The suffering in Gaza is intolerable

AU Financial Review

2 days ago

Readers' letters on the Palestine march, workplace mental health, working from home, the need for public servants and home battery subsidies.
Thank you to everyone who showed up at the Sydney Harbour Bridge and to the bold organisers who have worked so long and hard to carry reticent Australians towards this moment.
It was a privilege to join so many tremendous humans who understood that rain was nothing alongside Palestinian suffering.
There were many special moments shared in the middle of the soggy crowd: handing out tiny toy tambourines to fully grown men, joking over spare muesli bars and ponchos, finding out where folk had travelled from.
Marg from Grafton (70) doesn't even get internet access, but checked details at the local library and travelled down overnight, (despite flooding on the tracks at Taree) to stay at the Y. Towards the end she borrowed one of my crutches.
Mums with babies, families with double strollers, kids on scooters, mum under Disney umbrellas, the halt and lame were all swapping chants, banging pots and smiling widely. Every person seemed clear that the suffering in Gaza is intolerable. Bravo to all who put human rights and common sense ahead of fear, belief, half-truths and self-censorship.
Jane Salmon, Killara, NSW
I refer to the editorial ' Corporate leaders need to speak up like Ryan Stokes ' and agree that psychological injuries which lead to workers compensation claims need to be addressed.
Clearly, for Stokes to raise this issue it's becoming a burden on big business and a headache for insurers.
However, Westpac CEO Anthony Miller said ' more could be done ' before legislation is changed.
Think about small business, who employ 900,000 people and struggle every day just to pay the bills. One psychological claim because an employee was told to improve his manner could be the first step to bankruptcy.
In fact, it's not the size of the claim that destroys small business, but the significant increase in the yearly workers compensation bill. In its current form it's a sleeping cost time bomb.
David Button, Breakfast Point, NSW
WFH law will make Victoria even less appealing
The news item about the Victorian Labor government's plan to legislate to ensure that WFH is a worker's legal right is a classic example of governmental overreach (' Vic government to enshrine WFH two days a week in law ').
Premier Jacinta Allan is quoted as saying that 'it's good for the economy'. That viewpoint would be disputed by many and it will no doubt make heavily taxed Victoria an even more unattractive place for some companies and businesses to operate from within.
It is disappointing that Allan is not instead focused upon working tirelessly to reduce her spendthrift government's mammoth amount of state debt.
Dennis Walker, North Melbourne, Vic
Remote-working themselves out of a job
Now that working-from-home rosters are being institutionalised in the public sector, you must question if the same jobs could be just as effectively done in Mumbai or Manila.
With the rise and rise of AI, mass redundancies are inevitable. This will do wonders for Australia's productivity as the only people left in the workforce force will be those creating and adding value.
David Hurburgh, Opossum Bay, Tas
Are all these public servants strictly necessary?
Rather than arguing about where public servants work, we should be asking why we need them at all. Take aged care and health departments, where over 7000 employees work in non-patient-facing roles. With artificial intelligence and automation revolutionising administrative processes globally, this represents a massive productivity opportunity.
Every dollar spent on bureaucratic overhead is a dollar not invested in frontline care, infrastructure, or innovation. While other nations streamline their public sectors using technology, Australia maintains bloated administrative layers that serve the bureaucracy rather than the public.
The real issue isn't remote work flexibility – it's relevance. Modern AI systems can process applications, manage compliance and coordinate services faster and more accurately than human administrators. Robotic process automation can handle routine tasks 24/7 without sick leave, superannuation, or office space.
Countries like Estonia have demonstrated how digital transformation can deliver better citizen services with dramatically fewer public servants. Their e-governance model processes 99% of public services online, eliminating countless administrative positions while improving service delivery.
If Australia seriously wants to lift living standards and national productivity, we need a public service focused on essential functions, not job creation. This means embracing technology to eliminate redundant roles and redirecting resources toward genuine public value – teachers, nurses, police, and infrastructure.
The question isn't where public servants should work, but whether many of these positions should exist at all.
Peter Worn, Melbourne, Vic
Home batteries are good business, too
Yes, the battery subsidy really is the easy option (' Labor's home battery subsidy low hanging-fruit in energy transition ').
Obviously cheaper than taxpayers footing the whole bill for the energy storage we so badly need, to carry the cheap daytime excess through to the evening. It will not only save for those who invest, it could also drive down the cost of power to all consumers. But these new batteries need to be managed wisely if they are to have the same effect as community batteries or the commercial 'big' batteries.
Having played the wholesale electricity market ourselves, with Amber managing our home batteries for the last two years, it has become bleedingly obvious why the overall cost of power has gotten so high. Several times a year, the wholesale spot price for electricity goes through the roof, reaching prices more than 100 times the normal. Those who can sell energy into the market at such times are able to make a small fortune. The wholesale feed-in tariff can get to $15 or more per kilowatt hour. Our two home batteries have earned us as much as $380 in just one day.
But our batteries are tiny compared to say the Tallawarra gas-fired 'peaker' across the lake from our home. A quick calculation suggests they could be earning several million dollars an hour in such circumstances.
It is an expensive exercise to keep the grid working when the prices get so high, but they do it. To my knowledge, the grid hasn't suffered any blackouts due to power shortages, so we can only assume they have always had enough in reserve to keep the lights on.
Clearly our privatised electricity grid can only turn on the last of the big players in the spot market by sending the price through the roof occasionally. And consumers will keep picking up that tab until there are enough suppliers in the market to take away that monopoly.
Roll on Snowy 2.0, and more batteries.