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

I tell this story by way of an illustration of the August 14 article “A Nazi mass murderer in our midst?” that New Zealand may have “walked away from the problem of Nazi war crimes”.

This memory has always haunted me. When I was growing up in Timaru during the 50s and 60s, my mother was friends with a couple. The wife was Czech and the husband Ukrainian. Erich said openly that he had been a batman for a Nazi general during World War II. This was possibly, and maybe probably, suspicious in itself, because the Ukrainian Nazis who worked for the Germans were particularly brutal. What I found suspicious was that, periodically, groups of German men would come over from Argentina, and Erich would take them hunting.

This meant more as I got older and learnt more about the war and the Holocaust. My father, long dead now, was at Monte Cassino and North Africa during the war, and I later wondered why he never thought it strange to have this man openly living among us without investigation.

I understand that soldiers who come back from war often want to forget, and he may have thought it was taken care of by the Government, but there must be accountability. I hope New Zealand has grown a stronger ethical backbone.

Ann Mackay

(Oamaru)

LETTER OF THE WEEK

VACCINATION ACTION

The August 7 Editorial was spot-on. With New Zealanders’ increasing complacency at all levels, the slow vaccine rollout and the emergence of the Delta strain, there are areas that need immediate action.

There is no requirement for aircrew to be vaccinated at Air New Zealand or other airlines. Aircraft are flying to highrisk destinations and their unvaccinated crew members are required to self-isolate for only three days on their return and then produce a negative test. Aircrew get weekly tests, but clearly there is a dangerous gap between Day 3 and the weekly tests. Given that outbreaks in several countries (eg, China and Singapore) have originated from aircrew and the fact that many cases become positive after Day 3, this policy seems risky. Surely at the very least unvaccinated crew should be redeployed to domestic flights? The same precautions need to be instituted for all port workers. Unvaccinated workers must not be allowed to be in contact with potentially infected ships.

Furthermore, unvaccinated hospital and care-home staff should be required to either be fully vaccinated or prepared to be stood down whenever a community outbreak occurs. The Sydney outbreak spread via a partially vaccinated nurse. We should not allow unvaccinated staff to work around vulnerable people.

My colleagues in public health have expressed grave fears regarding our current policies and report a discouraging level of inaction from their bosses in Wellington. Paul Corwin, GP

( Christchurch)

PLIGHT OF HUMANITIES

The headline on the August 21 Letters column, “Science and knowledge”, highlights a certain irony in the sometimes indignant debate about the relationship between science and mātauranga Māori. “Science”, after all, was once a word that (like the Latin scientia) embraced all forms of knowledge, being hijacked by the proponents of “scientific method” only in the 18th-century’s so-called Age of Reason.

What is at issue here is little more than a philosophic argument about wording, whose outcome is unlikely to have the slightest effect on the funding of what is now generally regarded as “science”, either in our universities or elsewhere. Materially, there is far too much at stake.

Unfortunately, though, the quarrel serves to distract attention from a far more serious educational development: the systematic destruction of the Humanities, not only in Auckland, but elsewhere. The Auckland English Department, for example, was once one of the largest and most prestigious in the university, boasting a complement of more than 30 full-time permanent staff. In 2022, it will have fewer than seven. Other Humanities departments, both here and around the country, have been similarly affected.

What this represents is the gradual destruction of any notion of education as a good in itself, and a serious dilution of the universities’ statutory role as “the critic and conscience of society”.

It is telling that while the University of Auckland’s Vice-Chancellor has actively involved herself in the science debate, neither she nor anyone in senior management felt any need to respond to my recent NZ Herald opinion piece drawing attention to the sorry plight of English and of the Humanities in general. Michael Neill, FRSNZ

Emeritus Professor of English, University of Auckland

VACCINATION BENEFITS

Thank you for Jane Clifton’s brilliant August 7 Politics.

My mother was severely crippled from age two with polio contracted in a 1923 epidemic. I was very ill with measles and whooping cough as a child.

During my 30-year nursing career, I cared for many people in Thailand with tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid and, worst of all, tetanus among newborn babies from the Hmong hill tribe, 50% of whom died because their mothers were not vaccinated. As I was fully vaccinated, I never contracted

any of these contagious diseases from my patients.

Because of these experiences, I am naturally avidly pro-vaccination. As a result of the unparalleled success of our vaccination programmes over the years, younger generations have not experienced the fear, horror and pain that their ancestors did, so, sadly, they are sceptical.

I am prepared to go into any school in my area and share my experiences. Hopefully, the children will then take the message home to their parents. Helen Carver

(Dannevirke)

SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE

Mātauranga contributed directly to the scientific endeavour two decades ago when I wrote the “Origin of Life” entry for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Global Change, stating, “Diverse tribal societies with ancient traditions prefer naturalistic, sometimes theistic, accounts of life’s

origin based on the agency of some cosmic generative principle, of which the precept whakapapa (genealogy; layering) espoused by New Zealand Māori is perhaps the most comprehensive in its scope of application.”

Since then, I have become much more convinced that the universality of scientific knowledge claimed by my institution’s elite ( Letters, July 31) is an illusion. The principles of physics and chemistry may be universal within a realm constructed according to the extent of their relevance, but biology transcends it.

Physics and chemistry give no comprehensive explanation of how patterns of information, such as the DNA sequences that make up our genes, temporally construct special, local domains of matter within which the operation of quantum mechanical rules is biologically confined. Biology effectively renders physical principles causally

impotent by constraining them both temporally and spatially. If current science is to play its part in the solution of problems it has helped to create (nuclear weapons, climate change, ecological collapse), it will have to abandon its claim to universality and embrace restrictions akin to those embodied in mātauranga.

