DAVE CAMERON
Whanganui
Stimulating jobless
Let's use the homeless and unemployed for NZ's future, by filming and documenting their plight and using the data to stimulate underperforming students to learn so they can get jobs.
My father instilled into his sons that "you gotta have a trade", as he had been through the Great Depression, when he worked on Relief Work (10/- /$1) a week, alongside lawyers, dentists and other professional people, pushing a wheelbarrow and planting marram grass at Wanganui Airport.
The Sallies could participate by saying graft not God provides; and Te Māngai Pāho could do the documentary with NZ on Air funding to get NZ back to No2 in the OECD, where we were before the advent of "pork barrel" welfare policies.
BOB HARRIS
Whanganui
Free speech is dead
Now here is a tip for all you racial, gender-inconclusive, left-wing, radical non-conformists. Pick up the phone and mention "security concerns" to protest against any speaker who may have a contra view to yours and you have won the battle before it has even commenced.
Phil Goff folded, Jan Thomas surrendered.
It appears laws have no place in our society when those most expected to uphold those laws can use their positions of "authority" to render the laws ineffective.
Free speech is dead in this country, because there will always be some person with an opposing view or slightly different skin colour who will claim oppression, ill-treatment or special rights and threaten protest action.
This is so farcical that if a person was to notify the council that the Anzac Day Parade was to be the target for a protest, the council would rightly have to forbid it for "security reasons". Can you imagine the damage a bunch of ageing veterans could do to a group of protesters who p****d them off?
D PARTNER
Eastown
Velodrome on agenda?
I agree with your scribe Zaryd Wilson's article in last week's paper on the need for a regional approach to sporting facilities, supported by the mayor, but lacking support from our two regional councillors.
I'm sure I speak for many in wondering if the velodrome roof is still strongly on our local agenda. Cooks Gardens, Wanganui and district and the very, very much wider region need that facility completed — and now.
TERRY COXON
Otamatea
Equality denied
Like almost everyone else, my ancestors came here by boat.
But I am denied equality by the separatists who increasingly rule all parliamentary thought. Or is it a social media "fake news" phenomena where a "bot" button can generate thousands of fictional support messages?
We have the Don Brash denial of "free speech" at Massey University fiasco, and the Whanganui High School Joseph Parker motivational speech "apartheid" reversal — and not a race relations conciliator in sight.
A deceptive monologue of past wrongs consistently emerges, followed by claims for earth, air and water. Settlement is achieved by more and more money being stripped from our collective economy by threat.
KEN CRAFAR
Durie Hill
Send your letters to: The Editor, Wanganui Chronicle, 100 Guyton St, PO Box 433, Wanganui 4500; or email editor@wanganuichronicle.co.nz
