The Whanganui Covid-19 vaccination centre on Victoria Ave is up and running. Photo / Bevan Conley
The Whanganui Covid-19 vaccination centre on Victoria Ave is up and running. Photo / Bevan Conley
I have just read Russell Bell's article on why the Covid vaccination is slow (Opinion, June 30).
This is another article amongst a myriad of articles on this subject, recently published in a variety of media.
Most of them have been written by or obviously prompted by the business community. SomeI admit have been slanted to people who appear to be missing their slot.
The others are obvious attacks on the Government and the Ministry of Health.
Most do not refer to the competency of the DHBs, which is variable to say the least.
These business "gurus" should know a little about supply and demand, but choose to ignore the fact that the vaccine producers would not have New Zealand in the front of their minds when considering their bottom line.
Thus far we are ahead of Australia in completely vaccinated people so that can't be too bad.
As for being at the bottom of OECD, I would rather our performance be based on deaths, cases, and community transmission and freedom to live a relatively normal life.
D Partner (Letters, June 29) asks if the use of the name Aotearoa is part of a scheme to quietly appease a small proportion of the community.
Perhaps Mr Partner has just arrived from Europe and is ignorant of our country's history.
In 1834 a group of leaders signed a Declaration of Independence, declaring Aotearoa an independent state.
Ignoring this declaration, European boat people continued to arrive in great numbers, and in 1840 a large number of Aotearoan leaders signed a treaty at Waitangi that protected indigenous people (then 70 per cent of our population) with the same rights as the immigrants.
The industrious local land-owners made the Waikato a prosperous farming region that the Europeans coveted.
In 1858 many Aotearoan leaders came together to select a king, in order to protect this land.
But completely ignoring both king and treaty, the Europeans imported an army, invaded that region, and drove the landowners away.
These robber barons continued their bloody conquests in Taranaki, the East Coast and the South Island.
By the 1890s many once-proud villages had become tumble-down and half-empty, their inhabitants decimated by war and epidemics of typhoid, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, smallpox, diphtheria, measles and influenza that reduced them to about 4 per cent of the population.
The final straw was the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed another 1600 villagers.
Is Mr Partner unaware that this genocidal holocaust is why indigenous are now only a small proportion of the community? Nevertheless, according to the treaty our European forebears signed, they are equal partners with us, although a lot more civilised.
I am very ashamed that my ancestors behaved in such an uncivilised, greedy, thieving way, and I try to do all I can to make amends. However, would I be correct in surmising that Mr Partner agrees with the heinous crimes our European ancestors committed?
JOHN ARCHER Ohakune
Homegrown name
If, as John Roughan (June 26) and D Partner (June 29) claim, use of the name Aotearoa is evidence of a hidden "Māori" agenda, then the moniker "New Zealand" points, via Abel Janzoon Tasman, to a long-running Dutch conspiracy.
This paranoia over a name is somewhat comical. Personally, I'll be happy with a new, homegrown label for our country, as long as, (and this is where my own paranoia kicks in), Sir John Key is not handed the job of designing any new flag.
