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Tonight Barry Jones and Jennifer Byrnes created another colourful atmosphere at the GlebeBookshop. Naturally, knowledge and science dominated the memoirs we had to have ...

All readers of the Media Dragon will remember that Barry Jones first came to public prominence as Pick-a-Box quiz champion, and from then on he has embraced a myriad of passions and causes. A Thinking Reed spans his remarkable career, from a lonely childhood in Melbourne of the 1930s and 1940s to the fight he led against the death penalty to his crusade to make science and the future prominent issues on the political agenda. He has worked tirelessly on both a global and local scale to rethink education, to improve and preserve our heritage, to revive the nations's film industry, and to build a better Australia. Almost unique among politicians, Barry Jones is held in enormous public affection. And while he reveals many insights into the political process - both the problems of office and the atrophy of Opposition - he concentrates above all on the life of the mind; a mind with deep, passionate and often witty insights into history, philosophy, music and literature. A Thinking Reed is a generous gift from an extraordinary Australian PS: Ach, Nifty, Neville Wran, laughted at the same places at Mal ;-)

In this context, reading the thought-provoking and hard-core irony bitten letters to the editor inside the newspaper which Mark Scott wounded - just like his father wounded the TAFE system - somehow the generational dots of comedy or errors are joined together ...

A skills shortage of employers' own making

Sorry to disappoint the boffins at the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, but broad-based skilled migration ("Skills crisis: migrants get fast-tracked", October 4) will never solve a skills shortage.

Recruiting overseas hairdressers will, for example, create more demand for accountants, then both professions create more demand for building tradespeople to build their homes, then more demand for cooks and all the other skilled workers already in short supply - including hairdressers. The consequent population growth will put more pressure on our limited water resources and create demand for engineers and construction workers to build the desalination plant the NSW Government recently put on hold. Spend the money training Australian youth and mature workers instead and the skills crisis can be solved.

-Dick Harfield Leichhardt

Rosemary O'Brien (Letters, October 4) wonders if people do their community service. They do. I am required to do at least 200 hours over six months for the crime of being unemployed. Centrelink doesn't know this but I had done about 300 hours before I registered. You see, I get more out of volunteering than I put into it. I can also get training credits from Centrelink. I am going to put mine towards a trip to China to do a TAFE course that is going to get me back into the paid workforce. By the back door, so to speak.

-Warren Heggarty Yagoona

Oh, woe is us. After spending many years in the building industry it beggars belief that employers and government are whingeing again about something they have created: a skills shortage.

When there was a union of substance in the industry, the first thing about which we would have a discussion, argument, plea or strike was how many apprentices would be employed on the site. This was determined by several things: the size of the project, its duration and the number of carpenters, electricians and so on. Employers had to be dragged kicking and screaming to employ apprentices. They and the government are complicit in the debacle we are now seeing.

-Wayne Murray Marrickville

Outsourcing Knowledge