Cynical view of rosy items

A109 Light Utility Helicopter flight with mayor Gisborne City from the air in November 2023.

Opinion

I would not normally reply to comments on any letter I have written, but in this case my qualifications for doubting the workforce population statistics have been called into question.

I have been a journalist for over 40 years covering all manner of local body, governmental and technical issues.

I hold university papers on topics such as statistics. I do not rely on a personal BS meter — instead I put faith in common sense and background research.

There may well be more traffic on the roads — more people own cars these days and there is the rise in logging truck numbers.

But that does not necessarily equate to a rise in population, or an increase in the workforce of the size that I questioned.

I actually went back through StatsNZ's own figures for my letter.

I might point out that I made no comment as to whether the claimed increase was a good or bad thing — I leave it to others to decide whether growth is good, especially when locally we cannot cope with many of our current needs.

Finally, I have noted over the past year the steady stream of PR articles in the paper from council and government agencies, all patting each other on the back for various projects and purportedly getting people back to work.

Having covered unemployment and its downstream effects for many years, I have a decidedly cynical view of items that repeatedly tell us that everything is “rosy in the ‘hood”.

Roger Handford