Letters Plus Caption Competition, Quips & Quotes, Life in NZ and 10 Quick Questions

Good call, Lynne Stewart ( Letters, December 24). Should we support your suggestion of a $50-$100 conservation/ taonga levy on visitors to supplement the taxes funding conservation? Absolutely. A $100 levy would add about 3% to the average tourist’s expenditure. I suggest some of the extra income would need to go towards research into and action on the things that already threaten the attractions tourists take for granted: possums and wasps, for example.

In terms of destinations such as Milford Sound, tourists coming here are what economists call freeloaders. Tourists don’t pay to visit natural sites, which are our biggest attraction. Try getting into the Louvre in Paris ($23) for free, or the Tower of London ($45) or any of Europe’s other major attractions.

The most recent visitor numbers, to September 2016, were 3,385,000. A tax of $100 a person would yield $338 million. That would be a nice supplement to the Department of Conservation’s annual budget or for any of the other preservation efforts we should be doing.

Let’s turn tourist freeloaders into contributors to help preserve the environment we love

and which they come to see. Maurice Murrell (Maunu, Whangarei) LETTER OF THE WEEK Thanks for highlighting the controversy over the planned Mackenzie Basin changes (“Land war two”, December 17). Our water resources are finite, but irrigators, ECan and politicians like to pretend otherwise.

If intensive dairying were truly beneficial, Fonterra would not have needed to fund TV adverts recently in an attempt to show farming in a good light. G Henderson (Northcote, Auckland) Fifty years ago, while camping by a river, I boiled the clear water for tea and it tasted of sheep dip. At least you’re unlikely to strike that today.

Our rivers have been polluted since we first started grazing livestock, with much of the nitrogen runoff coming from top-dressed hill country. Should we let it all revert to native bush?

You need only spend 10 days in torrential rain in Fiordland and see the rivers still running clear to know what they should look like. The main problem with our lowland rivers is that much of the summer flow is drawn off for irrigation, leaving the river unable to flush the pollution out to sea – a good argument for storage lakes. Either that or we stop farming livestock. Chris Bowen (Lower Hutt)

CAUSE FOR NATIONAL PRIDE

I have rarely felt more proud on the world stage than when the UN passed the New Zealandsponsored resolution on illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Perhaps the money spent getting us a temporary seat on the Security Council has value.

A small voice rallies others to speak in favour of justice, fair play and a pathway to peace in Palestine. Beyond politics, we have spoken for an end to outrageous oppression but also navigated the resolution through the mesh of vetoes towards justice by careful timing and quality diplomacy.

Congratulations to this administration and all in Parliament who have stood strong for the Palestinians – the wound at the centre of Middle Eastern conflict. Terri Byrne (Glen Eden, Auckland)

AUCKLAND HOUSE PRICES

Joanne Black ( Back to Black, January 7) writes in relation to Auckland house prices that “no one is ‘forced’ to buy a house at a particular price any more than they are forced to buy stocks at a particular price”. This shows complete naivety regarding the issues.

The fact is that house prices dictate rental prices. Tenants are now priced out of the market as owners increase rents to match property values, as they are entitled to do. Black’s comparison with stock prices shows that she understands that many property

purchases are an investment rather than a home.

Landlords show no regard for the fact that the income of their tenants has not changed. And it is inappropriate to tell young couples seeking their first home to go to smaller towns when the work is in Auckland. We need to stop turning a blind eye and demand that the Government bring in a policy of support for tenants and those who want to buy their own home. Sue Greenwood (Whakatane)

MANSFIELD BIOGRAPHER REPLIES

Vincent O’Sullivan’s review of my biography of Katherine Mansfield’s early years cannot go unchallenged ( Books & Culture, January 7). His tone is sneering and superior.

He claims that my book is peppered with subjective words and phrases such as “probably”, “might have”, etc, as if a biographer has no right to speculate beyond what has been established as fact.

In dealing with Mansfield, who took such trouble to hide her traces, this would leave us with blanks where the circumstantial evidence is strong.

More seriously, O’Sullivan highlights supposed similarities between parts of my book and an article by Redmer Yska. Any implication that I may

have plagiarised Yska’s work is quite false. All my sources are accurately presented in the detailed notes at the end of the volume. Yska is a fine scholar, but my conclusions are my own, and not anyone else’s, as my source notes confirm.

Let’s hope New Zealanders find pleasure and interest in my book, which as CK Stead says in the foreword, offers “a much more complete account of the young [Mansfield’s] childhood and youth and the forces that shaped her development”. Gerri Kimber Visiting professor, University of Northampton (England)

SLAVE TO MISPLACED GUILT

The introduction to “Conned & kidnapped”, a story in the December 17 Listener, claims a new book reveals “this country’s shameful and longforgotten role in the Pacific Islands slave trade”. A more accurate description would have referred to Australia.

