Water is complex, can’t just blame ‘polluters’
The Minister for the Environment, Penny Simmonds, has expressed her concern at the ‘‘vilification of farmers’’ in the debate on the ORC water plan. In your editorial (24.10.24) you compound the felony by the comment ‘‘farmers and other polluters’’.
Most of the time sheep and cattle, if contained by fences, defecate and urinate on land. It is only humans and birds that don’t. So what are polluters? Canadian geese that dominate the wetlands or even ducks or other wading birds?
It could possibly be septic tanks that are old and leaking unbeknownst to their owner? The giardia, or rock snot, that was introduced to our mountain streams and rivers by tourists.
Furthermore, councils take remedial action by adding chlorine and fluoride to domestic water for very good reason.
The biomass associated with water is complicated and not well understood.
The delay enacted by the government will ensure that reason, not ideology, will get the right result for the use of the water resource we all share.
Jim Barclay
Clyde
Good day for democracy
Alistair Cooke, of Letter From America fame, once made a comment that it was good journalism if the reader could not discern the political views of the journalist.
Obviously the editorial staff of the ODT did not read that memo when the paper’s headline said ‘‘Intervention ‘very sad day for democracy’ ’’.
How's that? The plans the ORC wanted to notify were requirements from the last Labour government. We booted them out.
The new government, that we elected, has new plans and told the ORC so.
The intervention was only needed because the ORC failed to recognise that the public had voted Labour out. So in fact it was a good day for democracy.
Peter Foster
Waikouaiti
[The headline was quoting Opposition MPs. It was not a statement of the ODT’s view. Editor.]
Parroting not fooling me
Christopher Luxon’s parroting of ‘‘the mess the former government left us’’ is wearing thin. Similar to Trump, he resorts to the same rattle of an empty man each time he is asked to substantiate his lies and empty promises. He is very vague on spelling out the specifics of policy timelines.
Likewise, Nicola Willis is totally unaware of how real people on the coalface live. As Pamela Ritchie (Letters ODT 15.10.24) says, who do they think they are fooling?
Kay Hannan
Oamaru
Violence not a solution
When will Israel realise that ideology and resistance are never changed by violence?
Seventy years ago, after the Qibya Massacre, John Bagot Glubb, British commander of Jordan’s Arab Legion said: ‘‘The Jews of Israel must be as well aware as anyone else who knows the Arab world that every one of the survivors of such an attack now considers himself in on the blood-feud custom — violence which breeds more violence still.’’ .
That message has not been heard. The consequences are catastrophic.
Catharine McGrath
Wakari
How did the sailing go? We were all fast asleep
Yeo's cartoon (ODT 21.10.24) showing Kiwis asleep as Team New Zealand won the America’s Cup was how most people experienced it.
It was certainly the case with all I have spoken to. “A wealthy man’s cup” said some. “Looks like car racing on water” said another.
Not like the traditional yacht when we won the cup in 1995 in San Diego.
Ron Robert
Dunedin
Gaza conflict
Jutel and Jenkins (Letters ODT 21.10.24) persist in accusing Israel of genocide.
It is anti-Semitic to claim that Israel is deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure such as hospitals and schools. It is a resurgence of the old blood libel that Jews ritually sacrifice children.
It is evident that Israel is targeting Hamas, not civilian infrastructure per se. Unfortunately for the Palestinian civilians, Hamas sees them as useful human shields.
If Israel has been committing genocide in Palestine, it has been singularly ineffective given that the population of Palestine has been continuously rising from about 945,000 in 1950 to 5.5 million today.
It is a perverse and pernicious form of propaganda that accuses Israel, the only home nation of the Jewish people, of the crime which they themselves suffered more than any other people.
Today the term anti-Zionism is used as a disguise for being anti-Semitic
Listen carefully when you hear someone say it, before they proceed with a litany of anti-Semitic claims.
Malcolm Moncrief-Spittle
Dunedin
[Abridged - length. Editor.]
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@odt.co.nz
