On the Lord’s Prayer

Rosemary Jacob writes: Re. “Hinch’s Senate Diary: separation of church and state, and pigs on a plane” (yesterday) I would recommend that Derryn Hinch brings on a motion that the proceedings in the House and the Senate should no longer be preceded by the Lord’s Prayer but by acknowledgment of the people and of their ancestors of the land on which the Parliament stands.

On power generation

Garry and Jewel Diehm write: Re “Chris Uhlmann joins Barnaby in blaming wind energy for SA’s blackout. They are dead wrong.” (yesterday). We are disappointed that no one has suggested that the numerous widespread week long power outages that we experience in FNQ each and every year are due to the failure of our coal fired power generation. Instead we are told it is because of the cyclone season which has allowed insurance companies to double or treble our insurance premiums.

We have become sick of waiting for our politicians to take action to fix the unreliable coal fired power generation system so we have been forced to have a back up power supply that takes us off the grid during such times.  This has been necessary as loss of power for a week leaves us with no water or sewerage. Many of our neighbours have taken this course of action as well. Could you suggest to Chris Uhlmann that he write a piece to bring this power generation failure to the notice of politicians in Canberra when it occurs next cyclone season.

Better still more action on climate change might reduce these events and even save the Great Barrier Reef.

Les Heimann writes: I nearly choked on my soup tonight watching our PM Malcolm Turnbull blaming Labor states setting unrealistic renewable energy targets for the dire situation in SA from an (un)natural disaster. Immediately following this was a bite from Nick Xenophon exclaiming SA as the laughing stock of Australia.

How absolutely pathetic and just plain low can one get for playing politics in the face of an entirely unstoppable natural disaster that has caused untold misery, damage, injury and misfortune to so many South Australians? There is nothing anyone can do when lightning crumples many power pylons into the dust and the automatic switch is triggered. Shame on both these people. In my view, they both showed what they were really made of and, in the process created the beginning of the end of their careers. Real Australians don’t kick people when they are down, they instead offer a helping hand.

To Malcolm Turnbull and Nick Xenophon I ask: how could you say this?