Vaping's role in helping to achieve smoking reduction is not negated by the council's policy. Linking smoke and vape-free spaces to a smoke-free policy is not to brand vaping as evil but to acknowledge that vaping is not health-risk free. Rather, a smoke and vape-free spaces policy supports the work of health services by encouraging the best option for good health: No smoking or vaping.
Aside from this, vaping is a look-alike activity to smoking, and does not help denormalise smoking behaviour.
Contrary to Mr Waters' editorial, there are reports of vaping being an entry point to smoking. Fortunately, there's also evidence that vaping can help smokers to stop altogether, but smoking in public spaces is not necessary for successful quitting.
The smoking cessation support offered through our health services provides access to nicotine replacement products, cessation medications and much needed quit support.
Stop Smoking Services provide support within the context of a structured and successful quit programme, and quit coaches will certainly work with smokers who want to use vaping as a quitting aid. Let's also note that vaping is no more effective as a quit support than other nicotine products.
Stopping smoking has been proven to save lives and reduce health issues for people who choose to quit smoking. And while it is reasonable to consider vaping within a harm reduction context, it hasn't yet been shown to achieve this benefit.(Abridged)
JOHN MCMENAMIN
Chairman, Whanganui Tobacco Advisory Group
Power rules
Don't you think this business about Metiria Turei is a bit of a sideshow? In the same way that the Aaron Gilmore and Todd Barclay and Rodney Perkbuster affairs were sideshows?
These matters are certainly not unimportant; in fact, they give one a frisson of schadenfreude, but they more or less affect only the MPs involved.
Even Bill English claiming a housing allowance to which he was not entitled, and then having to pay back $32,000, was bad enough, but not a major scandal.
What we should really be concerned about, and what we are not getting, is the sort of leadership that considers equally the needs of all New Zealanders -- not only the comfortable, the outright wealthy and the business lobbies.
The worrying housing crisis, for example, which the Prime Minister outrightly denied recently, the squeezing of the funding of health and education, which is causing doctors and schoolteachers to speak out to make us aware of the deteriorating positions of schools and hospitals.
The Department of Conservation is almost being treated as a government liability while it struggles to protect our environment. Our carbon emissions are increasing, contrary to the Paris agreement, and our leaders pretend not to notice.
In the meantime the Government rolls out the pork barrel of tax cuts, and if they get re-elected with the help of that perennial sideshow, Winston Peters, nothing will change.
Promises of fairness and equality will be forgotten, and it will continue to be government of the powerful, by the powerful, for the powerful.
I D FERGUSON
Whanganui
Get out and vote
At last it's election time, when we drown in political propaganda. "Vote Me?" "No! Vote for me?" The three-year ballet of fake change.
With the USA and France attracting just over 40 per cent of the populace to the polls, it is clear we are giving up on this ideology called "democracy"?
"One person, one vote."
The migrant flood is distorting our infrastructure and the Treaty train seeking "self determination" rolls on.
Our wages fall and our regions decay as jobs transfer to the main cities, as they have for decades.
The financial "surplus" is a myth on the backs of the poor and at the expense of health and education. The tools of enlightenment! "Tell the truth!"
As hackers backdoor the NSA and our key computer services we have this inane call for "electronic voting". I can walk to the voting booth, thanks!
We don't need computer programmes that can allow "fractional counting and no audit trail".
Let's also cut the number of MPs as per our last referendum? Politicians of every ilk who want entry to Parliament on the grounds of gender, religion or ethnicity will result in the demise of New Zealand.
Think before you vote, but get there.
KEN CRAFAR
Wanganui
Evans family
I am seeking any descendants of George and Sarah Evans, who lived in Whanganui during the late19th and early 20th centuries.
George was a ganger on the railways and was killed in a shunting accident in the ballast gravel pit in Palmerston North in April, 1904.
He is buried in the Heads Rd cemetery.
We know that George and Sarah had five children. They had earlier lived in Foxton before moving to Whanganui some time around 1890.
Unions Manawatu, in conjunction with the Palmerston North City Council, intend to erect an information board recognising George beside the existing Workers' Memorial that is in the old gravel pit, which is now known as Memorial Park. An event remembering workers killed, injured or made ill at work is held each year at the memorial.
I would be interested to hear from anyone who might know of George and his family. I can be contacted by email on john.shennan@psa.org.nz or by phone on 0274418172.
JOHN SHENNAN
Palmerston North
