‘‘Maybe the effect of being around other Maori keeps our blood pressure healthy’’

I’m a real estate agent in Wainuiomata. I started back in the 1980s and I sold rental properties to ordinary local people who told me they were concerned about their retirement. They bought one, sometimes two, using the equity in their family home.

These people were taking responsibility for their futures. I’m sick and tired of them being vilified in the media – they provide homes and are not a drain on the system. They are comfortable but not ‘‘The Rich’’ and would laugh at the description.

A capital gains tax would be the end of it for many, they will get out, reducing the rental stock and pushing rents up further. No worries, KiwiBuild will save us! Ahhh . . . maybe not!

Leith Gunn, Lower Hutt

According to Simon Bridges, a capital gains tax would be an assault on the Kiwi way of life. The lack of a capital gains tax during the nine years of his party’s administration is one of the reasons those with money poured it into buying passive investment properties for a taxfree capital gain instead of into productive investment. Billions of dollars borrowed from offshore poured into New Zealand; this money built nothing and produced nothing for export. Meanwhile, his party opened the immigration floodgates.

Bridges’ party’s nine years at the helm did more to destroy the Kiwi way of life than any future capital gains tax ever will. David F Little, Whangarei

Housing in crisis

There are three houses in our short street, owned by foreign investors, which are empty at present because the rents are too high.

If this is the tip of the iceberg in all Auckland then there have to be between 30,000 and 50,000 houses in Auckland alone in a similar situation.

Following on from that it is logical to assume there is no shortage of houses in New Zealand, just an abundance of people who can’t afford to live in them. This means that in the near future Auckland faces growing hordes of homeless people or overcrowding in the aforementioned houses, a crisis of epic proportions.

Gary Hollis, Mellons Bay

Chase dumpers

Last Sunday our op-shop was used as a rubbish dump again. There were bicycle tyres, a car wheel, broken furniture, cans, bottles and dirty nappies. The stench was overwhelming. The local board and Auckland Council were sympathetic, but we were told that it’s on our land, so it’s our problem.

Op-shops pay to dispose of illegally dumped rubbish. We don’t have the resources to prosecute, even if we could locate the culprits. The disposal of rubbish needs to be fully funded by rates. Central and local government need to provide financial incentives so that everyone is keen to recycle. Dumpers need to be tracked down, prosecuted and publicly shamed.

Doreen Sunman, Auckland

European peace

David Slack (Focus, February 17) is unfair to Brexiteers.

He rightly says that the EU desires ‘‘an enduring peace on a continent where millions had been killed or murdered’’ and questions ‘‘why anyone would feel like wandering off in search of an alternative reality’’.

He fails to mention that the UK surely supports the objective of ‘‘enduring peace’’ but that, in order to achieve it, it has no need to belong to the EU – especially since (to state the obvious) it is not part of the mainland continent.

Michael Gibson, Northland

Medical science

Columnist Hinemoa Elder (February 17) goes to Oxford University, thinks Harry Potter, and decides that colonialism invalidated indigenous knowledge. Actually, it was science. As a doctor she ought to have realised that by now. Kerry Craig, Auckland

Cycling injuries

The feature ‘‘Rage against the machine’ (Focus, February 17) starts very aptly with: ‘‘As more cyclists hit our roads . . .’’

In my immediate adult family three have been injured through ‘‘hitting the road’’ while cycling, and none has been injured through motor accidents. The injuries were moderate but required medical attention.

The adults in my family drive on a daily basis and together we have driven vehicles several hundred thousand kilometres without causing or receiving any injury.

Perhaps someone has reliable research to compare the health and wellbeing of cyclists with that of users of more stable transport?

John Howat, Lower Hutt

5G and footy

Perhaps the appropriate response to the Huawei assertion that ‘‘5G without Huawei is like rugby without New Zealand’’, is that New Zealand without Huawei or rugby would be a safer place.

Harry Love, Dunedin

Mission secrecy

Alison Mau (Opinion, February 17) wrongly asserts that the Defence Force training mission

at Camp Taji in Iraq is ‘‘top secret’’.

Mau must have missed the announcement by the last Government of the mission in 2015, the debate in Parliament about the deployment, the large number of press releases the Defence Force has issued on the matter, and the carriage of Stuff’s political editor, along with other media outlets, to Camp Taji.

The only caveat on coverage was about identifying Defence Force personnel. That caveat, made in early 2015, came after analysis of the threat posed to both our people, and their families at home, from Isis. That threat has since receded and the caveat was lifted last year.

Had Mau asked, the Defence Force would have told her about the caveat and the reason it was subsequently amended.

On the Operation Burnham inquiry; this was convened under the Inquiries Act and it is up to the inquiry how it operates. The inquiry, not the Defence Force, has decided how to handle classified material.

That does not mean the operation hasn’t been described in some detail publicly – it was, back in March 2017, by the then Chief of Defence Force, Lieutenant General Keating, and a large amount of information since then on our website.

While I acknowledge this was an opinion piece, the lack of factual reporting, the one-sided commentary, and grab-bag of issues has left 14,000 men and women of the Defence Force wondering where the fairness, accuracy and balance was.

Air Marshal Kevin Short, Chief of Defence Force

Make a distinction

The French government are considering classifying antiZionism and anti-Semitism as one and the same thing in response to reprehensible behaviour towards French Jews by some French protesters.

Anti-Zionism is moral protest against prolonged inhuman treatment of Palestinians by Jewish Israelis of Zionist persuasion, whereas antiSemitism is racial hatred.

Anti-Zionists are ordinary principled people all over the world.

Worldwide acknowledgement of Jewish persecution during the Holocaust must not provide a blank cheque for Zionist Israelis to persecute Palestinians today.

Jenny McNamara, Gore