Your Views: Letters to the Editor
This week, InDaily readers respond to job cuts at Australia’s big four banks and South Australia’s algal bloom crisis.
Responding to Top scientists blame ‘chronic’ underfunding for algal bloom gaps
Every day people who use the beaches and oceans need to know what they can do to assist. Do we need to collect all the dead creatures? If so, what do we do with them?
Should we keep vehicles from driving onto beaches with their petrol and diesel fuel/fumes?
Climate change, warm oceans – we the people are the cause of this. – Lynn Graham, St Morris
Responding to Algal bloom leaving ‘abandoned’ sardine fishing grounds in its wake
I believe South Australia’s marine life has been poisoned due to pollution from floodwaters. Usually, after the River Murray floods, this problem happens. There’s way too much floodwater for our reed filter system to work. All that polluted water has caused the South Australian marine crisis, killing marine life and poisoning people. Prevention is better than cure – let’s get something better for future floods. – Helen Stueve
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Responding to Thousands laid off in Big Four bank restructure
Well, well. More staff cuts – but no director cuts. Same story, different decade.
Guaranteed further customer service because “We just don’t have the staff”. Not very impressive. – Rex Wilkie
Responding to Banking sector reels as another big four sheds hundreds of jobs
Once again, greed and profit are king! The billions the banks already make are not sufficient. The obscene salaries the chief executives make are not enough! They need more bonuses to live, at the expense of the workers who make these profits for them! The usual outsourcing of call centres to foreign countries all under the guise of improving customer service? Who even believes that?
How disgusting are these people, and our politicians, who barely raise a wimper. – Ted Jaeger, Penfield
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I hate being told the cuts and relocation of jobs offshore are for the benefit of customers; my experience is it is wholly for the bank’s benefit to the detriment of the customer. – Chris Gill
I have been with the NAB most of my life, but it is still sad to hear this. – Tom Wotherspoon
Responding to New ticket for abandoned North Adelaide railway station
Great story, and great it was reported … wonderful old heritage building, and it deserves to be used … excellent ideas as well, I will be supporting them once open … well done Tony Chippett. – Anthony Chippett
Responding to Leaders jet off in final push for Adelaide COP bid
South Australia is pulling out all stops to bring COP31, the world’s most important climate conference, to Adelaide in 2026. The Prime Minister is lobbying at the UN, the Deputy Premier calls it “like hosting the Olympics,” and the Lord Mayor is travelling to New York and Rio to strengthen the case.
Winning COP would be a remarkable achievement, placing Adelaide alongside Paris and Glasgow as a host city for negotiations that shape the planet’s future. But if we do succeed, the question will not only be whether we can host the event. It will be whether we can match the message with reality.
What will delegates actually see when they arrive? A 38-storey tower rising behind Parliament House, casting democracy into permanent shadow while adding to urban heat. Park Lands and Indigenous land being dug up and handed to Saudi Arabia for LIV Golf. And if they look out from the cruise ships moored in Gulf St Vincent to house them, they will see the very waters where unprecedented fish kills are already occurring from warming seas and algal blooms.
These are not side stories. They go to the heart of what Adelaide represents. Will we show ourselves as a city serious about climate resilience and democratic renewal? Or will we be remembered as a city that spoke of Pacific solidarity while clinging to fossil gas and selling off its Park Lands and our democracy?
COP31 could be more than a global event staged in Adelaide. It could be the turning point where we break with developer capture, protect our green spaces, and set a course toward a cooler, fairer and more democratic city by 2036.
But if we fail, COP31 will be remembered as a spectacular act of greenwash — the moment we invited the world to celebrate climate leadership while continuing to build the very future we claim to resist. – Stewart Sweeney.
Responding to Why does South Australian democracy need to evolve?
Alan Reid’s Charter for Democratic Renewal is a timely call to re-imagine our democracy. It proposes bold reforms of citizens’ assemblies, a human rights charter, and lowering the voting age that could refresh South Australia’s democratic tradition.
But renewal will falter unless it names the forces diminishing democracy today. The greatest is capture by powerful private interests, above all the property industry. The Property Council now dominates debates on planning and housing, its agenda visible in the towers crowding the CBD, the erosion of the Park Lands, and the assumption that high-rise equals progress.
The Malinauskas government, reliant on the SDA and aligned with developers, has embraced this vision. With the Liberals in disarray, the result is not corruption in the narrow sense but a deeper fusion of state power with developer interests. Walker Tower 2, rising behind Parliament House, is more than a building: it is a symbol of democracy overshadowed.
That is why the alternative of a Democracy Hub at Festival Plaza matters. It would honour our democratic heritage, host citizen assemblies, and provide a civic focal point for Adelaide’s 2036 bicentenary and our current bid to develop a sister city relationship with Athens. South Australia can either repeat its history of democratic innovation—or slide further into enclosure by private power. – Stewart Sweeney
