Letters: Cost-of-living crisis requires urgent action

We need to immediately drop GST on nourishing food, writes one reader. Photo / NZME

Tautoko Debbie Ngarewa-Packer on the urgency in dealing with the cost-of-living crisis.

While I support the Government's decisions in their handling of the pandemic response in New Zealand, it is now that we need immediate action regarding dropping GST on nourishing food, taxing unearned wealth, and making available the unoccupied houses across the motu.

CHANNA MIRIAM KNUCKEY
Gonville

Subsidies favour rich

Subsidies on electric cars are causing a wound in our society as it is only the rich who can collect it.

Then to rub salt into the wound, they get to travel on our roads for free, while the rest of us have to pay to use the roads.

Labour is supposed to be the friend of the working class, it seems it has changed sides.

GARTH SCOWN
Whanganui

Rates reduction please

My concern for writing is: over the next few months the incumbent councils will be setting budgets for the 2022-23 rating year.

Then, through to October 8, ratepayers will have the privilege of selecting new councils for the 2022-25 term.

Budgets for Whanganui District Council and Horizons need to cut back from this year's rates because, at 5.7 per cent and 8.4 per cent increases, they do nothing to help Covid-19 affected ratepayers in meeting all their living increases, fuel, groceries, shortage of work and downturn in businesses, to name just a few of our community problems.

Whanganui District Council (through Whanganui District Council Holdings) purchased the pilot school, then an unused rest home, followed by a motel in Liverpool St, all without consultation with stakeholders, the ratepayers.

It was recently granted a $200,000 interest-free loan to help keep it afloat.

The question must be asked: Is operating these businesses really a council function?

The upcoming budget needs to clearly reduce or remove the empire being built by a few, with ratepayers' money, and leave it to private enterprise. [Abridged]

LES WRIGHT
Whanganui

Not so lucky

The editorial in Saturday's Chronicle tells us "Western countries are probably lucky to have someone of US President Joe Biden's experience in the White House during this (Ukraine invasion) crisis".

It is true that Biden has experience in failing to deal with a Russian invasion of Ukraine, the last time it happened Biden was vice-president.

It is also true that Biden has many decades of experience as a politician, marked by his continual flip-flopping on issues to gain political support, his failure to keep his campaign promises.

Many years ago a US senator said they should not allow the continued expansion of Nato towards Russia's borders as that would be seen as threatening Russia. That was Senator Joe Biden. Now that is an unpopular view, so Biden doesn't say that any more.

Biden has shown the international community, and especially the bad actors like Russia, exactly what he is made of by his policies and actions in the past year. The utter disaster of the withdrawal from Afghanistan, unnecessarily costing military and civilian lives, leaving millions of dollars of military equipment for the Taliban while blaming his own failure of leadership on his predecessor, is a prime example.

Claiming to support the importance of border integrity in Ukraine, Lebanon, and other countries while acting against border integrity in the US itself is another.

Biden has taken the US from the long-sought energy independence, finally achieved under the previous administration, and made them more dependent on oil and gas from foreign nations. This is a hazard to both the US economy and security. But Biden claims that all his actions against US energy production have had no effect on US energy production.

Lucky is not the correct word for the position Western nations find themselves in with Biden in the White House.

K.A. BENFELL
Gonville