So much so it would seem, that PM Malcolm Turnbull saw a need – when announcing Peter Dutton will become Australia’s answer to Conan the Barbarian –  to follow the Shorten lead e.g. surrounding himself with “Darth Vader like “SAS personnel.

An exhibition from “malleable Mal” which, while possibly turning off thinking voters, may well have secured future electoral support from Star Wars fans.

Was it only me, or did anyone else notice during our PM’s “look at me –look at me” performance that he did manage to slightly resemble another “Star Wars” character, Obi-Wan Kenobi?   

Barry Swan, Balgownie

For all we know every vehicle travelling on public roads could be unregistered and uninsured. Why? Because there is no visible government certification to say that they are.

If you are unfortunate enough to be injured in a motor vehicle accident and the other party is unregistered and at fault, you will be liable for all your hospital bills.

In a cunning move, the New South Wales government have made sure they will not be liable ambulance transportation costs, by a recently introduced levy paid on compulsory Third Party Insurance policies – double bad luck if both crashed vehicles are unregistered – no third party insurance carried by one party.

It was different when I managed motor registries: every renewed registration was accompanied with a coloured label (sticker) that was attached to the windscreen as visual evidence of the annual registration date.

And to keep the public safe general duties inspectors, each day (7 days a week) roamed the countryside removing number plates from unregistered vehicles and then dutifully dropped them into my registry for destruction. Today chaos.

John Macleod, Berry

Reading about the police injustice in the USA. I myself am still amazed at the leniency given out by our magistrates. It will not be long before we as a law-abiding nation take matters into our own hands.

When you look at who gets out on bail for committing these terrible crimes.  I would say the people will turn against these soft Magistrates and Soft Judges.

Enough is Enough. So get tough and jail these monsters for a long period of time. Stop being afraid.

Lawrence Wren, Fairy Meadow

In reply to the letter by Reg Wilding "Can’t stop the climate movement" (Illawarra Mercury, Monday July 17, 2017), Mr Wilding, scaremongering is what Al Gore does best, and fear is the business model that has made him rich, despite his apocalyptic prophecies failing to materialise.

Any normal person with such an appalling record of accuracy as Gore, would be ashamed to show his face. Eleven years after his Inconvenient Truth movie scared little kids witless his warnings of climate armageddon have come to nothing. "Unless we take drastic measures the world would reach a point of no return within 10 years”, he told us then. Wrong. In fact the world has just been through almost 20 years in which there has been a hiatus in global warming, even as carbon dioxide has increased. China's Meteorological Association recently confirmed the warming pause that warming scientists didn't predict and warming journalists won't report.

The big victory for those in the climate movement is to have common supermarket shoppers forced to pay for plastic bags and to see powerless South Australian's treated like lab rats. 

Adrian Devlin, Fairy Meadow