Plus Caption Competition, Quips & Quotes, Life in NZ and 10 Quick Questions

The story about inadequate monitoring of early childhood education centres (“Look & learn”, June 23) highlights the importance of improving such environments.

Adults wouldn’t put up with spending long, disruptive days in those conditions. Why should vulnerable children?

In the “good old days”, mothers were mostly home with their children and would take them for a morning session at kindergarten or Playcentre.

Even though I was a trained primary-school teacher, I was required to pass a Massey University course before being allowed to supervise at Playcentre. I remember it with affection: happy, exciting developmental times with the children, including my own.

The present set-ups seem more like overcrowded confinement for parents’ convenience rather than children’s education and care.

Children are our most precious resources for the future. They deserve better.

Clare Dudley (Coromandel)

PRICE OF FORGETFULNESS

Amy Chua’s analysis of failed US geopolitics (“Both sides, now”, June 16) is interesting and disturbing. How can the leadership of both mainstream political parties keep making the same mistakes?

The creation of successor states from the defeated German and Austrian empires at the end of World War I to form a bulwark against the feared expansion of Russian communism, and the subsequent failure of Eastern European “nations” as they fell under Soviet hegemony, shows you cannot impose democracy.

The recent failures Chua lists in her book, Political

Tribes, illustrate how little has been learnt. The comment attributed to Barack Obama that “failing to plan for the day after” in Libya was probably the worst mistake of his presidency could just as easily have been made by any of the 20th-century occupants of the White House in any one of the conflicts they were engaged in.

The US leadership has been spectacularly unsuccessful in backing “winners”. I remember Victoria University geography professor Keith Buchanan before the Cuban missile crisis opining that if he were a betting man his strategy would be to watch which horse the Americans backed and then put his money on any of the others in the field.

Although Chua apparently strikes an optimistic pose in her conclusion, it’s hard not to feel that the tribalism she describes will perpetuate the procession of failures in the global political realm. George Santayana’s adage that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” couldn’t be more prescient.

Cam Murray (New Plymouth)

I was interested to read Chua’s interpretation of the catastrophic misjudgments the US made in Vietnam and then in Afghanistan, because of policymakers’ sheer ignorance of the countries concerned.

Growing up in Australia in the 60s and 70s exposed me to ongoing coverage of the Vietnam War, for which many young Australian men were conscripted. What I especially recall is the My Lai massacre of 1968, not just for what it was, but because of the response of the US public. There was horror and outrage, but what stays in my mind is that the focus was on what US soldiers, and US military leaders, might have done, and what this might mean about US politics or the US’s moral status.

That is, Vietnam and the Vietnamese scarcely registered in themselves, but were counters in controversy and soul-searching, which were almost entirely about the US. The cause of this, I imagine, is that you can live in the US without having to know much about other countries, even as a person with a strong moral conscience.

In New Zealand or Australia, we’re not inherently morally superior to Americans, but being smaller players in world politics makes this mindset less common.

Joanne Wilkes (Meadowbank, Auckland)

History always repeats itself.

All dominant civilisations eventually decline. You only have to look at the Greek and Roman empires, the Egyptians, Mongols, Spanish, Dutch, British and a host of others. The US is at the peak of its powers both economically and militarily, but it will eventually go the way of the rest.

Exactly when, no one knows. But as with democracy and capitalism, which are systems that are in vogue but in time will be replaced by something else, the American experiment will also meet its end.

Jerome O’Malley (Masterton)

FAIR PLAY ON PAY

“Retrofitting the workplace” ( Politics, June 16) ponders whether proposed Fair Pay Agreements might gain or lose votes for the Labour Party. Why not ask whether the agreements can redress our skewed distribution of income, increasingly favourable to a relatively small number of privileged capitalists?

In the 1950s, our ample workforce received 70% of national income, with 30% going to capitalists. Now, a relatively few capitalists receive 50% and rising of national income. Surely something needs to be done.

Sadly, the new Government and its labour-market reform adviser, Jim Bolger, are unlikely to put a dent in the problem. The process of redressing income-distribution skews seems to involve the exercise of “countervailing power”, a concept as old as 17th-century trade unions, but entered into our lexicon by economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1952 to denote an opposing force to the monopoly power of large corporations.

As noted in the column, there is a triumvirate of such powers: corporations, labour unions and national governments. The present reality is that corporations have gone global, amassing monopoly powers far beyond the economic clout of nationally based labour unions and governments.

In short, global corporations have much more muscle than the others, even combined, and can thus perpetuate, indeed increase, the distribution of income skew toward capitalists.

The Labour Party has not helped matters by ruling out strikes during Fair Pay Agreement negotiations, the major source of union countervailing power. If Bolger and co want to make a start at redressing the income skew, they should begin by dropping the nonstrike provision, then move to foster globalisation of labour unions. Robert Myers (Auckland Central)

POLITICAL CLIMATE CHANGE

Same party, same attitude, different issue. Simon Bridges says the National Party would support the establishment of a Climate Change Commission, but not necessarily implement its recommendations.

