Letters to Editor: peninsula, Seymour, TOP

It is difficult to begin the new year on a negative note, but the strength of feeling being delivered to me by the community over this issue compels me to do so. 

 

If any of your readers have taken a drive, ride or walk along the Te Awa Ōtākou (Peninsula Connection) and Portobello Rd recently you'll see why.

 

The planted areas of once beautiful native landscaping have become weedy masses of neglect from between Vauxhall and Portobello.

 

There are places where the lack of care and maintenance is so bad that the weeds have outnumbered and smothered the life out anything once growing there.

 

Some of these plantings are only a couple of years old. It is a terrible indictment of the city council's lack of maintenance, care and disregard for the importance of this area as a community and tourist destination.

 

Expenditure on the peninsula roading project to the end of June 2022 was $69.1 million, and the landscaping alone was worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

 

When you see it today, you realise how criminally wastefully that money has been used. 

 

My community and its businesses welcome visitors to the peninsula and according to the council's much vaunted Destination Management Plan tourism contributes $267m towards GDP in Dunedin in 2022. 

 

However, our community is ashamed and embarrassed by what our area looks like and the level of neglect the city council provides as a standard to those travelling and living in the area. 

 

Otago Peninsula Community Board chairman

 

 

In my opinion, David Seymour is spreading disinformation. 

 

All who live in our country are currently equal before the law, but the third principle of the Treaty Principles Bill implies otherwise.

 

Māori have rightly lodged grievances over the Crown's many breaches of the Treaty of Waitangi. 

 

However, Mr Seymour is implying this is discriminatory for non-Māori people. That is not correct. 

 

I guess many have never thought about what would happen if another country came to  New Zealand and evicted people from their homes and land.

 

It's a shame so many do not know our own history which is useful for an MP who appears to want to obliterate it.

 

Kenmure

 

The mainstream media should give The Opportunities Party, New Zeal and other minor political parties a fair go, so that new ideas, innovative solutions can be heard.

 

These parties usually issue press releases which in a healthy democracy journalists should study, engage and report on.

 

North East Valley

 

 [The ODT referred to The Opportunities Party several times in its 2023 election coverage, including a feature interview with its then leader. Should it, or any other minor party, show the potential to make it into Parliament then greater coverage of that party will ensue naturally. Editor.]