Ours was a cameo role, with Australia being the main actor.

I have no interest in feeling guilty for wrongs supposedly committed 150 years ago. We have today’s problems to deal with, and there are many. Michael Ramsay (Queenstown)

EXTREME PREJUDICE

Don Arrowsmith wonders how the intelligent can accommodate the divine ( Letters, January 7). His assumption of there being a god controlling life on Earth as a puppet-master might manipulate his wooden figures is neither an accurate nor a reasonable image of the one most Christians believe in.

I for one understand that we are gifted three vital realities: love, freedom and grace. Imagine our world if we would adopt these, accepting that as a human family the world is ours to manage without divine

interference beyond being loved unconditionally by God, encouraged to love ourselves and love our neighbour.

Religiosity that cripples people with rules and licenses racism, misogyny and other anti-humanitarian abuses has no divine origin.

Extremists have always harnessed a deity or an antidivine belief in an attempt to justify their degrading actions. The tender mercies of some leaders – consider Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mussolini – who collectively slaughtered more than 200 million people last century in the name of atheistic beliefs remind us non-belief in God is no guarantee of humanitarian conduct. John Marcon (Te Kauwhata)

TRUMP’S TRAVAILS

I have some sympathy for accused misogynist Donald Trump (“Post-Trump trickiness”, December 10). The huge number of TV channels can be confusing and perhaps he thinks Two and a Half Men is a documentary. Mike Vincent (Maungaturoto)

OVER-SAFE CULTURE

Sir Robert Jones provided a breath of fresh air in his

article (“Quaking in our boots?”, December 3) about the real effects of the recent earthquakes.

The climate of fear and lack of self-reliance will cause more long-term societal impairment than any immediate structural damage.

We seem to be losing any degree of resilience, creating a First World problem when we should be thankful we have First World institutions.

We have come to a situation where a small business owner cannot retrieve his assets because of a wildly unlikely possibility of another shake at a given moment.

None of us call for recklessness, but surely we can do better than hide behind safety regulations that frankly seem to have become more and more overwrought with each recent disaster.

If there is any example to be followed in the aftermath of the Kaikoura quake, it is that of the local marae, where people pitched in and got on with it. All strength to their arms. Graham Sharpe (Strathmore Park, Wellington)

ABDICATION SPECULATION

Redmer Yska’s article on the so-called role of New Zealand in Edward VIII’s abdication didn’t reveal any surprise

(“Our part in his downfall”, December 10). There wasn’t a real role, only a bit of political flannel.

Yska also mentioned two works that speculate, but neither of the authors, Susan Williams and Denys Blakeway, can claim to have proof of their inferences.

It is wrong to forget that the Prince and Wallis Simpson made no secret of their sympathies for the Nazis (as shown in the article’s photo) and this was politically embarrassing to the royal family and the British Government. Once Hitler became chancellor and the philosophy and practices of the Third Reich became known (from the early 1930s on), the royal family couldn’t afford to show any favour with Germany. Remember that they had already changed their name to the English-sounding Windsor. Joyce Bowler (Fordyce, Scotland)

ALIENS HAVE RIGHTS, TOO

Like almost every country, we do battle with “aliens” as humans seek to return nature to some imagined pristine state. Aliens are vilified for “driving” natives out. Everywhere war is waged against despised “invading” fauna and flora.

Ours is not the only country whose unique species are affected by incoming predators and plants, but there are few success stories for going to war against them.

Some new-generation ecologists are rethinking the

role of aliens and arguing that the concept of oncepristine environments where everything “belonged” is a flawed one; species have always moved around the world by a huge variety of means.

Nativeness is not necessarily a sign of evolutionary fitness and biota cannot be classified according to human-imposed standards of belonging and citizenship. Alien species can be nasty, but so can natives.

The truly wild world does not operate according to our plans and we cannot necessarily save weak species. Human vanity thinks we can order nature, but we cannot kill our way back into paradise.

Nature must take its course. Wildness is not passive and fragile; it is dynamic, adaptive, evolving and can-do.

Nobody wants beloved species to become extinct, but we must focus on allowing nature and habitat to evolve. This might involve making peace with old enemies.

Conservation estates must be micro-managed to keep them functioning, whereas the rest of nature is where natives and aliens live together, jostling along, showing the traits of real nature – transience and dynamism, without a preordained cast list, dissolving and recreating entirely new communities over time.

Conservation strategies that eradicate species simply because they are non-native risk undermining the very species that may be able to succeed in our rapidly changing world. Lynette Vigrass (Belmont, Lower Hutt)