Folau’s ‘offence’ pales compared with the behaviour of others

According to your poll, 89 per cent of respondents think Rugby Australia should not tear up Israel Folau’s contract (“Fans emphatic: don’t sack Izzy over comments”, 4/5). Folau has always been a model representative for sport. He is a true sportsman, in the real meaning of the word. For RA to attempt to vilify his name because of his religious beliefs is appalling.

The affair is made twice as offensive when one considers the examples of disrespectful behaviour, fuelled by drink and drugs, of other footballers in the past. These players seem to get a wrap over the knuckles and are back playing within a couple of weeks.

There are many more candidates who should be dropped for breach of conduct before Folau.

Tricia Johnston, The Gap, Qld

Israel Folau’s expressed attitudes on the subject are hillbilly nonsense at best, and should be kept to himself and his private conversations. That he utters them publicly in the context of receiving $1 million a year for his public performance indicates the sort of self-righteous arrogance that has had a number of election candidates rightfully disendorsed.

As a notional Christian, it makes more sense that anyone who believes in hell and condemns others to that fate upon death is usurping the right of the deity to make that decision and risks that fate themselves for such un-Christ-like arrogance.

M. Seward, Launceston, Tas

Coal’s great significance

Noel Pearson argues that it would morally justify coal’s continued use here by significantly reducing emissions overseas (4/5). Our 200 million tonnes of thermal coal exports are of great economic significance to us, but while we are the world’s largest coal exporter, this amounts to only 2.4 per cent of global coal production.

So, if we were to wipe out our biggest export, it will have almost no effect on climate change. Pearson dismisses the fact that our cleaner coal is better for the situation than the dirty brown stuff that would be used instead as “an attempt to sustain the unsustainable”.

It is his argument that is unsustainable. Then there is the hypocrisy that we should deny others access to cheap electricity via our coal in order to preserve it, morally, for our own use.

Shane Newell, Airlie Beach, Qld

Entrenched ABC bias

My thinking on the ABC has drifted over the years from sell it, to reform it, back to sell it (“Forces from within are destroying the ABC”, 6/5).

It’s quite apparent that the bias is so entrenched that just as anti-trust laws apply in the private sector when a service becomes too powerful and abusive of the market necessitating its break up, the ABC has reached that same point whereby time and again it has openly demonstrated its inability to be fair and balanced.

Absolutely no one, from the chairwoman, the board and managing director down, seems willing or able to bring it under control.

No doubt any attempt at reform would be resisted by the Friends of the ABC as well as the embedded partisan jihadis and insurgents and go beyond the political cycle necessary to oversee such reform.

Apart from that, the excision procedure would no doubt leave cells of the cancer to lie dormant, only to metastasise in the future and resume their destructive mission.

Jim Ball, Narrabeen, NSW

When Ita Buttrose was appointed chairwoman of the ABC, I thought we were heading for a new era of an unbiased broadcaster adhering to its charter. Sadly, I was wrong because Buttrose soon made it abundantly clear there was no bias and all the staff did their job according to the charter.

Now she has appointed David Anderson as managing director, a 30- year veteran insider. The inmates are well and truly in charge of the asylum.

Don Spence, Ashmore, Qld