Attack on Shaw has concerning parallels for me

Your front page article on Timaru District Holdings Limited (TDHL) (March 15) suggests some people have not learnt from the recent debacle over the Alpine Energy shareholding.

Councillor Steve Wills talks of ‘‘more bang for our buck’’ and ‘‘directors with a specialised skill set’’. These are glib phrases with little significance.

The TDHL is not a cash cow, it is what its title says, a holding company. It has major holdings in two of the most important planks in our local economy – Alpine Energy and PrimePort.

Recent history gives us ample evidence of the consequences of losing local control of such as these two.

Surely our concern should be that they are performing well and serving the community.

So the current board is quite adequate for the job. It has the balance between public and private, elected and appointed.

It comes back to that old phrase which does roll off the tongue, but is nevertheless true – ‘‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’’.

Dennis Veal

Timaru On behalf of the Heart Foundation, I would like to thank all those bighearted people in South Canterbury who so generously gave their time to volunteer as street collectors for our Big Heart Appeal.

As a charity, the Heart Foundation relies on the generosity of volunteers and donors to help fund life-saving heart research and specialist training for New Zealand cardiologists.

To all those who collected donations and raised funds in their workplaces, schools and early learning services – thank you.

A huge thanks also to everyone who dug deep and made a donation. Your contribution means we can continue fighting heart disease – New Zealand’s single biggest killer which is responsible for the deaths of over 6500 of our loved ones every year.

Lastly, we are very grateful to all of the business owners who allowed us to collect donations at their premises. If you have not been able to make a donation yet, it’s not too late. Call us on 0800 830 100 or go to heartfoundation.org.nz/donate. Marthy Cloake

South Canterbury Heart Health Advocate huge difficulties faced by beneficiaries without the volcanic reaction that intentionally missed the point and ultimately drove her from Parliament.

I thought about the heart that showed, the fact that people like me gave the Greens our party vote that year because it showed it had a heart for a society in which everyone has the opportunity for full participation. Colour me idealistic, call me a neo-Marxist, do whatever you like. That is the kind of society I want to live in.

I also thought about Margaret Thatcher a bit this week. The antacid helped me over the worst, but I couldn’t help but be drawn back to my periodic reflections on what still strikes me as one of the most destructive of political pronouncements, that there is ‘‘no such thing as society’’. New layers to that come to me all the time.

A 1980s argument against socialism? Perhaps. But also a tacit endorsement of the view that in this life, it’s ‘‘every man for himself’’ – excuse the sexist framing, it’s era-appropriate, I think – that it’s user-pays, that accidents of birth that advantage some over others, pieces of luck that happen along the way, are just the way it is; that we’re not a grouping of people with each other’s best interests at heart.

To me, it’s the Thatcher approach to human relations that leads to incidents like a tower block