Letter of the week: Ainsley Dermody, Katikati.
A sleeping coastal village at 1am is shattered by a screaming engine, a loud bump and an even louder crash. The power goes off and a car horn goes on and on and on.
Outside, a woman is calling emergency services, one teen is running
down the road and another is screaming, holding an RTD with blooming lip.
And an unconscious teen driver is being shaken by a teen girlfriend, screaming for him to wake up.
I pull her off, hoping she hadn't worsened a possibly broken neck.
Three men arrive in an SUV to light up the scene. An off-duty fireman clears around the car and in bare feet among dropped power lines, holds the driver's hand.
Three fire trucks and an ambulance arrive.
In the morning, roadblocks are manned at either end of the scene and there is no power for breakfast.
Where are the hungover 17-year-olds and their parents? Shouldn't they be helping clean up and doing an apology door-knock round the neighbourhood?
Who pays the fire brigade; the ambulance; makes a cuppa for the road patrol; cleans up the mess; learns from this? Who pays the ferryman?
Jammed in
It's bad enough that some of the new homes being built in Glen Innes, as part of the Unitary Plan to accommodate more people in the city, are simply ugly (Weekend Herald, February 13). What all have in common is a total lack of adequate parking.
With three and four new homes now built where one previously stood, and each typically housing big families, their respective car fleets now jam the streets and berms.
Clearly these developments have been planned with no other purpose than to jam as many people as possible into the area, and to hell with any concerns about the environment created.
The city and its people deserve better.
M P Evans, Tāmaki.
Basket cases
The problem towns such as Queenstown (Weekend Herald, February 13) have is of their own making. They have "put all their eggs in the one basket" filling it with tours, hotels and eateries with no diverse other industries.
There are only so many tourist and eatery type businesses that will survive when their customer base is shut off. The little one-street village of Kamō in Whāngārei has 24 eating places, which is a ridiculous number. These towns, especially the ones furthest from Auckland, should have incorporated other industries and horticulture in order to spread the employment load.
Also, they cannot expect Kiwi to pay overseas prices. Queenstown, in particular, has been a boomtown for decades and now it wants a government bailout. What happened to "putting some aside for a rainy day"? This pandemic surely can be classified as a "rainy day".
What have the Mayor and council done to encourage diversification in Queenstown?
Marie Kaire, Whāngārei .
Flight of fancy
Your correspondent Chris Parker (Weekend Herald, February 13) makes a good point - why are Labour and the Greens so intent on damaging Air NZ?
One answer may be that Air NZ is a soft target, and attacking that company is easier than tackling far more important issues themselves. It is time they did. Labour should urgently be tackling the housing shortage, which will require major changes apart from revamping the RMA. The Greens should be tackling pollution and climate change with vigour; electric vehicles will barely scratch the surface of these problems, yet this seems to be considered by them a bold move. Creating this diversion with AIr NZ is useful for both Labour and the Greens for this reason.
I have voted for each of these parties, and each more than once; but I now expect them to start performing.
Claire Chambers, Parnell.
Send in the clown
The Emmerson cartoon of David Seymour in his clown costume (Weekend Herald, February 13) was absolutely spot-on.
The only thing missing from his depiction was a gun, given that Act is now the party of the gun-lovers' lobby - he's the Charlton Heston of New Zealand politics.
And there's nothing scarier than a clown with a gun.
Clyde Scott, Birkenhead.
