Council services
What sort of council did we vote in? I, like many others, thought that essential services were top priority, but evidently not with this council. A couple of fine days and Renwick is running short of water. Seddon will be next.
How many more years do people, living in these areas, have to put up with this?
It’s a pity they couldn’t withhold their rates, but no, don’t do that or you’ll incur a penalty.
But the council can withhold essential services and get away with it, while it wastes your rates on unessential car parks and the unused park building.
Now we have our new central park and also another drain on the ratepayer to commence on January 7 – the new theatre. It’s a pity there isn’t an election tomorrow.
I wonder how many councillors would retain their seats?
It’s funny, I seem to remember that most stood and bleated about improving drainage, etc, and about the real essential, water. Have they lost their memory?
Nothing appears to be happening and yet new houses are popping up all over the place. What may I ask are we going to do for essential services?
This council seems unconcerned. JOHN BLOY Blenheim been made for the mystical trade deals of more than 150 years ago.
I only hope that this is perceived as a good deal by the good, hardworking, tax-paying people who had nothing to do with nor contributed to the misdoings of a bunch of self-serving people (not leaders) from our short history, and will not benefit from any of these negotiations.
Think back 1946 years to the Norman invasion of England at Hastings. Have the English ever sought redress from the French for any reason?
The thing that bothers me is that, in all the reports I have read about the Treaty of Waitangi settlements, there seems to be an inordinate number of police stations in the deals.
Take Auckland, for example. As I can recall, all the police stations, including Auckland central, Henderson, North Shore. This local one includes Picton.
These are valuable buildings which didn’t exist in 1840 and now will be leased back to the Crown.
Can someone who is in the know please explain to me why police stations are included in these deals. DENIS WATERS Picton human butchery we call war, in all its bloody gruesomeness, they would literally scream at their leaders to stop it.
Scenes of mutilated bodies don’t sit well with any glamourised notion of war and so such photos are seldom published.
During the Vietnam War, when one magazine ran a picture of a decapitated soldier, people got sick to the stomach.
I hate to say this, but maybe we should start showing shattered limbs, faces shot off, bowels protruding, genitals torn off and brains oozing out.
I hear you shout, ‘‘Stop already’’, but I’ve not even started on the psychological and emotional damage, and then, too, these are only words, not photos or TV clips, and a far cry from the moans, gore, stench and agony of the battlefield itself.
Anyone who thinks that soldiers give their lives for their country is badly mistaken.
Those precious lives are brutally wrested from them as both sides try to kill the greatest number of soldiers.
People who clamour and push for war, manufacturers and dealers of arms who help create war, politicians who are ever ready to send young people to war, religious people who loudly proclaim so-called just and holy war theories, or even those who simply accept war as inevitable, have seldom seen the horror of it.
They need to see it at its worst. STAN PENNER Landmark Canada