Should Walter Burley Griffin be brought home to the city he designed?

Griffin, who died in India in 1937, lies in the Christian cemetery at Nishat Ganj. His grave is now marked but it is hardly known or cared for, and very few Canberrans can have visited.

Yerrabi MLA Deepak Raj Gupta had the grave cleaned up in 2020, suggesting it could form the basis of a positive engagement between Lucknow and Canberra, but the pandemic put paid to that hope.

The grave is again neglected, though the Nishat Ganj cemetery is a vital part of the life of Lucknow's Christian community.

While Griffin is a footnote to Lucknow's rich architectural heritage, he is central to ours. What if Griffin could be exhumed and his remains re-interred on the shore of the lake that bears his name? What would Canberrans feel about that idea?

I remember when my friend returned from her ESL (English as a Second Language) class without her usual calm.

She explained. Her students had taken turns to talk about the countries they had come from.

A newish student began to cry angry tears. Another wrapped arms around her, held her, saying, "We are in Australia now, we do not have to hate anymore".

Thank you Jack Kershaw for trying to make better accommodation outcomes for the future generations in Canberra (Letters, October 25).

Jack notes that the current ACT government planning policy of blindly following the international fashion of increasing urban density is generally resulting in poor outcomes.

Hopefully I'll live long enough to see the ACT government adopt more uplifting, ecological and socially responsible town planning models such as freeways for EVs to new villages.

This model would drastically increase the amenity and social cohesion so craved for by humans and decrease crime.

It seems that, according to one of your correspondents, the result of the referendum was proof that many Canberrans are educated fools because they were in the national minority.

Poor Galileo, he believed that Earth orbited the Sun when most people, including the Roman Inquisition, were of the opinion that the Sun orbited Earth.

What a fool.

In his article on "referendum takeaways" (October 21) Simon Cowan argues that the Voice was to give Indigenous Australians more "voting rights" than the rest of us.

This is false. A successful referendum would have resulted in Indigenous Australians still having exactly the same voting rights as other Australians.

It would also have provided advice to government in the same way other lobby groups, like the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) do.

Cowan is a leading light in the CIS. The Centre "aim[s] to make sure good policy ideas are heard and seriously considered".

Ironically, this is exactly what the Voice was intended to do in relation to policy affecting Indigenous Australians.

But in Cowan's mind, it's bad when policy ideas come from Indigenous Australians, but good when they come from the CIS.

Re the AMC search policy debate (Letters, October 25).

When I was a prison officer in the UK at what was a maximum security prison searches of staff and visitors were prioritised.

The searching for visitors was standard; sniffer dogs, pat down searches and x-ray machines.

Staff searches were more random in order to maintain maximum surprise.

More than once when staff walked into the jail and saw that staff were being searched they turned right round again.

When we were downgraded our dog unit was lost and searching changed. Drugs flooded in as a result.

I was disturbed to hear President Biden refer to the Hamas as "the other team".

Someone needs to explain to these people that slaughtering innocent civilians is not a sport no matter how you are achieving it.

If you must think of it as a sport, the fact that the Israeli's have killed three times more innocent people than Hamas without shedding a single tear is not a sign that they are winning, it is a sign that they have lost.

They have lost perspective; they have lost any sense of decency and they are quickly losing the respect of other nations.

The "might is right" philosophy that has driven them for decades needs to change. They need to sit down and discuss a realistic and fair solution in which the Palestinians have rights, a future and a homeland. No amount of mindless slaughtering is going to fix this.

The heading "Damage is done, Antarctica is doomed: study" (October 25) is alarming, but (hopefully) unnecessarily so.

A relatively small portion of the west Antarctic ice shelves has collapsed into the Southern Ocean: this will causing a slight rise in sea levels.

However, longer-term oceanographic modelling has shown that we must not ease off, but increase, the global efforts to reduce emissions.

Many people would say warming of 1.3 degrees, which has already been reached; or even 1.5 degrees, the IPCC 2030 limit, are very small, so why worry?

Problem is, 1.5 degrees is a global average that includes not only the very cold Arctic region and Antarctica, but also the oceans.

