grabbing gestures, tokenism or symbols, from graffiti-gowned clowns to fist-pumping poseurs. And where have their recent leaders been in this? When they should have censured the worst of the behaviours, instead they ignored, denied and even modelled it.

This is not a call for change or a cry for renewal. It’s too late for that. It’s not even a lament. You can’t lament something you no longer respect. No, it’s a simple obituary.

Trevor Gerdsen, Rathmines, NSW