Planting trees

Labour is confident that they can plant a billion trees in 10 years, for which my trusty calculator tells me they’ll need a 10-year pine treeplanting gang of at least 5000, prisoners presumably, plus a huge supervisory team, assuming one person can plant an average of 10 trees per hour during an 8-hour working day, of which there are about 250 in a year — space, weather, planter availability and productivity, and a supply of plants permitting.

Colin Meads would be impressed, but do we really need all these trees?

Perhaps prisoners would be more profitably employed planting cannabis given Labour’s ‘‘progressive" drug reform ambitions? JIM YOUNG Lower Hutt