Blaming Summernats drivers won't reduce the road toll

Rather than 35,000 the actual number was about 3500.

However he makes a valid point that despite all the efforts to reduce the toll to zero the numbers are rising.

What that tells me is that the current mostly punitive policies are not working. Instead of blasting Summernats attendees with threats of IQ tests and crushing cars, we could look more closely at driver behaviour as Haghani suggests. Even the so-called hoons doing burnouts want zero road deaths.

Perhaps we could look to improve roads and positive incentives to improve driver behaviour and thus road safety.

Mark Kenny's allegations about the way Israel is conducting its war against Hamas are simply untrue "Time to pull the handbrake, fellas" (January 21). Israel is certainly not deliberately targeting civilians. The effort Israel is putting into evacuating civilians from combat areas refutes this claim.

Israel is also not denying food, water and medicine. It is allowing in all humanitarian aid that arrives at the border of Gaza, after verification checks of consignments.

It has even repaired and re-opened a border crossing that Hamas destroyed in order that aid might be received more quickly.

Israel is only targeting Hamas. It is only bombing and attacking buildings Hamas is using for fighting. Regrettably, Hamas utilises civilian buildings including hospitals, schools, mosques and houses for its military operations, making them legitimate and necessary military targets.

Foreign Minister Penny Wong is swanning around the Middle East talking platitudes. She has refused to visit the site where the Islamic terrorists murdered some 1200 Israeli citizens in a brutal, barbaric, and vicious manner. The IDF should have offered to take her on a tour of the terrorists' underground tunnels so that she can better understand what is going on in Gaza.

Hamas is still holding some 132 hostages as bargaining chips. In the meantime, Penny Wong hands over $25 million to Gaza. How can she guarantee that this money won't be siphoned off by the terrorists rather than used for refugees' needs?

She claims that the only answer to this "problem" is a two-state solution. Has she considered why an Israeli government would not agree to a two-state solution after October 7?

Israel certainly, after October 7, won't accept a Palestinian state next door which would be used by Hamas and other terrorist groups as a staging ground for further attacks on Israel.

She obviously hasn't heard Hamas' representatives saying they will attack Israel again, again and again. These people are obviously serious yet Penny Wong is treating them as if they are reasonable.

The best thing she can do is come home, keep quiet and let Israel look after itself as it has been doing for 75 years.

In About Town in a recent edition of The Canberra Times described "...four days of engine revving, tyre-burning summer fun" and said that "a parade of 500 cars roared sedately through the centre of the city".

I have rarely heard such misuse of the English language.

I thought 500 revving engines, tyre burning and air pollution was the total opposite to sedate. Sedate means dignified, calm and unhurried.

A true description of Summernats is: "inconsiderate, unwelcome, extremely noisy, polluting, moronic and uncivilized".

Bill Deane (Letters, January 16) wrote "when your enemy boasts their intention is to annihilate you completely, Israel has little choice".

Mr Deane seemingly assumes that all Palestinians living in Gaza are Hamas militants and must be eradicated by Israel.

Has it occurred to Mr Deane that Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu may be determined to continue the war in Gaza (and farther afield) as long as possible to keep himself out of prison (to which he was probably headed before the war began)?

Your correspondent (Peter McLoughlin, Letters, January 15) wonders about the economic benefits Summernats brings to the ACT region, citing a government figure of $40 million.

I have always been curious where this money comes from. Unless extracted from savings, or brought in from overseas, it must surely just be churn. If it hadn't been spent in or near Canberra in connection with Summernats it would have been spent somewhere else, and probably around the same time.

Governments routinely spend taxpayer funds attracting events and expenditure to their area but I wonder is it a zero-sum game.

That was certainly my impression when Queanbeyan-Palerang Regional Council spent ratepayers funds to attract Octoberfest out of the ACT.

"Cosy club" sounds like an understatement ("It is time to refresh the Australian War Memorial council", January 16).

The argument has been clearly put for reforming the appointment of AWM council members to help ensure that the memorial is less likely to keep producing and promoting limiting and skewed decisions and outdated historical perspectives.

