My dictionary says a contract is an agreement, a written one, enforceable by law. It will however be a contradiction if the NRL try to argue that Sonny Bill Williams has breached his contract (''Gallop pleads with IRB to help with SBW saga'', July 28, p20).

The precedent has been set many times when coaches and players have been released from contracts when it suits a club and the NRL to do so.

You can't sack a player or coach from a contract when they are under-performing and then cry foul when an over-performer is pinched by someone with more dollars.

If only Todd Carney had gone wee wee instead of just wee! The spots left by these players will allow the real stars, like Marc Herbert and the other Carney, shine.

I can only hope that when Money Bill goes all the way home he doesn't get a jersey anywhere in the NRL. Au revoir Sonny, a reservoir Todd!

Jon Clarke, Isabella Plains

Living centres

I'm pleased to see people starting to question planners' Y-Plan theory of ''decentralising'' Canberra into a number of town centres, and expecting people to live self-contained lives, living, working and playing in and around the one centre (e.g, Letters, July 27 and 29).

Our planners of the 1960s were disciples of Ebenezer Howard, the father of the town-planning profession who, in 1899, advocated self-contained and self-supporting garden cities outside London as a means of getting the poor out of the slums.

The mistake our planners made was in not recognising that the circumstances facing Howard don't exist today; there aren't civic slums that the poor live in.

With motor cars (which didn't exist in Howard's day) travel between, say, Civic and Gungahlin is easy. And, as Tom Waring says, there are a number of reasons why people will live in one place and work or play in another.

Thus there's nothing to be gained by a policy of ''decentralisation'', and locating government departments in the outer town centre. Let factors other than ''planning efficiency'' dictate how Canberra develops, and where federal government departments are located.

R. S. Gilbert, Braddon

Suitable lodging

Richard Griffin's defeatist attitude to a new Prime Minister's Lodge is astounding (''New Canberra home for PM needed'', 29 July, p3).

Mr Griffin's Official Establishments Trust has advocated the building of a new Lodge year after year in its annual reports. Why bother when he believes that politicians will do nothing about it because they would be cowed by the inevitable media onslaught?

This country has reached a deplorable state if decisions of government are to be dictated by what the media may or may not think. Sure, there would be the familiar media outcry over what they would perceive, wrongly, as waste and pretension.

But if the nervous Nellies among our politicians won't wear that, then there is another way, as I suggest in The Prime Minister's Lodge: Canberra's Unfinished Business.

That is to remove politicians from the project and use the Trust and the Australiana Fund to drive it forward.

Apart from dismissing my idea to sell the Lodge and Kirribilli House as ''rubbish'', Mr Griffin advances no reasons for keeping these dwellings.

Why should there be a second prime ministerial residence on the shores of Sydney Harbour? What purpose does it serve apart from providing a bed for Mr Rudd on his occasional visits and accommodation for freeloading VIPs?

Four years ago the Labor MP Bob McMullan wanted Kirribilli sold because it was an ''anachronism''. Its status in this regard hasn't changed.

Let's sell the Lodge and Kirribilli and use the funds to build a house on Stirling Ridge in keeping with the dignity and importance of the PM's position as the leader of our great democracy.

Graeme Barrow, Hackett