By Singapore Telecom

Copyright theage

Be mindful of separation of church and stateThe article “⁣Boys fall further behind in education”⁣ refers to Australia’s three education systems – government, Catholic and independent. I think the Catholic Church has done a good job in addressing a gap in the education system over the years by affording children an improved chance of attending university. However, it is troubling to me that a religion offers education. On the face of it, the two should have nothing to do with each other. The model of offering discounted higher quality education comes with the inclusion of teaching religion alongside fact-based subjects at a time in a child’s life when they don’t have the capacity to distinguish between the two. I’m happy for people to make an informed choice about religion when they have the capacity to do so, but the Catholic school (and other religious schools) model doesn’t allow for that.If government schools did a better job of providing a pathway for children who wanted to go to uni, then fewer parents would have to face the above dilemma when selecting a school for their child.

Philip James, Hampton East

Optus failingsOptus runs some of our most important telecommunications infrastructure and it can’t tell when its part of 000 isn’t working and has to wait for customers to call it in, and even then doesn’t respond for some hours. Meanwhile, people start dying due to no emergency response.Optus is owned by Singapore Telecom, which is owned by Temasek, which is the Singaporean pension fund, which means it is owned by the government of Singapore. Fines probably don’t mean much, unless we are talking billions. Too big to fail, but also big enough to stop doing things on the cheap.How about less money on public relations, and more money on strong systems that do what they are supposed to do?Ian McKenzie, Canterbury

Put humans to workThe tragic consequences of the breakdown of the Triple Zero emergency line clearly needs investigation. This is just the beginning of a larger social problem. The real issue is about any organisation’s capacity to respond to its users.Increasingly, automated services stand between humans and the services they wish to access. A caller’s query is often responded to by someone without power or a real name. The corporate response, a policy of zero tolerance for users who express their frustration exacerbates the situation. There appears to be little attempt by the corporation to wonder what is going on that people feel so angry and alienated from those who are, in fact, paying for their expertise and service.It appears that ability to sit down with a customer and work out how best to respond to a problem is now a luxury that business-oriented organisations will not afford. Once, a help person advised me, in writing, that the reason my phone was not working was due to the hills surrounding my residence. All well and good except I live on a flat farm block with a phone tower within several kilometres of my home. It transpired that there was a fault in the tower. That my partner was seriously ill was a factor in my concern. We were lucky that there was no emergency. Is this failure of humanity one reason for the social unrest we are seeing today?Christine Vickers, Lockwood