Look abroad for answers, but take off the rose-coloured glasses

The first of the new reactors, the 3.2 GW Hinkley Point C, is now scheduled for completion in 2029-31, at a final cost of £46 billion ($A87.4 billion). In the meantime, five reactors have been decommissioned, with the result that nuclear energy's share of British power generation has fallen from a peak of 26 per cent in 1997 to 16.1 per cent in 2020.

The completion date for the remaining seven reactors is problematic, given that construction has not started. Private investment, the lynchpin of the Blair plan, has not been forthcoming.

The small modular reactor is also some way off: the six companies bidding for the project want millions of pounds from the government to proceed with development. With four more old reactors set to close in the next four years, nuclear power's contribution to the UK mix is looking rather thin.

By all means, let us look at all the options for Australia's energy future, but perhaps not through rose-colored glasses.

Lest we forget the long list of Australians that turned their backs on Assange and the speaking of truth to power: Brandis, Gillard, Dreyfuss, Carr and the vast majority of Australian 'journalists'.

Australians can be proud of the role PM Albanese played to get the US to set Assange free. It has come late after Assange had to endure so many years of torment at the hands of the world's leading democracies. That was a crying shame and an indictment on them. It is absolutely fantastic that good sense has prevailed and Assange set free even if so belatedly .

Hope good times will roll for Assange and his loved ones for the future.

There is much ado about an increase in the salary of the governor-general. Some seem unaware that it is common to set a higher salary for an incoming incumbent because it is set by Parliament and, under the constitution, cannot be changed during their term of office, usually five years.

Additionally, surely an office holder should be paid what the job is considered to justify, not their personal circumstances. I'm sure Malcolm Turnbull was paid the PM's salary even though he was very personally wealthy. The situation of MPs not being paid, meaning only the wealthy could afford to stand, changed many years ago.

Sophia E. Pauchet ("How can we look to the future as we watch our present burn?", June 26) sums up the flood of emotions that can be caused by contemplating "catastrophic climate-fuelled disasters" such as the 2019-20 "Black Summer".

Regrettably, the Australian government is struggling to meet its 43 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 target, and is giving the green light to more extraction and burning of natural gas and coal.

The latter triggered the start of global warming 260 years ago.

I wish Ms Pauchet and her fellow appellants every success with their submission to the Senate committee on the Climate Change Amendment (Duty of Care and Intergenerational Climate Equity) Bill.

Sharon Wilson claims that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not prosecuting the war slowly for his own political purposes, but because of the need to evacuate civilians (Letters, June 25). But if that is the case, he has been spectacularly unsuccessful, with the death rate of Gazans now exceeding 37,000 and with an estimated 10,000 missing under the rubble.

More than 80,000 people in Gaza have been injured, many of them children and many will be disabled for life as a result.

She says that Hamas must be militarily and politically destroyed. But you can't destroy the idea of freedom by occupying people's land for decades, keeping people under siege for years and keeping thousands of them, some children, in prison (hostages) for years, not to mention subjecting the rest to apartheid policies.

It's quite the wrong way to do it.

In Crispin Hull's opinion piece on Peter Dutton on June 25, he claimed that if Australia decided to choose to go down the nuclear route, mainstream investors in our renewable energy sectors have stated they would leave the market.

Of the two he named, one company is BlackRock shares management company. I am not sure how Hull defineds mainstream but the BlackRock chief executive, Larry Fink, is a radical leftist. Fink openly brags about using the wealth that his company manages as a method of forcing society in directions that he finds desirable.

Ironically, one of his main goals is to use BlackRock to subvert the capitalist economy and institute a more collectivist (read: communist) one. He is not a man that we should be listening to for our future directions for energy security.

Australia Post let down a member of the postal customer community by late delivery of express post. Post management has been very busy and focused on shutting down its superb network of local post offices and can't be expected to concern itself with timely delivery. And it will only get worse.

Posties now have to travel farther from a main base to their delivery patches. Less time at the sharp end of delivery (the letter box). Posties? Yep, Australia Post management, that's who delivers the mail.

Light bulb moment for management? Unlikely. No such moments, tucked away in head office.

Helen Moore's letter (June 25) covers all the main issues about literacy and numeracy education in ACT public schools in the recent report.

