Light years ahead
PETER Cook's suggestion {Letters, THE (Melbourne) AGE of 3 June} that ministers be congratulated for moving "one step closer to introducing a refund system on drink containers" highlights how far behind we are compared with, for example, the Netherlands.
There, it's not only drink containers that are collected: glass jam jars, peanut jars, gherkin jars, herring jars and "what have you" jars are placed on a conveyor belt by the customer after which a credit voucher is automatically issued that can be used in the adjacent supermarket to reduce the amount due.
Politicians frequently go on trips. Why don't they opt for Holland next time and study its collection system that puts the Netherlands light-years ahead of this country. No wonder Dutch footpaths, parks, streets and beaches are free from smashed glass containers.
Henk Verhoeven, Beacon Hill

Actually, Judith Ridge (Letters, June 4), pro-life commentators have not blamed the victim. Hundreds of US pro-life groups have condemned the shooting. National Right to Life has extended its sympathies to Dr Tiller's family, and has condemned unequivocally acts of violence whatever their motivation.
Henk Verhoeven Beacon Hill

After viewing German concentration camp killer Adolf Eichmann in the witness box in Israel in 1961, political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote about "the banality of evil". Arsonists are no less banal, writes Rowan Callick The Australian, 14/2.
A study of Eichmann’s life and crimes has suggested that Arendt’s analysis was at best naive, and at worst incorrect. Ms Arendt had attended only the beginning of Eichmann's trial. Up to Arendt's departure from the court room, Eichmann had tried very hard to undermine the charge that he was a dangerous fanatic by presenting himself as just another pen-pusher.
Had Hannah Arendt stayed for the whole of the proceedings, it would have become obvious to her that Adolf Eichmann was a person who had identified strongly with anti-Semitism and Nazi ideology. Obviously, he had been much more than someone who had dutifully subscribed to the Befehl ist Befehl culture.
Eichmann did much more than just follow orders: he introduced a range of new extermination policies. At the height of his career, he always stood by, and was proud of, his murderous achievements on behalf of the Third Reich. Eichmann's evil acts were overwhelming in nature - the antithesis of banal. Since we know nothing about Victoria's apprehended arsonists, we should refrain from 'doing a Hannah Arendt'.

We have heard a lot about the obviously deranged Catholic bishop who denies that the Holocaust, the genocidal murder of Jews by the Nazis, did happen. Even 12-year-olds in post-World War II Europe would have been aware of the horrors that had taken place in Nazi Germany's death camps.

Would it not be better to ignore statements uttered by those who border on being insane? Why all the publicity? Unless, of course, the silly Bishop is seen as yet another stick to beat the Catholic church with.

The mass killing of unborn children in the US - around 48 million since the Roe versus Wade decision in 1973 - has been termed a "holocaust". Presumably, abortionists, those who are unequivocally in favour of the practice, and perhaps most women who have undergone terminations, will distance themselves from the term.

Is it not reasonable to refer to the mass killing in America of about 48,000,000 unborn human beings, albeit very small ones, as a "holocaust"?

Same-sex marriage

The central issue in the same-sex marriage debate is whether society needs to maintain a heterosexual definition of marriage. People against same-sex marriages have cast it as a debate about the moral, legal and social acceptability of homosexuality and homosexual relationships. And while they admit that homosexual people and their relationships are entitled to respect, including in law, they propose that this should not give gays and lesbians the right to claim access to marriage.

Same-sex marriage proponents argue that marriage is first and foremost about two adults making a commitment to each other. To establish that it is discriminatory to exclude same-sex partners from marriage, gays and lesbians claim that the nature of the commitment between the partners of any same-sex marriage and those of any opposite-sex marriage is identical.

Significant is that the arguments put forward by the same-sex marriage lobby are primarily adult-centred: not surprisingly, the issue of children is of no consequence to them since same-sex unions are, by nature, always barren.

Discrimination...

It's interesting how developing human beings in wombs are referred to as "foetuses" if they are destined for some abortion mill, but are referred to as "babies" when they are wanted. The big Dutch insurer ING, too, is happy to refer to babies: "insuring babies" sounds much better and much more personal than "insuring foetuses".

I would love it if ING were to announce that it would immediately withdraw its investments in cluster munitions, those infernal devices that keep killing and maiming children in Lebanon and elsewhere because they are invariably scattered indiscriminately over wide areas where civilians live and move.

Banking on Deadly Cluster Munitions

While being extremely appreciative of those who demonstrated last Sunday in front of the Tasmanian parliament against cluster munitions, it would have been more appropriate if they had managed to do so in front of the headquarters of three well-known Australian banks and a Dutch plus French financial institution: each of the five has investments in plants that manufacture cluster munitions that keep killing and maiming long after they have been dropped from the air.