Empowering the young

The Editorial (December 7) on the Grace Millane murder case concludes by saying that it is not the justice system that needs to be challenged, but anyone who believes young women going on Tinder dates are “asking for it”.

If we are to learn from Millane’s death, victim-shaming should not be the final word. It should be empowerment. Of course, Millane wasn’t asking to be killed. She had so much to live for. To avoid another tragedy like this, we can pin our hopes on a conviction of murder serving as a deterrent or we can empower young women to make critical judgments about self-preservation when dating an unknown person who may or may not be “dangerously dysfunctional”.

Patricia Fenton (Whangārei)

The Editorial takes some credit for the removal of the legal defence of provocation for murder. I don’t recall a referendum or even an opinion poll on this piece of criminal legislation. In fact, it could be argued that many New Zealanders feel this – as with the three-strikes law – was a gut response by our politicians and the legal defence of provocation should not have been removed.

Peter Williams QC, in his memoir The Dwarf Who Moved, wrote that provocation “was never a defence to murder but merely a mechanism that allowed a jury, if it so wished, to reduce the charge from murder to one of manslaughter”. He thought its removal was a tragedy.

In the Clayton Weatherston trial, the provocation defence was used and rejected by the jury, showing that the law as it existed worked.

Alan Hayward (Cambridge) GANG PLANK

In December 7’s Politics, Jane Clifton writes of National’s recent “poll deflation”. But by the time my copy of the Listener reached me, a TVNZ poll showed support for Labour had dropped to below 40% for the first time in two years and National, with Act, had the support to govern alone. Surely a major factor in that is National’s proposal to target gangs.

Its focus on providing the education, counselling and training to empower gang members as inmates to break out of the gang cycle and lead their families away from crime is exactly what New Zealanders want to see. There has been a sharp rise in gang violence in the past two years and shootings have jumped significantly.

Footage from earlier this year shows families trying to leave the Wellington ferry terminal were blocked by dozens of patched gang members barking and screaming the Nazi chant “Sieg Heil”.

Fear and intimidation were also evident in March when the Mongrel Mob blocked the main street of Ōpōtiki and raised their flags at the war memorial.

The Labour-led coalition looks set to be a one-term government and that certainly won’t change if Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern does not match

Opposition leader Simon Bridges’ lead in challenging such appalling gang behaviour.

Greg Carter (Auckland)

It’s hard to grasp the level of disconnect that many of our “leaders” exhibit. To propose building more jails and jailing more disaffected and disconnected people (read “criminals”) defies logic.

Isn’t it time someone, somewhere took charge and made decisions for radical change based on research evidence to at least try to ameliorate the growing social problems instead of adhering to old systems that clearly multiply the very problems they claim to be fixing?

Rita Riccola (Lucas Heights, Auckland) FOR TREES’ SAKE

I congratulate Greg Dixon on his quietly persuasive column about Mt Albert’s exotic trees

( The Good Life, November 30). His points – summarised in the heading “Did anyone ask the tūī?”– are made without any trace of the usual hysteria that turns point of view into polemic.

This is in stark contrast to the abrasive kōrero of Tau Henare, who brought his confrontational parliamentary style to a recent hui on the fate of the 345 “inappropriate” trees.

Sure, plant natives; sure, cull exotics. But for heaven’s sake, make the transformation generational. Maunga and their ecosystems will be here in a hundred years, but Henare and the muddled thinking he represents will be long gone.

Carried to its illogical conclusion, the next target will be “inappropriate” bird species.

Out, damn thrush.

GM Tinker (Whangārei)

The tūī that visit my garden certainly appreciate the kōwhai and the kākā beaks, but their favourite tree is the magnolia. They hang out in it from when the buds appear until the last flower has fallen.

Since we live close to Zealandia, we are also visited by kākā. They gorge themselves on the 50-year-old walnut tree. Who taught them they could bore into the green nut before the shell had hardened and peck out the flesh? This season, they also discovered the seeds on the copper beech tree – there must have been thousands of those. Are our

native birds smarter than us?

Beverley Milne (Karori, Wellington)

LETTER OF THE WEEK

DEATH OF THE DEEP STATE …

It is a shame an otherwise informative publication is spoilt by misleading coverage of US President Donald Trump (“Trump vs America”, November 30), based on the disinformation put out by the so-called mainstream media. It is undeniable that all the major media outlets are owned by big donors to the Democratic Party and, as

such, are simply part of the party’s propaganda machine.

There is plenty of factual information available on the internet, not least the full interviews of the crooked impeachment inquiry, which irrefutably shows Trump has done no wrong.

We are witnessing the final throes of the so-called “deep state” (the Establishment) that has run the US and the rest of the world for decades, enriching themselves at the expense of the rest of us. We are, at last, reaching the point where all the lies, disinformation, hypocrisy, corruption and horrendous criminality (including globalscale human trafficking and exploitation) will be exposed. Hundreds of corrupt officials, politicians and company officials will be tried and hopefully, imprisoned for years.

Trump will win the 2020 elections with a historic landslide and history will show him as the best US president, certainly since JFK, and possibly of all time. He is an American patriot and a true humanitarian.

Alan York (Nelson) … AND AN END TO UK NONSENSE

As a UK national living in New Zealand, I am irritated by your biased Brexit reporting. The lies from the Remain camp came in the form of false economic forecasts. These have been proved wrong. The UK has been one of the strongest European Union economies since voting to leave.

The Leave campaign lied about the cost of membership and promised benefits that could not be guaranteed. We all understood this at the time.

Briefly, the facts are that when the UK joined the EU, it was a free-trade area in which each member retained its national sovereignty, it had a 40% share of world trade, and member nations had broadly similar economies and retained their own currencies.

Now, the EU share of world trade is 30%, the unelected governing body in Brussels has reduced national sovereignty and intends to make Europe a single nation, and migration has placed an intolerable burden on the UK’s health service, schools and housing.

The desire to control national borders is no more racialist in the UK than the way New Zealand controls immigration.

Why would the UK want to continue to remain part of this failing organisation? Both major parties went to the polls in 2017 with promises to

negotiate an exit from the EU that have been betrayed by MPs in Parliament.

The general election on December 12 should end the nonsense and the country can return to normal politics and move forward.

Julian Wade (Warkworth) KING’S DEFENCE

I read with interest the column ( Psychology, November 30) that offered bouquets and brickbats to Mike King. It struck me that even a decade ago, such a column may have been impossible to write because the “evidence-based and best practice” theory of that time was that talking about suicide only created a “contagion” effect.

Through King and other community-based efforts, the discussion about suicide is now in the media. I would also argue that the Mental Health and Addiction Inquiry was largely due to the “non-clinical” efforts of King, Kyle MacDonald and others.

I have had involvement with King and the Nutters Club, and, later, Key to Life and the Gumboot appeal, for most of his journey. He may sometimes say things that are controversial and polarising, but with a full jumbo-jet of people dying by suicide every year in this country, the work he is doing can only be commended and his integrity and sincerity are not up for debate.

His methods may ruffle feathers but perhaps the suicide letters he is requesting – which I understand are being given freely and often enthusiastically by victims’ families – will add insight into the reasons so many New Zealanders are dying by this means.

Malcolm Falconer (Newton, Auckland)