God defend Santa

We should be congratulating, not condemning, the organisers of the Nelson Santa parade for having the balls to try to make Santa more inclusive.

But how to make him all-inclusive? Would his skin be black, brown, white, red, yellow or something in between? What about eye colour, facial features and gender?

The solution may be to disguise his identity with the traditional hat, beard and ruddy complexion. Then anyone in our free society – nudists and all – can depict him any way they like.

Seriously, though, the issue has exposed a sharp divide in our much-vaunted reputation for toleration and inclusiveness. We’re clearly not there yet, especially as more migrants from very different cultures settle here.

Is it time to promote these and the other values and mores that underpin our relatively harmonious communities? A good start would be to extol them in God Defend New Zealand, which is criticised, in particular, for being divisive instead of all-inclusive, and take it from there.

Bill Wollerman (Lower Hutt) BIG BULLIES

With all the talk in the media about workplace bullying ( Editorial, December 15), one name springs to my mind: Gordon Ramsay. Ramsay made a pretty good living doing just that. His TV show, The F-Word, was all about verbal abuse of his employees.

Donald Trump is another lifelong bully who loved criticising people on his show The Apprentice. Some people with a bit of power like to belittle others if they can.

Mike Walmsley (Whitianga)

Surely it is never acceptable for those who have power over and responsibility for employees to belittle, undermine, tease and gossip about them, especially in front of others.

For politicians to do so flies in the face of the Prime Minister’s call for kindness, something the world could do with a lot more of.

Jeremy Shaw (Oxford) UTE BEAUTY AND FRENCH TOILERS

One of my reading pleasures is Joanne Black’s carefully crafted column ( Back to Black), which last week dwelt on Americans’ love affair with pick-up trucks. It could stand as a warning to New Zealanders, who seem increasingly enamoured of these vehicles, which get bigger by the year.

One wonders what drives this fetish. Is it possible that the size of the truck is inversely related to the psychological maturity of the owner?

A recent event supports this theory. I was parked when I felt a thump at the back of my car. I got out to find that a driverless ute with a bull bar – essential in the city – had smashed into the bumper. When the driver appeared, he noted he hadn’t applied the handbrake.

As ute dealers enjoy a sales boom, social commentators such as Black should be heard loud and clear in dealerships and the country at large.

Geoffrey Horne (Roseneath, Wellington)

Joanne Black writes that “the French … have never been known for their productivity” (December 15). Although France has long had a reputation for prioritising the welfare of workers and their families, it is untrue that this has been at the expense of productivity, for which France consistently scores high.

According to the UK Office for National Statistics, among the G7 countries in 2016, France ranked second to Germany, was just ahead of the US and far outstripped Britain. Perhaps a human-friendly employment policy actually works.

David Richardson (Pakuranga, Auckland) BACKWARDS GOING FORWARDS

Rob Buchanan ( Letters, December 15) wonders how a car without a functioning reverse gear can get a warrant of fitness.

Reverse, or any other gear, is not a checked item in a WoF inspection. The inspector may comment on it, but cannot fail the car.

In fact, some models of three-wheeled “bubble” cars did not have a reverse gear at all. My concern would be that the driver Buchanan encountered may be feckless enough to drive around with real safety faults.

Luigi Girardin (Stoke) MARKET MISTIMING

I was a little bemused to read the opening line of Pattrick Smellie’s market-volatility story (“Rocky road ahead”, December 8), in which he says October was not a great month for sharemarket investors.

In 1894, Mark Twain wrote

in his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson that, “October: this is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, December, August and February.”

As was pointed out in the story, we are not really in new territory at all. Dean Apps (Lower Hutt) LETTER OF THE WEEK

GOADING CHINA

The US law regarding sanctions against Iran is viewed internationally with suspicion and as unhelpful in dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons intentions.

The arrest of the finance chief of Chinese telecommunications company Huawei by Canadian authorities over the potential violation of this US law must be seen as very provocative.

Since that law relies on the existential nonsense that there are “good nukes” and “bad nukes”, the world is now probably closer to a nuclear conflagration than at any time since the Cold War. Richard Keller (Lyall Bay, Wellington) US President Donald Trump unilaterally and arbitrarily withdrew America from the Iran non-nuclear deal and now wants to have an employee of a foreign company extradited to the US from Canada to stand trial for “breaking” sanctions that, it could be argued, are illegal to start with, and that only he and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seem to favour.

It is up to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to show some backbone, assert his country’s sovereignty, and end this nonsense, before the world is thrown into more chaos and uncertainty.

If Trump thinks that he can bully the rest of the world into falling behind his rogue presidency and determination to make America an outlier among democracies, he has another think coming. John Watkins, (Remuera, Auckland)

AGEING NEW ZEALAND SPECIES

Trevor Worthy and his colleagues are to be commended for their efforts to reveal the existence of now-extinct elements of New Zealand’s animal life (“All shook up”, September 29). However, I would assert that he is wrong in his belief that “a heck of a lot” of New Zealand’s species aren’t very old.

There is no empirical evidence for this, and molecular clocks often cited as support are only minimum estimates.

Instead, as demonstrated in unprecedented detail and broad scope in Michael Heads’ 2016 book Biogeography and Evolution in New Zealand, there is a wealth of biogeographic and tectonic evidence that most of New Zealand’s endemic biota are fragments of eastern Gondwana before the rifting of Zealandia. This evidence was further supported in a recent study published in scientific journal Zootaxa demonstrating that New Zealand’s ghost moths also follow similar Gondwana patterns.

Although many researchers may have assumed that most of the original biota was “drowned” in the Oligocene, or that the surviving fauna lacked major predator groups, this was never the case for pioneering researchers such as Robin Craw and Heads, who characterised the tectonic evolution of New Zealand’s biota long before the new fossil evidence.

They demonstrated that New Zealand’s biological and geological origins have a shared history, and I contend this finding is the most significant educational message for the students of tomorrow. John Grehan (Angola, New York, US)

SUGAR-FREE BAKE-OFF

The media often send mixed messages. The Listener regularly provides important information pertaining to our health on such topics as the perils of sugar and the increase in our girths.

I read these with interest as I have been a type 1 diabetic for almost 50 years. I also love to bake.

It would be great to see the food pages featuring baking without all that sugar, in support of all the important information you are attempting to convey.

It is possible to bake without added processed sugar or even artificial sweetener and it’s delicious and much better for your health.

Sandy Garman (Algies Bay, Warkworth)