I worry that we have a Council that sees development at any cost. Imagine the CBD area filled with multi-storey buildings, blocking the sunlight from the streets. We may as well be in Sydney,”where a stingy ray of sunlight struggles feebly down between the houses tall”, as Banjo Paterson put it.

I have already addressed Council with my opinion that Ray Walsh House should be the benchmark height for all buildings in the CBD, that is 4 storeys. The City of Tamworth has a nice country feel. Let’s keep it that way.

Jan Morris

West Tamworth 

If I were to use the rationale of the anti-gun lobby I would be demanding the banning of big trucks. Consider the deaths in Nice, France (86) and Berlin, Germany (12). It’s obvious, those big rigs are too dangerous. They can easily be turned into weapons of mass destruction.

There’s also the normal road toll from trucks which needs to be addressed. How long will it take for the anti-gun lobby to awaken to the fact that it’s the person, not the weapons, that’s responsible?

Jay Nauss

Glen Aplin

“Unions”. That was the answer Joseph Stiglitz gave in 2014 when the Nobel Prize winning economist was asked why Australia had not plunged into the disastrous inequality of wealth plaguing the USA.

Income inequality in the USA and Britain exceeds that in Australia. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan declared war on unions in the 1980s, unleashing free market forces that benefited the rich, not the rest. One of those wealthy winners is about to become the USA’s 45th president.

John Howard’s political heroes were Reagan and Thatcher. Our own “battlers’ mate” showed his contempt for real battlers when he launched WorkChoices against workers and unions in 2005. Under WorkChoices one major retailer proposed workplace agreements to some new employees that robbed them of $90 worth of entitlements and conditions a week in return for a miserable wage rise of two cents an hour! Not even a lousy dollar a week! It took a Labor government and the trade union movement to destroy WorkChoices in 2007.

The Coalition’s contempt for working Australians continues, with the recent reintroduction of the Australian Building and Construction Commission the latest front in their war on unions. They are obsessed with “protecting” business against some imagined union “threat”. But when it comes to defending workers against exploitation by unscrupulous and greedy bosses these hardened industrial warriors run up their white flags.

While most employers are fair operators, the landscape is changing as less honest bosses sense the time is right to screw down vulnerable workers and maximise profits. The rip-off scandals are too many to ignore: the 7-Eleven wages robbery, allegations of serious underpayment of wages in a major national petrol chain, charity workers ripped off by third party employers, young foreign farm workers underpaid, wage exploitation in the hospitality industry and a boom in unpaid trial work that rarely results in a job for hapless workers.

Inequality in Australia is growing, with the wealthiest 10% now grabbing 45% of the country’s wealth. In the war on inequality, the Coalition has gone over to the other side.

Unions and the Labor Party remain our best weapons in the struggle to protect Australia’s proud egalitarian tradition.

Mick Lawler

President Tamworth ALP