Channelling Trump in Ma¯ori wards debate

Robin Grieve (Advocate, March 24) writes “For Whanga¯rei the more than 5000 signatures equates to 8.5 per cent of voters and indicates the vast majority of people do not support race-based representation”.

You must be joking. Forgive my disbelief, but how is 8.5 per cent a “vast majority”?

When I taught maths, 51 per cent was a majority and maybe 80 per cent a “vast majority”.

This is reminiscent of Donald Trump logic.

Colin Edwards

Parua Bay

Forget the landing

Oruku Landing is wrong on many fronts. Here are three:

1. It is a financial disaster: It will cost taxpayers more than $100 million dollars, with WDC covering any over runs; it will burden the WDC ratepayers with an ongoing cost of $3 million a year; it will cost the Whanga¯rei ratepayers more than $10 million dollars to buy back a small portion of the land previously sold by the WDC for less than $3 million; the cost per seat is more than $120,000.

2. It is a social and city disaster: This project will create very few long-term, low-paid service jobs at minimum wage (The late Sir Paul Callaghan stated that the worst investment government could make would be in the tourism sector. It gives the lowest return on the dollar invested); it will pull customer traffic away from the CBD creating more retail vacancies; the project has not been generated from community need but rather a developer’s project and justified after the fact.

3. It is an environmental disaster: it will be built on a designated flood plain; it will be vulnerable to any tsunami and will be extremely difficult and expensive to get insurance; and it will attract the worst sort of polluting customer – overseas air travellers and cruise ship patrons. Calvin Green

Ngunguru

Fluoride in water

The science around fluoride as essential for our children's teeth is not in question, but fluoridating the reticulated water will not help the large number of children in Northland, living on tank water. I would guess that the percentage of these is very high and will include many of those who suffer right now with severe decay.

Why doesn’t the Health Ministry consider supplying fluoride tablets through all schools? Those parents who wished to, could opt out but all children would then be covered. Robin Lieffering, Onerahi

Bad driving

I agree that in the North we have some of the worst roads in New Zealand, but our high road toll and crashes are not the fault of the roads. They are the fault of poor driving decisions, such as speeding, failing to drive to the conditions, innattention, failure to secure a seat belt, drugs, alcohol, dangerous overtaking manoeuvres, incorrect use of passing lanes, slow driving practices, lack of indication, and being ignorant of some basic road rules.

Due to this poor driving behaviour, people are braying to council and government to “fix the road” at a cost of billions of dollars. The expensive road between Puhoi and Warkworth will shave 15 minutes off a journey to Whanga¯rei. After Warkworth it will be back to the two lane goat track, where drivers will continue to rack up crashes due to the aforementioned poor driving practices. How have we become a nation of impatient instantly gratified humans that we cannot bear to take two minutes to drive safely and two seconds to put on a seatbelt.

The road toll cannot be blamed on the road but squarely on the shoulders of those drivers who crash as a result of poor driving. It will not make any difference however much the road is configured , there will still be crashes.