Letters to the editor, The Daily Advertiser, November 3, 2021

The trend of closures started more than 20 years ago and the government has now only woken up that there is a problem.

Many smaller communities knew that it was vital for them to have banking facilities in their towns and solved the problem themselves without any assistance from government.

I was inaugural chairman of the Lockhart and District Community Bank Branch of Bendigo Bank where $450,000 was raised by local shareholders to open the branch in 2002.

The bank has been very successful and has contributed well more than $1 million back into community projects and facilities throughout the district.

Many other towns in the region, including Henty, Adelong, Tumbarumba and Narrandera, have done the same thing and now have successful banks helping their communities.

If they had not taken the initiative years ago they would now be left without any banks operating in their towns.

The major banks are not going to reopen and although a taskforce may have helped 20 years ago it is now a case of too little too late and a complete waste of taxpayers' money.

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Geoff Field has driven around his patch and observed that the climate is not changing at Gundagai ("No substitute for experience", The Daily Advertiser, November 1).

In fact, he says that this year is the coolest spring he has known in his "long life".

He is a little short on providing evidence for this conclusion, which differs somewhat from that of the many thousands of "white coated" scientists.

Geoff could have looked up this year's weather records for Gundagai on the Bureau of Meteorology's website to check his conclusion.

The official records show that the daily maximum and minimum temperatures from June to October this year hover around the averages over the last 30 years.

June's maximum and minimum were 0.4 and 0.7 degrees above the 30-year averages; July 0.2 below and 1.3 above; August 1.2 and 0.4 above; September 0.1 and 0.1 below; and October 1.0 and 0.5 below.

Are these temperatures really cooler than those remembered by Mr Field in his youth?

Gundagai records earlier than 1995 were not readily available to me. However, records are available for Wagga Wagga from 1909.

The latest available spring averages are till 2019.

These show that the 30-year spring maximum and minimum averages ending 2019 are 1.3 and 1.0 degrees higher than for the 30 years ending 1989.

I expect a similar change for Gundagai, but would welcome Mr Field correcting me with the actual data.

Geoff, memory can be unreliable. Please check the records before drawing conclusions.

By the way, if you had noticed what has been happening elsewhere in the world this year, you would have found incredibly high temperatures this past northern hemisphere summer.

Fires, severe storms and deaths of many people were the result.

Let us hope that our coming summer will not be like the one two years ago.

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