Whanganui letters: Don't sell off city's top asset

One reader is not a fan of the Government's Three Waters proposal. Photo / 123RF

Letters to the editor

Re Three Waters ... Once it is sold it will never be ours again! Some people must have very short memories. Is this the very same-named Government that assured Whanganui that the Railway Workshops would never close? Ha!

But don't despair, the other lot are just as bad.

So, I ask of our elected council members, please think very carefully before accepting the 30 pieces of silver, keeping in mind that the ratepayers have already done the "hard yards" in the years gone by with the larger than normal rates we were forced to hand over to the council to allow the work to proceed to upgrade our water supply, sewerage and stormwater to what it constitutes today ... a well-maintained system for our city.

Do we really want to toss all our good work into another probably mismanaged pool that has the possibility of ending up exactly like the overpriced electricity supply we now have throughout New Zealand?

Not to mention that every property will be further taxed when the water meters are installed. And there's the assurance that the Three Waters won't ever be sold off by the Government.

This whole proposal has the definite look of a Tui ad ... yeah right! I vote NO to this proposal. [Abridged]

G. SIMPSON
Whanganui

Waxing lyrical

I spent Māori Language Week examining the origins of a song WaiTai made popular a while ago, "E Aha Ra Te Manu" (What is this bird?).

I discovered that the song's lyrics were modified from an old chant used in a ritual to make a timid young man still hanging out with his boyhood mates more attractive to young women.

This ritual was what I guess today's psychologists would call therapeutic role play.

A tohunga would send the lad into the forest to ritually kill one of a flock of little insect-eating birds and then proclaim he was now a bush falcon.

The falcons that fly above our house here at Ohakune are independent, strong, capable and super-confident, and, of course, any young men displaying this behaviour quickly become much more attractive to potential life partners, as 1st XV players often discover.

Tohunga also used chants to assist those of unsound mind.

"Turou Whakataha" helped a tohunga treat a patient whose head was boiling with anger (upoko-kuhua). He theatrically "ate" his patient's curses, then passed them out and down into the latrine pit, calming the patient enough to discover the source of their anger.

And the literary goldmine "Pinepine Te Kura" outlines how a tohunga trained his son from infancy to continue with the treatment of an entire community periodically weakened by what they thought was "maketu" (tinyurl.com/pptekura) but was actually mineral deficiency.

British colonists accused tohunga of practising makutu, or witchcraft, and fraudsters using karakia kikokiko were prosecuted. But it seems that most tohunga competently treated the afflicted with the same therapies now used by Western practitioners.

Indeed, Polynesian tuhuga were probably using these therapies thousands of years ago.

JOHN ARCHER
Ohakune

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