DEAR News Of The Area, ON behalf of all the members of SeaSide Singers Community Choir, past and present, I would like to respond to Diana Souter’s letter to the Editor (published 19/03/26) announcing her retirement from the group.  Diana in her inimitable style, has beaten me to the punch by her public announcement! However, […]

DEAR News Of The Area, HAPPY Easter! Do you feel loved? We all want to feel loved! But even when human relationships let us down, God never stops loving us. And he demonstrated this by sending Jesus to be with us – to save us and give us life to the full! Easter eggs and […]

DEAR News Of The Area, YES, I am retiring! So it is with some trepidation and regret that I sit down to write this letter. For those who do not know, the SeaSide Singers Community Choir began after I placed a tiny advert in The Examiner newspaper in February 2009. So we started with 50 […]

DEAR News Of The Area, It seems the newspaper is flogging the dead horse to resurrect another shot at addressing the unacceptable risk of two infamous intersections, Bucketts Way and Medowie Road, as well as roasting Labor politicians. “Funding promises for highway intersections” (NOTA 17 April 2025) informs me of one certainty, the paper knows […]

DEAR News Of The Area, It is curious that in the 6 March NOTA article titled “Port Stephens Council reaffirms stance on offshore wind” that a union representative backed by the Labor Environmental Action Network asserts there was consultation. Justin Page even described it as “absurd” that councillors were unaware of any consultation. Yet I […]

DEAR News of the Area, All wars are tragic, inevitably causing unnecessary death, destruction, chaos and misery, at great financial and social cost. Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter prohibits war, calling for member states to: “refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political […]

DEAR News Of The Area, This is a response to Ian Roberts, Fingal Bay (Letter to the Editor, 19 February). Mr Roberts claims there was “no political mandate” for offshore wind. The record tells a very different story: it was opposition groups, not Labor candidates, who turned offshore wind into a federal election issue. Social […]

DEAR News Of The Area, IT’S somewhat laughable that Robina Badger (Letter to the Editor, 19 February) felt “stunned” by community uproar about an offshore power station (wind farm). There was no political mandate: I’ve lived for 36 years in this coastal strip without hearing one serious election candidate grandly promising to take power generation […]

DEAR News Of The Area, I WRITE in response to Kathy Brown’s (5 February) and Robina Badger’s (19 February) letters. I am a 50-year resident of Port Stephens and as Secretary of The No Offshore Turbines Port Stephens (NotPS) group I have been at the forefront of the community effort to protect the integrity of […]

DEAR News Of The Area, I AGREE wholeheartedly with Kathy Brown’s letter (5 February). I felt frustrated and a little intimidated by the very noisy and aggressive campaign to dismiss the idea of an offshore windfarm, before the survey even got off the ground. What happened to all the people who voted overwhelmingly for Labor […]