Having signs in te reo Māori and English should be embraced, says a reader. Photo / NZME
Having signs in te reo Māori and English should be embraced, says a reader. Photo / NZME
Letter of the week
NZ political shift back to the 1950s
When you live in a democracy you expect changes of Government but you do not expect a new Government to reintroduce policies that take the country backwards.
Even though National and NZ First campaign slogans referred to “Taking ourCountry Back” or “Getting NZ Back on Track”, I was surprised at how far back they plan to go.
The coalition policies are like taking New Zealand back to the 1950s where so many citizens smoked, women and Māori “knew their place”, education was definitely about the basics and the only history ever taught was about how wonderful Britain was having colonised a huge part of the world.
I grew up in this period and New Zealand was insular and primitive.
New Zealand has come so very far in the past 50 years and yet the two parties representing 14 per cent of the population have managed to wag the dog that is National, the major party in the coalition.
As an older Pākehā woman I do not speak te reo but am thrilled that my grandchildren do. I love signs in English and Māori, that Māori is spoken on public broadcasting and am not confused by any of it — I welcome all of it.
The cost of congestion (HOS, Nov 19) in Auckland has been estimated at $1 billion for at least 10 years. The real cost must be twice that. Congestion is said to be caused by employers requiring staff to be at work at set times, usually 7-9am to start and 4-6pm to finish. There are just under 209,000 employers in Auckland causing, say, $2b of loss to congestion every year, an average of $100,000 per employer.
The enormous bureaucracy and cost of installing ANPR cameras everywhere and the staff to bill more than a million employees driving to and from work every single work day can be saved by a direct charge to the employer. My guess is that congestion will disappear pretty quickly and it will cost little to implement.
Mark Nixon, Remuera
No tracking for me
I am shocked that Act wants to pursue a policy of installing satellite tracking devices in every vehicle as part of a congestion charging scheme. How on earth is such a policy considered libertarian? I would have thought mass government tracking of people’s private property would be something the Act party would be dead against. If Act show up on my doorstep and hand me a tracker to be installed in my car I’ll be telling them exactly where they can stick it.
Chris Hipkins has a nerve saying the new Government will take the country backwards. What does he think Labour has done for the last six years?
Wendy Tighe-Umbers, Parnell
Stop whinging
There’s been whining from the “opposition-in-waiting” and media about the weeks it’s taken to negotiate New Zealand’s first three-party coalition agreement.
But does anyone realistically think the three main parties on the left would have finished any sooner or in fact at all?
And does anyone recall any previous coalition making their agreement public?
Bernard Jennings, Island Bay
A reader asks why the Army was not deployed for months longer to assist the Cyclone Gabrielle clean-up. Photo / Mark Mitchell
Make clean-ups more alluring
After Cyclone Gabrielle’s destruction on the East Coast we often wonder why the Army was not deployed en masse for months longer to assist the clean-up — going from farm to farm to clear land and waterways, clearing silt and slash from riverbanks and beaches and helping flooded home owners. Other than the Bailey bridges erected there was so much more the Army could have done to help, even now.
If all they needed was strip clubs, skinny dipping and sexual entertainment to entice them it could have been arranged.
Hilary Sampson, Gisborne
Palestinian plea
The total land area of countries recognised as Arab is approximately 13 million square kilometres. The total land area of Israel is 22,145 square kilometres.
Palestinians are ethnically and culturally Arab, showing a common language, Arabic, and many cultural and historical ties with other Arab communities in the Middle East and North Africa.
Israel’s claim for its land is based on cultural, historical and biblical connections dating back thousands of years.
Would it be too much to ask that the Arab nations absorb Palestinians into their own communities since they have so much in common, or actually form a Palestinian State within an Arab country?
Bernard Walker, Pāpāmoa
New world order emerges
Correspondent Jock MacVicar wonders why transport infrastructure costs in New Zealand are so much higher than in India.
All costs throughout Asia are much lower than in Western-type countries such as New Zealand.
That is why when a country’s GDP is measured using the more accurate PPP method — which takes into account the much higher purchasing power of Asian countries when spending the same amount of money — China’s economy is much larger than the United States, with India in third place, and it has now been announced that the economies of the Brics alliance have overtaken the G7 alliance.