I welcome increased funding, support and direction for teachers but not the narrow kind proposed by the "science of reading" proponents, including costly courses and resources.

I support the learning of times tables once the concept of number is understood, but I suspect Ian Jannaway (Letters, June 25) didn't learn to read by this method nor by reading the dictionary.

Paul Keating was abused by the LNP for his "vision thing". He "sold" his vision, and then delivered. The Hawke-Keating government reformed the financial, wages and tariff systems in the 1980s. Australians benefited from that vision.

Peter Dutton says he has a vision: in 15 years' time we might have eight nuclear power stations in Australian regions. That's a boondoggle to prop up gas, not a plan.

Supposedly that plan will ease the cost of electricity, but there is no detail on when, particularly if Dutton openly discourages more investment in renewables, driven by the sovereign citizen rump of the Nationals, against more poles and wires.

Last week we started with eight nuclear plants, and on the weekend a spokesman let the cat out, drip-feeding ABC viewers that some of those old power station sites might, over time, have more than one nuclear generator on the one site.

Dutton will continue to drip-feed information in a deliberate Trump-like plan, targeting the electors of western suburbs of our major capitals, folks who don't ordinarily devote attention to opinion pages, but who are impressed by News Ltd headlines and three-word slogans.

Andrew Ross's claim that Israel is using the terrorist playbook and comparison of its campaign in Gaza with the 9/11 attacks are ridiculous (Letters, June 26).

Israel targets Hamas and other terrorists, and evacuates civilians before attacking.

I don't recall Al-Qaeda evacuating the twin towers before attacking them, or the US carrying out a massacre of innocent civilians before that attack, and promising to do it again and again, as Hamas did.

In fact, it appears likely that the fighter to civilian ratio among Gaza casualties is roughly one to one, which is far better than the US achieved when liberating Iraqi cities from ISIS, and demonstrates Israel's commitment to international law, especially given Hamas's abhorrent human shield tactics.

Also, it is indeed shredding the UN Charter to recognise a Palestinian state when they lack several of the basic prerequisites for statehood and their leadership have shown no inclination to live in peace with their Israeli neighbours.

Wow, our new governor-general has a massive pay rise before doing anything to earn it. I would have been happy to be paid $100,000 for just one year of my working life. But I guess I missed out on the big bucks because I always thought I was fairly paid and enjoyed my work.

Perhaps the most important lessons that Julian Assange has taught us are that freedom of the press is a negotiable instrument in Australia; that our citizenship isn't worth a pinch of the proverbial wombat poo when the chips are down; and who needs enemies when you have friends like the US?

Ah, the Civic Pool. I particularly would be sad if it was to go. A small group of us from Reid House went over the fence some nights before its opening trying out both pools and the wonderful diving tower. We, of course, escaped back to Reid House without detection. At 88-plus I, too, am trying hard to avoid that "wrecking ball" threatening to remove this important aspect of the Canberra we know and love.

The official Australian Labor Party (ALP) may not agree with their own senator Fatima Payman supporting for the Palestine people while the enemy Israelites keep killing their kids and mothers as their way to win the war. While Senator Payman might not be able to win the hearts of her ALP colleagues, there is one thing she is doing the rest of the ALP is not. She's attracting more votes for the Labor Party at the next election than anyone else!

Is the new taboo not to mention the 'O' word with regard to the Assange saga? I mean, of course Obama, the Nobel Laureate president, under whose administration it began. To use a dreaded expression of one of Assange's fanboys, Kevin Rudd, I find it passing strange that the two are never linked.

I'm afraid I can't agree with Master Stanley (Letters, June 27). Methinks that as we use so many words used by Shakespeare, we can't just ban one (and probably a few others of the same ilk) because some don't like it and another country uses it. Should we stop using fait accompli because it is a French phrase?

Peter Stanley makes a valid point that "gotten", though used for well over a millennium in the English language, is making a comeback here simply because it is doing so in the US. But that is no reason to ban it in Australia. Language is alive, and evolves according to the tastes and needs of its current users. Live with it!

Sharon Wilson (Letters, June 25) in her defence of Israel and Netanyahu makes no mention of the slaughter being undertaken in Gaza: 21,000 children missing, more than 37,000 killed, over 80,000 wounded and the greatest bomb damage since WWII. Add to that what is happening in the West Bank. Israeli action is hard to justify.