These hold 90 per cent of the world's heat.

We must not become complacent.

I voted "no" because I am a "stupid racist" (thanks Marcia Langton) a "dickhead dinosaur" (thanks Ray Martin), and "uneducated" (thanks Waleed Aly). And now I'm apparently, "mean-spirited".

That is according to the response by the "yes" campaign.

I actually voted "no" because the real question was masked behind a simpler question. If constitutional recognition was simply what the referendum was about then I am certain the result would have been a resounding "yes".

But it wasn't. It was about changing the constitution without any clear explanation of what the long-term consequences might be.

I voted "no" because, even among the Indigenous population, there was dissent and disagreement. I voted "no" because there is already a plethora of agencies tasked with addressing Indigenous issues. I voted "no" because the serious issues in our Indigenous communities cannot be addressed with a "unicorns and rainbows" approach at the federal level.

Problems must be addressed at the state, territory and local government level.

Your editorial on the Department of Infrastructure's handling of the hotties list ("Infrastructure Department 'hotties list' claims are a red flag", October 24) failed to address the more important issue of the institutions producing these privileged young male graduate recruits.

The schools and universities producing these graduates have much more to answer for. The sexism and misogyny bred in these institutions is a matter of record and Senator McKenzie and her colleagues had ample opportunity in government to do something about it. Her high dudgeon is disingenuous.

It is common to describe Israel's settlements as ever-expanding, as Paul Willemsen does, (Letters, October 22) but not correct.

The settlements have barely expanded geographically since the mid-2000s when Palestinian senior negotiator Saeb Erekat admitted they took up less than two percent of the West Bank.

They certainly didn't prevent Israeli PM Ehud Olmert offering the Palestinians a state in land equivalent to the entire West Bank and Gaza in 2008, with the Palestinians to be compensated for the small amounts of land Israel would retain with land from inside Israel.

Tragically, the Palestinian Authority flatly rejected the offer. The new roads connecting the settlements were only necessary because Palestinian terrorists were shooting Israeli drivers on shared roads.

To add to Peter Brewer's article ("Warning EV buyers: this is not a free ride", October 22), in the UK electric car insurance is higher than for petrol cars. One insurer no longer offers electric car insurance because of the high cost of repairs. There is no reason to think this couldn't happen in Australia as well.

Amy Martin's assessment of Iori ("Two decades and still going strong", October 25) is spot on, but it was not the first Japanese restaurant in Canberra. As an 18-year-old, my first experience of authentic Japanese food was at the wonderful Asakusa restaurant upstairs in Kingston's Green Square - 35 years ago.

Given the recent Four Corners report on Snowy 2.0 about the bogged boring machine, the sinkhole, the cost blowout from $2 billion to $12 billion, the incomplete geological survey and more it should be cancelled immediately.

Former President Donald Trump hasn't grasped how bad it is that some of his most loyal backers are now testifying against him. I think Trump's days as a free man are numbered.

Re the rumoured "hotties list". Although young men will always be admiring attractive women, this is in particularly bad taste. The women should retaliate on the lines of "you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find your prince" by creating a "froggies list".

So Snowy 2.0 will cost at least $12 billion and not be completed until 2028 (if all goes well). It is a disaster. There have been plenty of opportunities for simpler, cheaper pumped-hydro schemes identified along the Great Divide. Mr Albanese just stop digging this hole.

Perhaps Diane Nash is correct (Letters, October 26). After all, there's not much point in Albo making important overseas trips to consult with our allies and trade partners and to attend world leaders' forums. Much better to stay home and ignore the need to promote our interests.

George Eliot, the noted English novelist and poet, said: "It is surely better to pardon too much than to condemn too much".

I recently listened to War Pigs by Black Sabbath. The pigs (Israel, Hamas, US, UK etc) are in full flight. The poor suffer, "Satan laughing spreads his wings". Where are the true leaders in this world? Imagine...

Glen Maxwell said in an interview about his record breaking innings in the ODI World Cup that he felt ill before going out to bat. It's just a gut feeling but maybe he had "the runs".