Govt has stalled on fuel prices

In October 2018, after New Zealanders expressed displeasure at fuel prices, the Government announced an inquiry into the matter.

In August last year the inquiry released its findings and Jacinda Ardern took to national TV to state what the rest of us already knew – ‘‘We’re being fleeced at the pump.’’ About that time the Government increased the petrol tax.

A few months ago, due to Covid-19, oil prices fell into negative territory and oil producers were paying companies to take it away. In New Zealand, this massive cost reduction has never been passed on to the consumer, with prices in my area around the $2 mark since before lockdown. This is 24c higher than other parts of the country.

After spending money on an inquiry and acknowledging the issue, the only time fuel prices have come to the Government’s attention is now and that is to yet again increase the excise.

Thus far the Government has performed well during the global pandemic but I am beginning to wonder if Ardern is a one-trick pony with everything else being empty promises and platitudes.

Bob Kirsopp, Raumati Beach

Clark deserves thanks

David Clark’s resignation as health minister had become inevitable as it was an increasing distraction from the Government’s No 1 focus: the Covid-19 crisis and keeping New Zealanders safe through strict control of the border.

Overall, in his nearly three years in the role, Clark has done a good job, even though he may have made some mistakes. Nevertheless, when he took the health portfolio in 2017, he was faced with tackling the dire condition of our health services after nine years of shameful neglect by the former National government.

Clark has put the team effort first and deserves our thanks for the work he has done.

Bill Nairn, Trentham

No appreciation of legacy

Neil Marsden’s call (Letters, July 2) to remove all traces of Darwin and Darwinism from living memory is just another thoughtless link in the chain of iconoclasm, nihilism and revisionism that is being forged by large parts of society at present, parts that seem neither

to have any sense of history nor an appreciation of the lasting and positive legacy of so many that went before us.

It would be casting pearls before swine to list all of the foundational scientific benefits that Darwin’s work provided us. One part, however, of his great theory of evolution that caused considerable controversy, and outrage to many who asserted human primacy among all other animals, was his view that humans had descended from apes. Letters like Marsden’s would seem to be proof of that. Allen Heath, Woburn

Don’t they matter?

The furore caused by the ‘‘All Lives Matter’’ sign outside St Patrick’s Church, Masterton, was puzzling (Church condemns ‘politicising’ parish sign, June 15).

It was reported as being ‘‘provocative’’. Really? It ‘‘angered supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement’’. How so?

BLM’s Guled Mire and Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon waded in with criticism. I wonder if they spoke to the sign’s originators?

More worryingly it was ‘‘condemned by Catholic Church authorities’’, principally by its metropolitan, who is quoted as not supporting ‘‘material that some could find unwelcome or offensive’’.

I wonder how that statement, in respect of the sign’s absolute truth, would sit with the founder of Archbishop Dew’s church?

Over the past few months New Zealand has been ramshackled specifically because it has been deemed necessary to protect the lives of a minority of the frail elderly. Many other lives have been disrupted, some permanently, because those lives mattered.

A week before the shutdown, Parliament passed a draconian piece of legislation, practically guaranteeing that thousands of New Zealanders will be killed between conception and birth, the disproportionate majority of whom will be female and/or ‘‘of colour’’.

What have Mire, Foon and – most importantly, Dew – said of these lives? Nothing. Don’t they matter?

Philip Lynch, Upper Hutt

Rail line falls short

The point to be taken from Monday’s gridlock (Gridlock city, again, July 1) was not that it occurred, but rather the sheer number of people who still commute from the Hutt and Ka¯ piti by driving – and this is before Transmission Gully opens.

It’s hardly surprising though. Rail carries people much more efficiently, requiring barely 1 per cent of the space per passenger that driving requires, but who will use it when the rails terminate on the edge of the CBD, often a considerable distance from their final destination?

The stubborn denial of the urgent need to extend the existing rails through the Golden Mile, something strongly supported in the 1990s (by The Evening Post, too!), is inexplicable.

With politicians like National’s transport spokesman Chris Bishop and mayor Andy Foster fixated on road expansion as the only way to improve resilience, coupled with Let’s Get Wellington Moving’s mediocre efforts so far, we should not be surprised to get more of the same.

Demetrius Christoforou, Mt Victoria

Catching voters, not bugs

My wife and I are two elderly New Zealand citizens. It is very likely that, without the prompt and courageous actions of Dr Ashley Bloomfield and the prime minister, we would, with many others in our age group, now be dead.

It appears that a number of politicians, and I include the leader of the Opposition and the deputy prime minister, in their anxiety to retain a some form of power or influence, are now quite willing to risk the lives of the elderly.

Through ignorance of the science, or, more likely, dishonestly holding out to the electorate the bait of freeing up both the economy and incoming travel rules, they would open up our shores to a further wave of infection.

It was a relief to me to see what has happened in Australia to make a mockery of the political promises, distressed though I am at the fresh wave of suffering. However, I am prepared to wager the bait will be held out to the electorate again as soon as it is calculated that the Australian situation has slipped from the news headlines.

The price of escaping the pandemic is not only eternal vigilance at the border but publishing, again and again, the science of how the virus can be controlled only by testing, separation, tracing and isolation. It won’t be frightened away by political promises designed to catch voters rather than bugs.

Peter Waring, Eketahuna

Patients’ view paramount

A little-remembered fact is that, when palliative care established itself in New Zealand decades ago, it was reviled by many GPs who saw it as an unnecessary upstart service. These GPs claimed to ‘‘know best’’ how to care for the dying.

Fortunately their argument did not prevail, or we would have been stripped of a wonderful service that has benefited hundreds of thousands of dying Kiwis and their families ever since.

Now assisted dying is proposed via the End of Life Choice Act to help those whose suffering cannot be relieved by even the best of palliative care, i.e. some 2-5 per cent of their patients. All medical specialisations have their limitations, after all.

And what is the response of palliative care? To revile the very concept of assisted dying because it ‘‘knows best’’.

This is not compassion. It’s a commercial tussle over market share, with the patient as the pawn in the middle.

The hostility of palliative care towards advocates of assisted dying like myself is not reciprocated. Naively, we take the view that the patients’ interests are paramount. We invite palliative care to share that view.

Ann David, Waikanae