Homeless and George St: priorities are wrong
I read with interest two articles in Saturday’s ODT (4.5.24) — one about the homeless living in the Oval and the George St pedestrianisation.
I support the replacement of ageing pipes.
However, the pedestrianisation is and was a waste of money. Will the cost and benefits to businesses and citizens be measured? Who would sit outside in the cold on wet seats in the winter?
I would have liked to have seen the money spent on improvements and changes to George St go on actual needs — social housing in Dunedin?
It is disgusting that people have to live like this.
What happened to the people who were living in the Carisbrook Hotel?
The Dunedin City Council should look long and hard at its spending.
What I would really like to know is where all the maintenance money went to keep pipes upgraded? It should have been an ongoing project over many years.
And what is the plan for more social housing?
Vivienne Cuff
Dunedin
All quite sad
It is all quite sad that Dunedin councillors are contemplating selling off one of ratepayers’ most valuable assets.
Much is being made that the sale is necessary to cut council debt.
Why is debt so high? Because councillors, Greens and others, insist upon wasting ratepayer money building vanity projects. George St drains could have been replaced for $20 million or so but no, wastrels insisted that George St be tarted up to the tune of $60 million.
Nearly $1m for a playground! $100m for an assortment of bike tracks around the city and buckets more demanded for extensions. Someone has a lot to answer for.
Yes, council can make today’s debt hole a bit smaller by selling Aurora, but the wasteful spending has to stop. I can’t get rid of the image of a bunch of starry-eyed councillors looking at the big bag of money gotten from the sale of Aurora, with silly ideas in their heads of what new ideas they can spend the loot on.
If they must sell off the city’s jewels that money can only be used for debt reduction and then reduce council’s debt ceiling.
Too many people seem to think selling valuable assets is a never-ending source of money. Just foolish.
Keith McCabe
Sunbury
Rank incompetents
The mainstream media was trumpeting the results of the latest political poll, which showed the coalition government’s popularity was on the slide.
What surprised me was that the Green Party was on the rise in the polls and with Labour and the Māori Party could now form a government.
If we stop for a moment and have a think, we would be handing power to a bunch of Marxists, racial elitists and rank incompetents.
The Green Party has given up any pretentions of being an environmental advocate party and has become a heavily Marxist organisation which appears to want to bring down democracy and ferment social unrest.
A good proportion of the Greens’ parliamentary caucus have been either going through the courts system, under investigation for dodgy business practices, facing sanctions for poor behaviour in Parliament or leading from the front supporting every terrorist organisation on the planet.
The Māori Party are unabashed racial elitists, and the Labour Party as proved by their last stint in power are rank incompetents.
Dave Tackney
Fairfield
The smoking gun in government health policy
Finding a blueprint for health is a challenge under any government administration.
The current coalition has, in office, indicated the return of health targets, return of prescription fees, promoted Pharmac increased funding and promoted the use of pseudoephedrine.
The coalition claims it is correcting previous "overspends" but there is no benchmark or yardstick against which spending is measured. The public health aspects seem limited to promotion of immunisation.
There is nothing that addresses the predictions of significant increases in diabetes mellitus and other diseases related to unhealthy lifestyles. Of concern is how policies might be influenced by external agents and lobbyists rather than the science and information that is central to good public health.
The British Medical Journal recently identified the involvement of a tobacco company in a United States anti-smoking programme developed by Medscape (as a service to continuing medical education). This programme has subsequently been discontinued.
In the BMJ editorial (3.5.24) mention is made of New Zealand’s decision to withdraw from a smoking cessation plan. A smoking gun?
Stephen Chalcroft
Belleknowes
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