The total lack of athletes in the arena left a vacuum never to be filled. We would have expected them to all have been led in behind our flag bearer bearing our one and only National Flag. They were apparently banned from doing so.

The remainder of the ceremony was over represented with Aboriginal content when one considers that our population is 97.5 per cent European and others and just 2.5 per cent Aboriginal.

A genuine corroboree - on the ground, not a stage - would have been well received.

Our overseas viewers may well have understood and appreciated such a performance.

What we were presented with was a hotchpotch of a corroboree with a mixture of nationalities and two women in the background wearing fur-skins of protected animals. 

However every cloud has a silver lining. Birmingham will have learnt a lesson here.

Peter Beattie has acknowledged the shortcomings of the closing ceremony which was partly designed and constructed by an American expert. Peter has kicked a cat this time.

I read with interest C J Buckland’s letter about the bins.

Furthermore, I might add that the idea of rubbish collection being fortnightly just will not work.

There will be wrong types of waste going into wrong binds. There will be people taking their bins to the tip, or just emptying them out in the bush somewhere.

When the powerful idiots involved (perhaps the council, maybe) realise what a stuff up it all is, then they will introduce a much better and more workable way of managing wastes.

I wholeheartedly applaud former Liberal minister Sussan Ley for taking a stand against the cruel live export trade.

It's high time we stopped acting like barbarians by needlessly sending millions of gentle Australian animals to a brutal, terrifying and agonising death by ritual slaughter.

Regardless of what measures are put in place to reduce deaths at sea, the reality is that once our animals are sold to foreign buyers, we have absolutely no control over what happens to them.

Just last week Animals Australia released footage of sheep at a Qatar abattoir being mercilessly beaten.

They also learned that Australian sheep from this same abattoir were being illegally sold to private buyers.

In 2017, 1,953,918 sheep and 879,958 cattle were exported.

Even if the government was interested in monitoring the treatment of our animals it would clearly be impossible to do so.

The only way to ensure our animals are not subjected to atrocities is to end live export.