Talking of "pushing an agenda" such is the situation with the article `Chance to stand up for LGBTI resilience’ by Dr Sarah Dalton (Illawarra Mercury, Saturday October 14, 2017).

Dr Dalton's support for same sex marriage mirrors that of the AMA's position which has been heavily criticised by a large number of doctors and the opposing view is given in a paper well titled `Misleading the public, Neglecting the Child - Medical Critique of the Australian Medical Association's Position Statement on Marriage Equality’ (July, 2017).

Dr Dalton states in her article: "The most hurtful debate about marriage equality critiques the ability of same-sex couples to parents, claiming their children have poor psychological outcomes. But there's just no truth to these statements."

Sadly for Dr Dalton the paper `Misleading the public, Neglecting the Child’ refers to several published peer-reviewed studies that do indeed find "poorer health or psychosocial outcomes' for children raised in same-sex parented families" which expose the truth under the heading `The AMA's suppression of evidence of harm to children’.

Dr Dalton continues "Many credible scientific papers show that children parented by same-sex couples have very similar outcomes to their peers".

Again this is a similar position to that in the AMA's "position statement" which cites only two authorities supporting its position, ie Deborah Dempsey and Simon Crouch.

Crouch's study does not allow statistically significant findings and Dempsey's report relies on small, biased and unrepresentative studies and the few large representative studies she quotes show on balance, disadvantage to children of homosexual households.

We can only conclude that the AMA and Dr Dalton have wilfully mislead the public.

Bob Patrech, Figtree

The Greens’ David Shoebridge should focus on more important issues other than how many firearms that the law abiding citizens have.

He highlighted the person from postcode 2518 as having 141 firearms.

So what? He is a collector.

Like other people who collect beer cans, beer coasters, stamps and motor cars.

He should be more concerned with the selling off of our major assets, ie. land, power, coal etc.

Warren Fleming, Balgownie

The nation’s wealth and assets are being divided between politicians and their capitalist masters.

There are millions of taxpayer dollars being gifted to private enterprise with no return for the people and there are 600,000 children living in poverty plus millions who are homeless.

Yet scant regard is given to their plight as the profits of the few is more important.

We are being privatised into poverty and when there are no more working Australians to tax where will the pollies perks come from as their futures fund will soon run out and their rich mates will not be able to support them at their present life style.

Unless the calibre of those wanting to serve the Australian people in an honest way improves, with the nation coming first, we are doomed to becoming a third world country.

This because of a corrupt political system that is hopelessly out of date.

When it comes time to vote again just who can we elect with any hope that this nation will become a place of both equality and true democracy.

Brian George, Berkeley