I hope another stadium in Canberra ('Is a Civic stadium just a dream?', June 15) stays a dream rather than a nightmare.

The football codes supporting the proposal obviously benefit from a rate-payer funded stadium - we pay for it, and the codes continue to keep the broadcast rights. Furthermore, a new stadium is more likely to leak than the existing one if construction standards continue "developing"! My back-of-the-envelope estimate is that even if it was constructed for $200 million, a new stadium could still be cash negative every year. Wait for the proposals to "activate" the area - Uber planes to Tuggeranong? - as the current Chief Minister tries to justify his flight of fancy.

The government could ameliorate concerns by releasing a proper cost-benefit study, or asking the football codes to contribute, say, 50 per cent of the cost (I expect they would run a mile).

According to Ian Tulloch's article "Did a record-low turnout of voters skew the election?" (Focus, June 9, p17), the May 18 election saw more than 1.5 million registered voters chose to abstain, and it seems that the majority of these were young first-time potential voters. Commentators labelled the election the "climate change election", but many seasoned voters, particularly in Queensland, seemed more concerned about Labor's mixed messages on Adani and voted accordingly. First-time voters, who are mostly more concerned about climate change than their elders, were also expected to vote accordingly. If the majority of that 1.5-plus million had chosen to vote, Labor could well have won the election. It seems to me that many of these young voters, having been convinced by the polls that Labor would win comfortably, may have decided that their votes were not necessary to ensure a Labor victory.

Jeff Bradley's suggestion (Letters, June 10) that in the national anthem we replace "young" with "strong" is akin to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The anthem is so bad that it is an embarrassment; it needs to be ditched completely.

Consider its contents. Pages in stages (or is it stages in pages). Girt by sea. Golden soil. Land abounds in gifts [that are] rare. Yuk! An anthem should be inspiring, but I have not met any person who admitted to being inspired by this one.

Fortunately, a song exits which would be an excellent basis for an inspiring anthem. Its words "We are one but we are many, and from all the lands on Earth we come". I am, you are, we are Australian, it accurately describe us, especially our diversity and culture of inclusiveness. They are inspiring, and can be sung with gusto. I once heard the song performed to a concert audience of over 1000, and the effect was electrifying.

When I was growing up - a long time ago - men played footy for fun. After WWII when my Dad came home from the war he was made President of the Warrandyte football club, a little bush town outside Melbourne. It was great fun barracking with the locals on Saturday afternoon for the red-and-whites. Then football became big business revolving around money and became highly competitive which led to barrackers becoming really nasty experienced in the shocking and very hurtful way our star player Adam Goodes was ridiculed. This was a really ugly time in football. Now we have another star player Israel Folau banned from playing because he quoted words from the Bible critical of homosexuality. The Bible also condemns the bad behaviour of heterosexuals. So players freedom of speech now gets crushed if it interferes with the football clubs ability to make a lot of money. Not much fun playing football anymore.

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