It is now up to the Labor government to show some gumption and discard the Coalition's convenient and crutch-like "mates and all things military" approach that has been allowed to infect the top tier of this well-funded public institution for far too long.

South Africa's decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice has lead to the charge of "breathtaking hypocrisy" (Letters, January 15) because it has not condemned Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

South Africa has no reason to be supportive of Israel because of that government's longstanding support of the South African apartheid regime which denied millions of black and coloured South African's their democratic rights.

Much is made of Israel's democratic credentials and yet it chose to support apartheid for so long a time over the ANC's struggle for freedom and democracy. No double standards or hypocrisy in that I suppose.

Modern Australia didn't come into existence until January 1, 1901. January 26 commemorates the arrival of a British convict fleet at a land the British had recently called New South Wales.

Some people don't want to celebrate the creation of the modern nation, Australia, on January 1 because it is New Year's Day.

Surely the establishment of our nation is more important than the purely arbitrary start of each year. Give New Year the boot and let our modern nation have its proper day.

One of President Biden's lasting legacies will be the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act which has put hundreds of billions of dollars into the renewable energy transition in the US. It is not just stimulating the US economy, it is aiding the fight against climate change as nothing else has.

Trump, on the other hand, has promised to withdraw the US, yet again, from the Paris Agreement, if elected. The Republicans under Trump will also introduce a sweeping strategy called Project 2025 which, according to The New York Times, will shred regulations to curb greenhouse gas pollution from cars, oil and gas wells and power plants; dismantle almost every clean energy program in the federal government; and boost the production of fossil fuels.

This would be disastrous, not just for the US, but for the world.

When I received my tax bill for 2022-23, where the low and medium income rebate was now discontinued, I realised how the "stage three cuts" are going to be funded.

They will come from the extra tax from low and medium income earners. It is a straight transfer of tax from low earners to high earners.

The particularly sinful change is the flattening of the progressive nature of the tax scales.

I was once a rusted-on Labor voter but am now unable to find a real Labor party to vote for. The local mob lost their way years ago when they handed over their responsibilities to developers.

Now the federal mob have lost their way by flattening the income tax scales.

Just to clarify for newcomers to Canberra, the capitalised word in the headline "Traumatic injuries after alleged EPIC brawls" doesn't mean The Canberra Times thinks it was excellent fighting and we should have more of it.

As I was reading the opinions and letters in The Canberra Times (Letters, January 13) with lefties dealing out advice on Australia Day, patriotism, unity and freedom I could've been forgiven for thinking I was reading the comics.

Fiona Allan (Letters, January 19) criticises Bill Stefaniak for denying the Israelis are committing genocide and then gives a definition of the word that precisely defines the aim of the people - and which they boast of in their manifesto - who started the current war in the first place.

It is interesting to see the police carting off drugs and Lego pieces, a seemingly odd toy for the criminals. Are the criminals using the Lego as an early warning system? A few on the floor will cripple people and cause them to scream in pain.

Could cricket statisticians advise how many Test second innings batting collapses have recently occurred after a long day in the field? Can the issue be addressed to provide a balanced game?

The most apt date for Australia Day is July 9; that was the date on which Queen Victoria assented to the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act. The actual celebration date in any given year should be earlier as necessary to produce a long weekend (noting that Parliament passed the bill on July 4, 1900).

In November 2016, Donald Trump said of Hilary Clinton that a candidate under federal investigation has no right to run and it would be virtually impossible for a president under indictment to govern. How quickly people forget.

Obviously the people who advocate for Wattle Day to become the new Australia Day don't suffer from hayfever.

People may fear money in itself but, as I understand it, the bible correctly identifies the real problem as the love of money. On money itself, I agree with whoever said that it's like dung; "hugely useful when well-spread out, but big piles of it stink".

Try as hard as I might, I cannot get my head around assertions that when Donald Trump wins elections, be they primaries or presidential ballots, that democracy is suddenly under threat. In a democracy people get the politicians the majority votes for. To suggest otherwise is sophistry. It is also undemocratic.