Letters to the Editor - May 6

Weeds mentioned were annual ryegrass, tall fleabane, boxthorn, blackberries, serrated tussock, gamba grass, bridal creeper and willow trees.

There is no mention of Caltrop - a good survival plant easily transported thousands of kilometres with no real grazing value.

A plant that sprouts and sets seed in just one week under ideal conditions.

It is very capable of puncturing motor bike tyres - surely this is a problem weed that has been pushed further and further into the too hard basket over the years.

This letter is designed to bring this weed to the fore where it belongs.

THE headline School Gender Crisis is no startling revelation, particularly for teachers who have been educating our students, both female and male, for the past 30 years.

It was widely recognised back in the 1990s, that female students lagged significantly behind their male counterparts in their achievement at maths and science subjects.

Significantly federally-funded and targeted programs for girls were successfully established across the country to plan, develop and implement strategies, which addressed this concerning imbalance.

At the same time however, groups of educators highlighted the widening gap between the reading and writing standards of boys when compared to those of girls, but were informed that boys were not a target group.

The acknowledged lack of skills in written subjects by boys is today being addressed by merely stating "that writing is not suited to a boys game day strengths" and that they would now be able to produce a video or deliver a live presentation instead.

It would seem that rather than addressing and improving the writing and reading skills of boys, an easier and less costly way - time and money wise - of just modifying the task requirements has been chosen.

Fixing the problem should be the solution, not lowering the bar.

I READ with dismay banks are closing some branches in country towns, and I am astonished that our political leaders allow this.

Is it a coincidence, that the head of Australia Post has been ostracised because she had the temerity and forward thinking ability to suggest that post offices set about a mechanism to provide limited banking services?

Have big banking interests lobbied the government to prevent this easy stop gap and lobbied to have her removed as clearly she is dangerous to the banking industry?

Big banks are ratbag financial institutions, staffed by executive insensitive zombies, who have no compassion for the people who have supported them. They forget how they began, and the little people supporting them.

Greed corrupts everything.

It is a shocking indictment of who we are and where we are going.

How simple it would be to allow post offices to conduct simple banking services and relieve country people of the stress and hardship to their basic banking needs.

I guess government has an agenda that does not include acknowledging the people they purportedly represent when they can so easily be influenced by banking lobbyists.