Letters to the editor: Māori should stand for council like everyone else

People who consider themselves Māori should stand for the council the same as everyone else, says a reader. Photo / File

I agree with Margaret Murray-Benge re Māori wards (Letters, August 29).

As a European, will I be able to stand for the Māori ward like any Māori can stand for the council?

If not, this is, in my view, leading to separatism, otherwise apartheid.

New Zealanders fought against this in South Africa. Do we want it here?

I understood the Treaty of Waitangi was for the people to become one nation.

People who consider themselves Māori should stand for the council the same as everyone else.

I believe we are all Kiwis. (Abridged)

Ida Davies
Pāpāmoa

Māori wards

Re Māori wards - your newspaper has been full of headlines and comment but lacks information on how it will work.

How is being a Māori defined?

We currently have a mixture of geographical wards and at large. Will there be an addition to the geographical allocation? Or would the Māori ward fit within?

Māori have non-voting roles on a number of council committees. Will these be dropped?

Even more important to me is there has never been an explanation as to why Tauranga City Council, without consultation, changed our simple voting system to STV.

This upset me in that I had to change my voting patterns. Can we have a referendum on the method of counting?

Would your newspaper publish what the results of the last election would have been if the count had been under the original simple system?

For me, a Pākehā, subject to how Māori is defined, the question of Māori wards is far less important than having a structure which is fair to everyone.

Get rid of STV for a start, and my preference is for fewer wards anyway.

Bill Capamagian
Tauranga

Respect is dead

RIP respect.
Yes, respect is dead, buried, and forgotten.

No more will a person be remembered who fought a war, rescued a person from a burning building, saved a drowning child, stopped a robbery, helped a fallen old person, picked up an injured dog from the roadside, went out of their way to serve a distraught customer, knocked on a neighbour's door during a storm, etc.

These gentle people, ones who put themselves in harm's way, or inconvenienced themselves to help one of us, are now forgotten.

Their tombstones left to fall and rust, their trophies are taken off the shelf, their mementoes flung out. We have no use for all our yesterdays, history is binned, time has no use for souvenirs or mementoes.

''Now'' time has no use for the past.

History should never have been. A mistake.

Jim Adams
Rotorua

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