Letters to the Editor: 'A nation that has gone mad', 2 March 2022

A nation that imprisons children who have runny noses is a nation totally unfit to comment on the tyranny of other countries.

A nation that "protects" children from a mild cold by preventing their growing bodies and brains from properly taking in oxygen and expelling carbon dioxide is a nation that has gone mad.

Parents, grandparents, teachers - for the sake of our little ones, for the sake of the future, for the sake of all that is right and good - please, speak out against this evil. Our children are being sacrificed to the worship of fear, so called science, and the authority of rulers and "experts." God gave us brains and consciences and expects us to use them, not delegate that responsibility to others.

To the gentlemen who stand on the three lane bridge leading out of Halls Head with your signs. Can you please clarify for me how we explain to my eight-year-old granddaughter what "using your children as lab rats" means?

As our police are always getting bad press I'd like to say how great they were to me today. After someone helped themself to my purses while I was carrying in my shopping(I even chased him up the road), the police were here in about 15 minutes and were polite and helpful and are checking cameras in the street. I could not have asked for quicker service or such kind people. Thankfully both purses were found in the street, minus the cash, but all my cards intact so was not too bad.

I walk (or try to walk) early every morning along what used to be "our beautiful Mandurah Terrace foreshore". Now all I seem to encounter are fences denying my usual access, workers telling me to go this way or that and overall one hell of a mess which looks like it's going on for at least another year, and possibly more? Three million dollars on a pool that I have only seen one person use, once, this summer, early morning, and with skate rinks and other "concrete enhancements" I would guess at least another couple of million and more noise and encroachments? I'll bet the coffee shops, which I patronise most mornings, are going to love all the yelling and screaming, that is if anyone uses these wondrous things?

I don't know who dreamed all of this up but I preferred it the way it was when I was a kid, many years ago. Progress? Or lack thereof?

Like Charlie Gibson, I too have seen the Water Corporation's big spending on television commercials regarding our dwindling water reserves.

What worries me however is they use Lake Gnangara as an example of dwindling water supplies and lakes drying up.

Back before the 50s Lake Gnangara, was, I was told, large enough to sail yachts. This lake is the tip of a huge aquifer called the Gnangara Mound and thanks to this aquifer the expansion of the northern suburbs has been made possible. Trillions of litres of precious water have been drawn from this aquifer to supply water to thousands of homes, which is only a fraction of its capacity. To add to the many bores drawing water from the mound, a huge pine plantation was planted around this lake, over 1000ha in size. I remember going to the lake in the 50s and seeing only small pools of water similar to what the Water Corporation ads are showing today. My point being is, the lake dried up over 70 years ago, not in the last few years.

During the 60s and 70s I made weekly visits to the Public Works Department in Dumas House to quote on various projects. It was during these visits that I saw plans for the piping of gas down from the north west gasfields. We all know what happened to that idea. Where are the visionaries, the engineers, the people that made the impossible possible, like the Kalgoorlie pipeline? Commissioned in 1896 and completed at the end of 1902, a project deemed unnecessary, a waste of time and money and impossible to build is still taking fresh water from Mundaring Weir to Kalgoorlie 530km away. The steel pipes, 60,000 of them, were laid...with human sweat and the help of horses and wagons. A piece of cake with today's machinery.