Bach tax plan

The Tax Working Group should be careful what they wish for.

If they are going to treat the bach as a business and apply a tax, it wouldn’t take a very creative accountant to find all sorts of costs-of-doing-business to charge against the tax.

Every trip to mow the lawns = mileage + petrol for the mower, even the cost of the mower itself.

All those maintenance jobs, keep the receipts and file a return ... the refund could be a nice little bonus on expenditure that was going to come out of your pocket anyway.

It even smells like a perk for the ultra-weathy as a tax-dodge rather than a serious attempt to raise revenue.

Ian Orchard, Papanui dissonance is happening in our minds.

It is that same uncomfortable feeling that most people had way back when they were finding out that the earth was round and that the sun did not revolve around it.

Police investigators also have a similar dilemma when they believe an innocent person committed a crime.

This can lead to the planting of evidence so as to quell their uncomfortable feeling.

Dreaming up interpretations of religious doctrine is a good example of easing cognitive dissonance.

Some people keep an open mind on such matters whilst others will take a stance and may group with other likeminded individuals, and may carry out irrational acts to ease the discomfort.

I’m with Albert Einstein when he said ‘‘A brain that is open to a new idea will never return to the size it was’’. photo of the main entrance while queued up outside on Saturday. If I were from out of town and taking the obvious external money shot from Cathedral Square without venturing inside the fantastic new facility, I might be puzzled when subsequently tapping through my photographic memories of Christchurch.

The two detached ground level bilingual ‘‘totems’’ would not be visible.

I applaud that Nga¯ i

Tu¯ a¯ huriri is ‘‘a key partner in the development of our new central library’’ and that ‘‘Mana whenua language preferences have been included throughout the building in bilingual wayfinding signage and in the naming of key spaces’’.

But I am still bemused by the bilingual omissions above the external entrance and (apart from a bit of fine print) on some of the new facility’s web pages.

Most will use the terms ‘Tu¯ ranga’ or ‘Central Library’ interchangeably and I am happy to have the first given precedence in formal signage.

I just question why, in ‘‘first view’’ places live and online, the bilingual concept is not carried through clearly in a truly informational way.