I'm disturbed to note that the CSIRO is having its centenary this year while retrenching staff and that Australia is spending about half on research and development as a per cent of GDP compared with the US and the OECD.

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There is plenty the CSIRO could do to help Australia productively. In my area the Australian building codes have had little spent on them in recent years and have become unwieldy and difficult to use. Builders often just guess to save turning their brains inside out trying to understand many of these codes.

The CSIRO needs to be funded to re-establish the Experimental Building Station to update these codes with tiers. The first tier being simple conservative rules for busy builders, the second tier requiring some calculations and being less conservative and the third tier accurate calculations. The house gutter and downpipe code would be a good start.

Public interests ignored

When are the major parties going to listen to the public whom they claim to represent?

Most people's standard of living is going down while profits are going up. What has caused this?

The Coalition pushed an agenda of corporatisation of NGOs and councils. Privatisation was encouraged when many social services are best run by government or public agencies.

Look at aged care and NDIS - privatisation has raised the cost of a gardener from $40 to $50 per hour to $80 to $90 per hour. Home care packages have to include costs not just for a wage but for the private management structures of for-profit businesses. Both of these systems have become about money rather than service.

Business interests have too much say over policies and governance. Look at the gambling and building development industries. They can afford lobbyists. It is a bit like when the management of the "free" press is taken over by board members who are all representatives of big corporations. Whose interests are they going to want heard? Not the public interest for sure.

Recently it has been proposed that job seeking should be put back in the hands of the public service because the "for-profit" model has failed miserably. Why is there not a fair distribution of the wealth generated by the mining and gas industries? Again government listens to the b.s. of corporations over the interests of their constituents.

Richard Henshaw, Stirling, SA

Labor's record on debt

Ian Douglas (Letters, September 4) likes to attribute the national debt to the Coalition. Funnily he doesn't mention Labor's request for every Australian who got the COVID-19 jab to be paid $300 from taxpayers' money. You do the maths and see how much further debt this would have put us in.

Albanese in opposition complained that the Coalition should extend JobKeeper payments, but when in power he declined to do what he said the opposition should do. He also fails to mention it was the Labor state premiers and territory that unnecessarily locked down their citizens for prolonged periods without medical advice, who then demanded money and got it from the federal Coalition government to cover for their gross mismanagement.

He also fails to admit that the Howard/Costello government left the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2007 with a surplus of $17 billion and net assets of $29 billion, who in turn left the incoming Abbott Coalition government in 2013 with a $19 billion deficit and net debt of $153 billion. Former Labor prime minister Julia Gillard wasted half a billion tax dollars to Islamic schools in Indonesia and the cost of 50,000 illegal........

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