Gorse not required, back blues to the hilt
I am sure as a former minister of sport, University of Otago vice chancellor Grant Robertson is feeling a warm glow of pride at New Zealand’s Olympic success. The ODT noted his government poured in $158million into the 2024 Paris games.
However, Mr Robertson should be feeling shame at the rank hypocrisy of Otago seeking to reflect in the achievements of their elite athletes by awarding them "blues" while doing precisely zero to support them.
Otago is the only university in New Zealand that does not belong to High Performance Sport NZ’s Athlete Friendly Network. Membership requires some commitment to support elite athletes, and this has never been a priority with the long procession of failed leadership that has led Otago University to its current parlous state.
For Mr Robertson the answer is clear — shake a small amount of gorse out of the university’s pockets and join the athlete friendly network.
Russell Lund
Macandrew Bay
Altruism needed
Shane Jones, with his customary flourish of logorrhoea, seeks to reduce electricity prices. There are five stakeholders who might be disadvantaged: the four major gentailers and the biggest beneficiary of all, the government.
As the latter owns 51% of Mercury, Meridian and Genesis which are 78% of the market, our government receives 40% of the profiteering. Mitigating this will require altruism.
Ian Breeze
Broad Bay
Eliminate joy
Your splendid editorial about Mr Luxon deferring "the arts and music curriculum for now"(10.8.24) reminds me of Mr Gradgrind the schoolmaster in Hard Times, by Charles Dickens: "Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. Before him is an inclined plane of little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim".
His colleague Mr M’Choakumchild is a "mighty man at cutting and drying, a government officer; in his way (and in most other people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England".
Their plan to eliminate imagination, beauty and joy backfires disastrously.
Jocelyn Harris
Dunedin
Shameful attack
Israel has just made another attack on a Gaza school sheltering displaced Palestinians. The IDF excuse is that Hamas and Islamic Jihad were using the school as a command post with civilians as human shields. 93 civilians, mainly women and children were killed.
The reaction of the rest of the world to another example of Israel’s contempt for the rules of war is to condemn the attack, but do nothing about it as usual.
Israel’s perennial self-defence excuse for its attacks on civilians has lost credibility.
The international tut-tutting must end and be replaced by severe sanctions on Israel until it ends its apartheid regime. Withdrawal of USA armament support is the place to start.
Jenny McNamara
Gore
Unbelievable utterances regarding Ukraine
The utterances of the psychotic megalomaniac Vladimir Putin and his band of sycophantic henchmen is unbelievable . In response to the Ukrainian offensive in the Kursk region Putin described this as "a major provocation." Surely this term is more appropriately applied to Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine?
Commenting on the US position on this Ukrainian "penetration" of the southern Russian border , the Russian Ambassador to Washington said: "these statements on the Ukrainian action were outrageous — not a word criticising their clients , not a regret about the victims of this tragedy ." (ODT 9.8.24).
More particularly there has never been a word or regret from the Russian regime regarding the thousands of Ukrainian men , women and children who have been killed by their aggression — despite Putin’s claim that civilians wouldn’t be targeted — and the tens of thousands who have been forced to leave or the annihilation of the country .
Putin has a habit of accusing Ukraine of war crimes when the fact is that war crimes and crimes against humanity are exclusively created by him.
A dangerous , lying leader who has been cited by United Nations for war crimes — a fat lot of good that did.
Ukraine has shown courage and resilience at a huge cost and unfortunately it is difficult to predict that they will see Putin and his Chinese mates off .
Go Ukraine.
John Milburn
Wanaka
Well said
I totally tautoko-support Ian Davies’ criticism of the government’s intentional support for the alcohol industry (Letters ODT 8.8.24). I would like to add that their overt support for gambling is also abhorrent.
Judy Layland
North East Valley
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