This brings to mind the Public Health Commission that was established in 1992 to be responsible for health

monitoring, public health policy advice and the purchasing of public health services. It was a component of the health reforms introduced by the Jim Bolger-led National Government; it was well resourced and its independence was guaranteed.

Sir David Skegg was appointed as its chair. He was an epidemiologist of world standing and had acted as a consultant to the World Health Organisation. But the commission didn’t survive the hand of Health Minister Jenny Shipley. Warren Jowett (Dunedin)

AFTER P, WATER?

The June 16 Editorial asks what other issues might Government agencies bungle after the admission that the harm caused by P traces in homes had been officially misconstrued. Our drinking water might well be one.

There is a strong push stemming from corporate lobby groups to establish national standards and guidelines for municipal water provision, including chlorination and privatisation of supplies. Many councils have been scared by possible litigation into immediately chlorinating perfectly healthy water supplies.

There seems to be a strong drive in Government agencies to take control through national guidelines. Will we again see a sledgehammer used where the tightening of a few screws is all that is necessary?

Dave Laurie (Christchurch)

FOR WHOM THE BELL IS SILENT

The grammatically incorrect “Who do you trust?” ( Politics, June 23) must have been by design and not by accident, I keep telling myself. If so, it will surely disappoint many of your readers who, like me, regard and value your magazine as one of the last examples in New Zealand of fine writing, meticulous subediting and an unflinching regard for the correct use of English.

Your defence for not using “whom” may well be to claim that it has become dated and sounds awkward, and you are merely following the precedent of a distinguished magazine in England that recently took a similar view. In which case, many readers, writers and grammarians will disagree with you.

“Who” wrongly used for “whom” is excusable in speech, but the written word should aspire to a higher standard. If the bell is indeed tolling for “whom”, how long before such everyday verbal atrocities as “her and her partner” or “him and his wife”, used in a subjective sense, become commonplace in print – even in the Listener?

Gavin Riley (Havelock North)

CRUSHING CONGESTION

Would it not be useful to increase (double or treble?) the annual registration fee and the cost of petrol and diesel for all vehicles with engines of 2 litres or bigger, and all SUVs that clog up our roads, usually with one adult passenger or child?

The vehicles block the roads while dropping off and collecting children or when the driver is shopping, often for an item that could be carried comfortably on a bus. Drivers of SUVs should also have to

pay, say, $20 each time they take their vehicle into any city centre, a system that works well in London.

Cameras would identify their registration plates and the driver (and, incidentally greatly help to catch drivers of stolen cars), and if they haven’t paid the charge, they will receive a fine. If this isn’t paid, each future demand will be doubled and redoubled.

Another good way of reducing the traffic jams that most towns and cities in New Zealand have to face is to remove all roadside parking meters once $50-a-day parking buildings have been built. At the same time, all private cars, excepting those with disability stickers (numbered and checkable by aforesaid cameras), would be banned in city centres. If caught, the offending vehicle would be confiscated and immediately crushed.

George Orwell, eat your heart out!

Boris Moiseiwitsch (Levin)

CYBERMEN UNWELCOME

Marc Wilson writes about potential designs for humanoid robots and the need to adapt their appearance to accommodate human bias ( Psychology, June 16). What about the human bias of some people to simply find robots utterly terrifying?

I know that they’re in automated checkouts, for example, but there at least they’re invisible. I cannot grasp why more people like me, who grew up in the Cold War’s cultural aftermath of science-fiction films and TV programmes, do

not seem to remember the visceral fear at the sight of Doctor Who’s Cybermen. Forget robot paramedics – I’m certain that the appearance of any robot will frighten me to death on the spot.

The fictional aliens and robots of the 50s and 60s were malignant; in the 70s and 80s, many of them were portrayed in a much cuter, friendlier way. Does it mean that the children of later decades have been softened up to accept robots?

I do not want to live in a world of robots. Might this, in Wilson’s hypothetical view, make me racist?

People are calmly predicting immense social and economic

upheaval from this technology. Why is this future seen as inevitable? Why this passive acceptance?

Elizabeth Newton (Wellington)

SAVING ON SPECS

John Darkin ( Letters, June 16) is not alone in the realisation that we are being overcharged for glasses.

I found a New Zealand online option with a massive range of frames at realistic prices. They can be tried on your face digitally, your lense type and prescription entered, paid for in NZ dollars and promptly delivered. I have done this twice with no problems.

Sue Quinlivan (Darfield)

LETTER OF THE WEEK

A BRIEF EVENING WITH …

I recently attended an NZSO Simon O’Neill concert in

Dunedin. It was billed as “An Evening with Simon O’Neill”. What we got was O’Neill singing for 21 minutes, followed by the interval at 7.25 pm.

The orchestra then performed Bruckner’s 4th symphony and the show was over by about 8.50pm. Both performances were very good, but as for the notion that it was an evening with Simon O’Neill, you can forget it.

I’m not advocating a return to the glory days when concerts really were concerts (Beethoven’s benefit concert in Vienna in 1808 featured his 5th and 6th symphonies, 4th piano concerto, the choral fantasia and a number of other minor items). But I do think on this occasion either one other work should have been scheduled before the interval or else O’Neill could have sung a bit more for his supper.

Martin Anderson (Cromwell)