Your views: Readers' letters

With sea levels rising, any protection from stopbanks is likely to become less effective as time goes on.

Flood protection

I read with interest Steve Baron's opinion in the Chronicle on May 23. Yes, there may be misinformation coming out of the regional council as well as the district council, but protection alone cannot save the future of the properties adjacent to the river, particularly along Anzac Parade.

Today, we are possibly paying for the early deforestation in the catchment along with our lack of understanding of that same catchment. We need to bolster our knowledge and ensure future generations do not wake to a flood evacuation alarm and blame us for not taking the right decisions in the first place.

Sea levels are rising, and the nature of the weather passing over us also appears to be changing. The stopbanks Steve Baron wants raised may provide a one-in-100-year flood protection today, but in 10 years that protection may have reduced. Raising the stopbanks attracts additional engineering costs, such as installing pumping systems to cater for surface water trapped in sewers when the river is in flood.

So there has to be a balance struck. European countries, particularly the Netherlands, have long developed strategies that encompass many scenarios. The Venetians live with regular tidal floods. It is to them we should look for ideas.

Managed retreat from the flood plain is inevitable. Perhaps it should have started with the last flood in 2015.

While I agree with Steve Baron that we do not need two tiers of local government, that is not going to change in the near future. In the meantime, we need to work together, regional council providing data and district council looking at scenarios, lifespan of the building stock, parks, infrastructure and how that will modify the district plan on a micro level.

It is all going to cost, no matter what. That is the price for living next to water.

What we need is a plan, not just for the next 10, 20 or 30 years but for the next 100. It must benefit future generations.

So, Steve, I suggest you put personal preferences to one side and look at a long-term pragmatic solution. Make sure you paint the whole picture and not a skewed one like our councils all too often do.

ROBERT SNIJDERS
Marton

Invidious rating

Mayor McDouall says (Chronicle, June 1,) that the current rating system encourages invidious decision-making.

Sorry, your worship, but it is you and your council who have been invidious by increasing uniform charges and trying to impose a $50 charge for sewerage upon people who cannot access the service.

Differential rating is a long-standing attempt to make rating equitable. But, years ago, Woolworths challenged Wellington's differential rating system, which subsidised residential rates by loading the commercial sector. They argued that there was no rational basis for the allocation of rates, and they won in court, throwing a spanner into the works of all local governments.

Whanganui responded by allocating costs for each and every activity between residential, commercial and rural sectors. For example, governance was allocated as a uniform charge on all payers, libraries were charged mostly to city residents and rural roading was charged to farmers. Then the whole lot was added up to give overall differentials and uniform charges.

That was a rational approach that is still in force but, I suspect, has been fiddled with and distorted by subsequent councils.

The arbitrary increase in uniform charges in the proposed budget will benefit the rich at the expense of the poor, pure and simple. That is invidious.

The council ought to do the differential exercise again, starting with a clean sheet, to get back to a rational and fair system and then leave it alone and focus on cutting our coat to suit our cloth.

STEPHEN PALMER
Bastia Hill

Election lolly scramble

Chester Borrows opens National's lolly bag of election bribes (tax cuts etc) and castigates Opposition parties that think these lollies aren't good for us -- in a column (Chronicle, June 2) that plugs his party so blatantly he should be paying for the advertising space.

Then he says the best news about the National Government's Budget is that New Zealand is "back in the black" and "projected to stay that way".

Back in the black? How much is the national debt again? Last time I looked, it was over $87 billion and counting. Talk about the elephant in the room!

Chester, no matter how selectively you quote figures or how creatively you interpret them, we're not going to be back in the black any time soon. The interest on that debt is $4 billion-plus a year (or $138 a second). The total owed is more than $18,000 for every New Zealand citizen.

So what's the Government's answer to the fact that we're living further and further beyond our means?

Have a lolly (or some medical marijuana) and vote for us again!

T INNES
Castlecliff

Correction

I write to correct reviewer Linda Thompson's comment in her review of The Wild Side by Janet Balcombe in the Chronicle (May 27) that the Ashton Wyle Charitable Trust awards are only for "spiritualist books".

This is not so. The awards are for published and unpublished manuscripts in the body, mind and spirit genre, e.g. such matters as mental or physical health, the search for God or meaning, and so forth.

I suspect Ms Thompson is confusing spirituality, which is about the human spirit as opposed to material or physical things, and spiritualism, which is a practice based on supposed communication with the spirits of dead people, especially through seances or mediums.

DICK WARD
Aramoho