Do right thing, Downer
Downer is a successful Australian company. They’re a leading provider of transport services, engineering, construction, mining and rail and they build and maintain many of our local roads.
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According to Downer’s website, ‘zero harm’ is embedded in their culture. ‘This means sustaining a work environment that minimises the impact our business has on the environment’.
But Downer has a dark side, a plan that will cause ‘extreme harm’.
They have a $2 billion non-binding contract to build the Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.
The burning of the coal from this mine will be the equivalent of a whole new country and 1.3 times Australia's climate pollution.
Dredging will be dumped in the Great Barrier Reef and the biggest freshwater aquifer in the world, the Great Artesian Basin, is at risk of fracturing from the mine construction.
More than 60,000 jobs in Queensland tourism will be lost if the Reef dies. How can this equate to zero harm?
Please Downer, you’re doing a great job building wind and solar farms. Mean what you say about ‘zero harm’ and withdraw from your deal with Adani.
Jenni Huber,
#StopAdani Albury-Wodonga
Pollies a laughing stock
The NSW Parliament has again refused to decriminalise abortion.
Who, in their right minds maintains on the statute books a law which is unenforceable and which nobody obeys.
Surely a law to stop people laughing at politicians would be more practical.
D. A. Corbett, Albury
Museum right fit
The answer to Wodonga Council's unpopular decision to close the Information Centre is to place it within a museum, which is a common practice in many provincial towns.
If the council could afford to pay thousands of dollars a year to run the Information Centre in Hovell Street and millions of dollars to staff and run the Bonegilla Migrant Experience – an important part of our 'modern' history but not to be compared with the first waves of migrants who from 1854 settled this area – it can afford to buy one of our historic houses or build a museum which would be the only repository for our written, photographic and historic items, and also boost Wodonga's economy by being the Information Centre.
It has to be centrally located on or near a main road and have room for towed vehicles to park.
Junction Place is an obvious possibility. Another is the old swimming pool site on the corner of Hume and Stanley Streets with its proximity to Junction Place and Melbourne Road (Elgin Boulevard).
The advantage of the swimming pool land is that it is already owned by the council (the ratepayers) and close to the shopping centre.
Council staff have repeatedly refused requests to lease 'the other half' of the shop to the Wodonga Historical Society presently occupied at 19 South Street.
The premises has no phone line, fire alarm, electronic equipment (volunteers take their own) or space to properly display Wodonga's historic items.
Indeed the Society has to refuse some items important to our history because there's not room for them. Sometimes the donors have no choice to rent. 19 South Street could be a museum and Information Centre.
Historical Society volunteers have to pay the other costs and use their own computers.
We understand the dismay and frustration of volunteers at the Information Centre and invite them to help us at our South Street rooms.