Anthony Albanese Labor leadership federal election
(Image: AAP/Dean Lewins)

Yesterday readers considered Labor’s shifting approach to security agency oversight — the inconsistency of which has allowed the government to quash scrutiny, Bernard Keane writes. Their consensus: taking a strong position might be difficult for the party, but it is necessary. Elsewhere, readers discussed NIMBYism amongst growing city density, and the role of Australian protectionism.

On Labor’s security stance 

David Cole writes: Labor has been nervously trying to avoid being targeted as soft on terrorism or national security for years. It’s stance never seems to do it much good. Hopefully, now it will move to a position based on policy and principle. To do so, of course will require it to withstand criticism from those can never let a possible “got ya” moment go past, boring rubbish that it is.

On NIMBYism

Peter Burnett writes: Yes, increased housing densification across cities is generally a good thing. But a constant trend across Melbourne and Sydney is that developers put up multi-storey buildings, often of poor quality (e.g the cladding scandal in Victoria), without any community facilities. Where is the public transport, aged care, child care facilities, green open space, community hubs, bicycle lanes etc to serve all these new apartment dwellers? The social and transport infrastructure lags years behind the housing infrastructure. And if housing keeps growing and growing, we’ll be playing catch up for decades.

On Australia’s trade protectionism

Neil Hauxwell writes: True, we have an awful lot of parasitic slackers in our boardrooms but the rest of us just want a decent job. The issue surely is maintaining industries in a country with a minimum wage. Rather than tariffs, it’d be better to start getting some economies of scale in our industry development by tying government support to the export of equipment and expertise to other second rank countries that would rather have their own people working than becoming peasants in corporate empire.

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