Heart can rule head in love but at work Gladys is a highly capable leader

Gladys Berejiklian is not the first remarkable, astute and high-achieving woman to have had the emotional wool pulled over her eyes. I hope she can take some comfort from the amazing and resilient Ronni Kahn, founder of food rescue charity OzHarvest, whose story featured in The Weekend Australian Magazine recently. Kahn provided similar stories of letdown in a relationship.

Sure, a heart can rule the head when it comes to love, but as Kahn and Berejiklian have shown, heads can still be screwed on the right way when it comes to dynamic leadership and achievement.

I won’t be changing my vote, so hang in there, Gladys.

Patricia Perrett, Wyong, NSW

Gladys Berejiklian’s openness before ICAC, and thereafter, deserves positive recognition. She may have missstepped in her private life, but as Premier she has done very well. Her colleagues should remember this and not lose their nerve.

Berejiklian’s professional integrity remains intact and that is what matters. There is no place right now in NSW for political shadow boxing, infighting and one-upmanship over an affair that will soon be history.

Michael Schilling, Millswood, SA

Give me enough money, lawyers and time and I could even find some transgression or other by Mother Teresa. How many lawyers does ICAC employ and how much do they cost? Who is working on the cost-benefit analysis? Do we really need to know if Gladys Berejiklian had an affair? Should we be looking at anybody’s private text messages?

This whole fiasco tells us what lawyers will do to keep their snouts in the publicly funded trough. Shut it down.

Jack Robinson, Ashwood, Vic

The inquisitors of ICAC, whose investigative methods were once approvingly characterised by one of its own as “pulling wings off butterflies”, have already destroyed the careers of two perfectly good NSW premiers. This star chamber does not deserve to collect yet another scalp.

Gladys Berejiklian’s parliamentary colleagues — even across the political divide — should display sufficient moral fibre and fellow-feeling to stand by a worthy Premier who appears to have been guilty of nothing worse than the very human failing of giving her affections less than wisely.

Terry Birchley, Bundaberg, Qld

Lost middle ground

Here in Australia, we are not strangers to the deepening polarisation described by Greg Sheridan (“American dream consumed by hatreds of the left and right”, 14/10) We, too, seem to be living on archipelagos of opinion; with conservative thinkers at times unwilling to even risk voicing opinions that do not conform to those of an increasingly intolerant Left.

Sheridan suggests Joe Biden might “tack to the centre and seek national unity”. However, whether in the US or Australia, I’m left wondering where the middle ground is between some of the more fraught issues of today.

Where is the middle ground between a merit-based appointment and an appointment to satisfy a diversity quota? Where is the middle ground between holding dear the values of the Enlightenment and believing that reason itself is a white male heterosexual construct?

Where is the middle ground between teaching Bruce Pascoe as fact or as fiction? Where is the middle ground between believing that hard work is a key to success and believing that statement to be not a universal value but rather “an assumption of whiteness”.

If we can’t agree on something as basic as that, I despair of us finding middle ground on much at all.

I fear that the polarisation will further deepen, that the centre will continue to elude us and that today’s archipelagos are likely to become tomorrow’s islands.

Jane Bieger, Brisbane, Qld