PM is the master of the art of mass distraction

This leads him to lash out with what he knows will be distracting statements to deflect media and, these days, social media attention from what would otherwise be more strongly recognised as yet another abject failure by his government and himself.

The almost casual mention of Afghan "boat people" and "people smugglers" this week is yet another neat example.

The failure, over the past several months, of classic intelligence, diplomacy and military planning has led to him having to admit failure of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

Our foreign policy, or the almost complete lack of it, over the Morrison years of power will be dissected and discussed for years to come.

In the meantime we are left to consider why our prime minister appears to be so frightened by the strength of his position and his power over refugees in particular.

With prime ministers past (Hawke, Keating, Howard and others) we could observe at least a modicum of strength of character and a sincere belief in the correctness of their decisions, even as those were tainted by party politics and elections.

In Morrison we get none of that, just a faint whiff of doubt about his understanding of the "real" world in which he finds himself.

He is a person whose undoubtedly sincere religious beliefs shield him from our world.

The secular aspects of that religion deny him any comprehension of how the rest of us think because we are not "of them" and do not contribute to the church.

That he cannot handle. It is a reality that frightens him.

Even the Morrison government is dismissing the current official unemployment rate as clearly the unemployed are simply being counted as not in the labour force.

However, as someone currently participating in the monthly population survey, I believe that the true level of unemployment has been seriously undercounted for months; 52,000 households are randomly selected for inclusion in the survey and have a legal obligation to participate.

You remain in the survey for eight months. The official unemployment numbers are taken from this survey.

As the excellent ABS material accompanying the survey explains, previously all households were counted but since the pandemic, only those with access to a smart phone or home internet can participate.

Collectors can no longer visit other households.

Clearly it is those households not now able to participate that are most likely to be poor and hence unemployed.

I thought that it may be possible for the ABS to adjust the official figures in some way to account for this undercounting. I raised this issue both with the treasurer and Minister Simon Birmingham, who has responsibility for the ABS.

I have not received a reply. Perhaps the government has been only too willing to take advantage of dodgy data.

Your editorial ("It would be foolish to trust the Taliban", canberratimes.com.au, August 19) doubting the trustworthiness of the Afghan Taliban was spot on. They can be relied upon to be as ruthless and self-righteous as it takes for them to retain and build their power.

But it's not all bad. Domestically, they will most likely look after the welfare of their power base, the rural peasantry, beyond the Pashtun ethnic group. They will be a self-serving and unreliable strategic partner for China and Russia, and could well add to internal security problems for those countries, given their sizeable Muslim minorities and border states.

On the negative, they will continue to oppress their country's women and severely limit personal and political freedom. Their sponsorship of terrorism in Western countries is not the worst potential international consequence of the Taliban's return to power.

Heaven help us if they get control of Pakistan and its nuclear capabilities. Oddly, the stake the whole world has in stopping the Taliban's ideology from prevailing in Pakistan provides an opportunity for cooperation between China, Russia and the West.

Andrew Barr has been congratulating himself and his government on offering an extra $200,000 for a food relief program to be run by Volunteering Australia, and on offering $260,000 to the "community sector" for mental health and $200,000 for "crisis and emergency services" during the lockdown.

So, the ACT government, with an annual budget in the billions of dollars, will only spend peanuts to support of the more than 20,000 ACT residents in quarantine and refuses to employ anybody to deliver the nugatory support offered. Volunteers have to do everything.

We'll be living with COVID-19 for a long time yet, and quarantine will become an incident in many lives.

The ACT government needs to recognise quarantine and lockdown support as an important policy area, hire enough people to deliver meaningful services and to stop pretending that "it will all go away" like Donald Trump did.

If the happy day arrives when COVID-19 becomes a trivial health issue those employees can be redeployed to plant and protect trees.

Frank Selch (Letters, August 19) sees an anti-semitic plot in the 2021 Australian census because Judaism is not one of the tick-box responses available.

If he had visited the Australian Bureau of Statistics website he would have seen this just continues the past practice of listing the top ten responses from the previous census and providing an "other (please specify)" field. Judaism was the 16th most common religion in 2016 at 0.4 per cent of the population.

Is Frank suggesting the ABS is also anti-pentecostal, anti-Lutheran, and anti-Sikh by not specifically listing those significantly larger religions?

In Yes Minster terms, the statistician would be very "courageous" to exclude both his minister and his prime minister's religions without sound reason.

Given the COVID-19 figures in NSW and the fact the ACT had been coronavirus-free for almost a year, how is the statewide lockdown in NSW the fault of the ACT?

I know a number of Canberrans chose to rush down to the coast which, given the current NSW coronavirus record, was not the smartest move.

But if the issue was the failure to stop the ACT residents it should be remembered there were probably more NSW police available to monitor non-NSW traffic crossing the border than there are ACT police.

Gladys, at what point in this whole debacle do you actually start taking responsibility for your own actions?

When the COVID-19 lockdown in Canberra was announced last Thursday a journalist asked the ACT Education Minister Yvette Berry why private schools were able to start teaching online from the next Monday while public schools could only manage to restart teaching by the next Thursday, a full week later.

Rather than answering the question the education minister just kept saying the teachers in our public schools were professionals.

What does that mean? That private school teachers aren't?

What is clear is our public schools are inadequately funded and parents who can afford to send their kids to private school get a better deal.

This costs us all as a society in many ways, from the additional transport required to ferry rich kids from out-of-area to their plush private schools to the costs of inequity on our social services.

Allegedly being focused on lowering inequity in the ACT, our government should do better.

Andrew McConville from the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association claims that his industry can help solve the climate emergency by producing 'blue hydrogen' from gas ("The energy industry can be part of the solution", canberratimes.com.au, August 16).

Yet independent, peer-reviewed scientific research by Robert Howarth from Cornell and Mark Jacobson from Stanford indicates that, even if full carbon capture and storage proved viable, the production of hydrogen from gas still produces more emissions than simply burning the gas directly ("How green is blue hydrogen?", Energy, Science and Engineering, August 12, 2021).

Even if McConville's claim that blue hydrogen is cheaper than green is true, it is still anything but a solution.