Rail’s better than road

I have no problem with Taranaki’s solid waste being disposed of in Marton. I would prefer, however, to see it travel there by rail rather truck.

We have this thing called the Marton-New Plymouth Line. It is a railway line running from New Plymouth, through Inglewood, Stratford, Eltham, Ha¯ wera, Patea and Waverley, and down to Marton.

People are already fed up with the numbers of trucks on SH3. And, as someone who researched roading for six years, I can assure you that it is trucks that do the damage to our flexible, thinsurfaced carriageways. Not cars.

Hamish Stevenson, Ha¯ wera

Media Council

What we have here is really just a local crisis. The Russians started it to make a specific local gain and they know they can win.

The Russian-Ukrainian naval clash in the Black Sea is not going to end up in a world war. Ukraine would love to be part of Nato, but the existing members won’t let it join. Why? Precisely because that might drag them into a war with Russia.

Russia doesn’t have any real military alliances either. Various countries sympathise with either Ukraine or Russia, but none of them have obligations to send military help and they are not going to volunteer.

Secondly, there’s not even going to be a fullscale war between Russia and Ukraine because Ukraine would lose.

Russia has more than three times the population and its economy is 10 times bigger.

The Russian armed forces are far bigger and vastly better armed. No sane Ukrainian would choose an all-out war with Russia regardless of the provocation.

The Russians obviously have more options, but conquering Ukraine is probably the furthest thing from their minds.

It has no resources they need and if they occupied the country they would certainly face an ugly and prolonged guerilla war of resistance. They have nothing to gain.

They actually have a lot to lose, because a fullscale invasion of Ukraine would trigger a Western reaction that would come close to bankrupting Russia.

Nato would conclude this was the first step in President Vladimir Putin’s plan to reconquer all of the former Soviet empire in Eastern Europe and start rearming in a big way. The Russians would go broke if they tried to keep up.

So what we have here is really just a local crisis. The Russians started it to make a specific local gain and they know they can win.

They will not face major Western retaliation because it’s just not a big enough issue.