Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including the education system in Aotearoa, coal and its effect on climate, and thoughts on a nurse's opinions
In support of the arts and other thoughts
There is a timebomb waiting in the audience in Aotearoa. We are drifting towards a chaotic double system of education.
One has a new curriculum based on invalid data, and the other a tempting of schools to become charter-run, where they can teach whatever they like, to whoever they like, by whoever they like. So, two distinct systems.
Perhaps one system could be underfunded and for the great unwashed, and the other, for the well off. This is how it works in England, so why not here?
And if one system bludgeons the minds by sticking to the three Rs, with little else, and the other system encourages excellence in individualised learning and interests, will we be creating even further divides?
Who cares, so long as the government can pay less on education, right? I mean, it’s your taxes.
Alison Spittle
Mornington
A train halted by an anti-coal protest. PHOTO: LINDA ROBERTSON
Coal and climate
Extensive flooding and climate disasters in the North Island over the past three years are fresh in our memories. Burning coal is fuelling the climate crisis and should be replaced.
Accelerating climate change/global heating and the rapidly increasing global temperatures are causing mass extinctions of animals worldwide. Cold-blooded animals such as insects are particularly affected: they cannot survive a sudden succession of very hot days to which they are not adapted. Because insects are at the base of many food chains, warm-blooded animals are also waning. Insectivorous birds, for example, are now declining steeply.
The effects are global. We are now in an exponentially increasing catastrophe. Our excessively energy-dependent, coal-burning society seems to be sleepwalking over a cliff.
In this context, those brave souls and concerned citizens who opposed a coal train bringing sooty Southland coal north to a factory in South Canterbury required our support when they appeared in court on July 31 for stopping a coal train.
A. Harris
Opoho
[Abridged — length. Editor]
Magnificent gesture
What a magnificent gesture Roger Fewtrell has made for Dunedin and New Zealand’s future. To be a young, hardworking Kiwi couple with children, it would seem like a dream come true to own an affordable warm new home to bring up their kids in.
Shame on our politicians for spending $30million tax and ratepayer dollars on a cycleway for whom? I can only hope that the powers that be name the children’s ward in the new hospital the Roger Fewtrell ward.
Len Lind
Stewart Island
A mere opinion
In today's ODT (7.7.24) we find a nurse denigrated and maligned, for expressing a mere opinion.
And does this "offence" automatically make one a racist, misogynist, poly-phobic, Trump-voting, street rioter as these flying accusations so readily imply? Short of nurses are we?
Gordon Weare
Warrington
A Palestinian woman sits at the site of an Israeli strike on a house in Deir Al-Balah in the central Gaza Strip. PHOTO: REUTERS
Truth and reconciliation needed in Gaza
I am troubled by the correspondents who think the Israelis are justified in any atrocities they inflict on Palestinians in the name of "defence".
It is clear to me Israeli actions are designed to provoke reactions by Hamas and militant Palestinians in general. General George C. Marshall, the author of the Marshall Plan, was against the establishment of the State of Israel as inevitably leading to decades of conflict. How right he was.
The Zionists have planned the strategy of expansion long before the 1948 UN resolution. The public diplomacy of the Zionists that appeals to religious tradition doesn’t wash with me either.
Even Israeli courts have ruled that religious tradition does not justify land confiscation. The persistent warfare policy of Prime Minister Netanyahu and the ultra orthodox of Israel is reportedly the only thing that keeps him in power and out of gaol according to secular liberal Israelis.
The situation demands a truth and reconciliation process for peace to prevail.
Stuart Mathieson
Palmerston
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@odt.co.nz
