Horticulture department closure deeply dismays
It was with significant disappointment to learn of the closure of the Otago Polytechnic's horticulture department.
I have had the pleasure of working with staff and students of the department for 25 years and without them many projects would have been impossible. In our growing climate and biodiversity crises skilled horticulturalists are going to be essential for food production, habitat restoration and nursery development.
It seems in the face of such adversity losing the ability to train people with such skills is shortsighted indeed.
Dunedin and Otago will be very much the poorer because of its loss.
Mythologising
Howard Fraser (ODT 16.12.24) is the most recent correspondent to repeat the myth that the new Dunedin hospital will cost a "possible $3 billion".
The true figure is more like $2.1b, and falling. The figure of $3b was quoted by two ministers who added a bunch of ancillary costs such as community pathology and a car park building which are expressly outside the scope set by successive Cabinets.
They continue to repeat the figure, knowing it to be misleading, in the knowledge that some will start to believe it.
The total cost was falling because design has now reached the stage that a process called quantitative risk assessment has increased cost certainty. Contractors have greater confidence and will add lower risk premiums to their refined bids.
All of this was well advanced when ministers arrived in town and threw a spanner in the works.
[Pete Hodgson is the former chairman of the Southern District Health Board.]
Discovery channel
I wonder whether those who, like Jim Sullivan (Opinion ODT 10.12.24), such as wilderness magazines, Lonely Planet guides, and internet bloggers who go to some trouble to make "hidden gems’’, "wild walks’’, and "remote places’’ widely known, realise the irony inherent in their actions? Each place is then no longer hidden, wild, remote, wilderness, or lonely as we wish to experience it.
I would like to dream that each generation can always learn to "discover’’ our country’s secluded icons bit by bit; that this can remain a hands-on Kiwi exploratory thing to do in a way suited to each person’s inquisitiveness, capability, and generosity.
Once we Kiwis do finally admit to over-tourism in our land, our desired ability to experience remoteness and seclusion will have all but been lost.
Stick to your knitting
The ODT reported that the Dunedin City Council has written opposing the Treaty Principles Bill (12.12.24). The council writes as if it represents all ratepayers, but to my knowledge there has been no surveys.
The DCC Council has a mandate to manage our city and surrounds, not lawmaking for all New Zealand, which is Parliament's job. The councillors can submit to Parliament within the next month, their individual feelings on the Bill like everyone else. Please can the council stick to core business and not waste ratepayers’ money.
Comically disingenuous but not at all funny
The question is, what is the real cost of the hospital whose clinical specifications have been agreed as the minimum necessary to service the southern region?
Any budget that is short of the real minimum cost entails a cut.
The minister should stop gaslighting and acknowledge his government is cutting the rebuild in real terms.
Yes, he’s breaking an election promise while carping that his hand has been forced, but in the end that’s not even the point.
The point is the government is proposing to cut public hospital services that have been scoped, reviewed and agreed by clinicians and others. That’s disgraceful.
But equally disgraceful is pretending that’s not what they’re doing, and that those who see the flagged cuts for what they are have misunderstood, or are refusing to face "a hard financial truth" about meeting the health needs of other New Zealand regions.
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