Commenting on the story: ‘Environmental challenge’: Govt concern over trees axed for housing

This is happening in Unley: even on large blocks all trees are removed and the entire block filled with a residence and garage.

The State Government can fix this by legislating no more than 70% block coverage by buildings, as happens in Perth. – David Day

It is absolutely heartbreaking for residents to watch their suburbs denuded of large trees when developers clear-fell residential blocks prior to building new houses. It is well overdue that planning authorities strengthened our tree protection laws.

Apart from non-stop population growth and housing development, that other great slayer of trees is the Transport Department with their lust for ghastly intersection widenings when they boot homeowners out of their properties, cut down masses of trees and create great big bare ugly intersections which do little for transport times but destroy the history, character and amenity of local areas. – Evonne Moore

Commenting on the opinion piece: IR system needs top gear, not reverse

What an unhelpful article. The author targets unions whilst arguing they are largely irrelevant. So why the targeting?

The author rightly says that failure to achieve reasonable wage growth is the problem, but puts this down to external world economy factors. This totally ignores the massive growth in Australian business profits in the past 20 years (in that same world economy).

The author implies that productivity is a result of effort, presumably worker effort, which is a total fallacy. Genuine productivity results from business reinvesting its surpluses (profits) back into the business and then there is a larger “pie” from which to rewards its workers. The lack of productivity arises from lack of business investment and the declaration of larger dividends with insufficient government-led policy to drive productive investments.

Focus on unions as part of a general anti-union bash if you wish but don’t pretend this has much to do with worker wages, productivity growth and a fair balance between profits and wages. Let’s see some genuine contribution to the underlying issues here, not this old fashioned rant. Please! – Rob Edwards