In 1974, the Auckland University Philosophy Society staged a debate of the motion “That science is no more reasonable than mythology”. Then a doctoral student in biochemistry, I was on the affirmative team; Robert Nola, signatory to the Listener letter, led the team for the negative.

Although our intellectual positions have hardly changed, our institution has transmogrified from something resembling a Socratic academy into a corporation whose chief executive expresses an official view on mātauranga that must be consistent with the commercial interests she oversees.

Peter Wills

(Auckland)

I am a retired secondaryschool science teacher thankful to the University of Auckland group who brought the mātauranga Māori/science issue into focus, but I’m also angry and confused by the response.

Science at its core is based on the scientific method, but it also incorporates the study of accumulated knowledge just as I suspect mātauranga Māori does. Indeed, mātauranga has been incorporated into numerous scientific studies, including the investigation of kauri dieback and muttonbird sustainability.

Research and observation contribute to both disciplines, but only science has at its core the scientific method. The notion of “decolonising science” in a science curriculum is conceptually beyond me.

However, I venture to suggest that the steady decline of student achievement in science is more due to deficiencies in teaching the accumulated scientific knowledge than of attention to scientific method. There is ample scope to bring in the teaching of mātauranga Māori throughout the school curriculum without solely burdening the science syllabus.

The statement by the Royal

Society Te Apārangi that it rejects “the narrow and outmoded definition of science” begs the question what, in the society’s view, does the study of science involve?

The requirement to include mātauranga Māori as a science has other implications, too, as highlighted in “The meaning of science” (August 7), where it has been given a greater proportion of research funding than clinical medicine and engineering. Will this result in unintended consequences for the nation?

Why can’t we have an open and mature debate on matters such as this and as a society resolve them without one party invoking “hurt and dismay” or even racism in their criticism of a legitimate concern?

I cannot help but note that most of the criticism of the university group comes from those without a stated science background.

David English

(Auckland)

COMMUNITY MENTAL HEALTH

I was disappointed by Peter Stanley’s assertion ( Letters, August 14) that only doctors and psychologists have the depth of understanding to help people and take responsibility for the critical tasks in mentalhealth treatment. This seems unhelpful tribalism to me. We all have an equal value.

I work therapeutically with many people who have intentions of abandoning their lives. I help them with safety plans and assist them to find some personal hope to carry on in difficult circumstances, including poor housing, unwanted trauma inflicted by others, social isolation and stigma.

When I leave meetings with these courageous, traumatised people, I’m thinking, should I have tried to get them a bed in an oversubscribed mentalhealth unit, or can they be treated at home with extra support? As a duly authorised officer, I decide if the timing is right to instigate legal proceedings, which often means getting

the police involved with already frightened people to force them into hospital.

I have two clinical therapy master’s degrees and a nursing qualification. Community mental-health workers often hold a huge amount of risk and potential scrutiny of caseloads. We all do difficult therapeutic mahi that has the potential to have a crucial effect on mental well-being. Tim Giles

(Waipukurau)

POWER CUTS AND PETROLEUM

Let’s get this straight. Electricity companies have outages, planned or otherwise. The result is a power cut or blackout for customers. An outage is a technical issue for the company. What I get is my power cut off. Let’s not neutralise that with weasel words.

Jenny Clark

(Paekākāriki)

Free-market devotees must be pleased. In short order, in a fraught geopolitical world, the “market” has sabotaged our petroleum security, then demonstrated ultimate ineptitude in electricity supply and distribution. The market is working all right – for shareholders, whose returns cannot be placed before the operation of critical infrastructure essential for national security and public good.

GM Waring

(Nelson)

GREENER CITIES

“Greening our lives” (August 7), about urban pollution and the need to further green our cities to address some climate change issues, was pertinent and timely. However, there seemed to be some misunderstanding of how our cities develop, and critical comments about planners’ failings. Howell Davies criticised planners for allowing “developers to leave only a narrow strip of verge beside roads”, clearly unaware verges form part of the road reserve, the dimensions of which are determined by engineers, not planners.

We are, in fact, blessed that our local authorities require these verges next to footpaths, as these are not standard requirements in many overseas cities.

Our cities have also benefited from a requirement that land is set aside for reserves at the time of subdivision, a requirement that has been in place since the later 19th century. Yes, some of the land might be waste land, but here in Palmerston North, that waste land has become a vital part of a green-corridor system and many native birds are sustained by those corridors.

Finally, although I applaud the greening of buildings, I remember discussion with two landscape architects who had designed such a building in Australia. They said the most challenging aspects were the ongoing work and cost of maintaining that greenery.

Associate Professor Caroline Miller Resource and Environmental Planning Programme, School of People, Environment and Planning, Massey University, Palmerston North

The article presented some spectacular examples of “greening cities” by planting native trees, controlling predators and enabling native birds to thrive.

But only at the end of the article is the point made that urban planting alone can’t move the climate dial to “a 1.5°C world”. That will depend on us getting serious about removing the source of carbon-dioxide emissions, 36% of which are from fossil-fuel-powered transport.

The Greater Wellington Region already has the highest combined public transport and active modes (walking and cycling) share in the country: half of those who commute to central Wellington each day use these modes.

The Land Transport Plan aims to go further: a 40% shift in mode share from private cars to public transport and active modes by 2030. The council aims to decarbonise its bus fleet by 2030. Getting to a zero-carbon-emissions region requires other actions by the regional and city councils: compact urban design through more intensive housing; investment in safe walking and cycling infrastructure; a congestion charge; a step-change in public transport to mass rapid transit; promotion of the climate and health benefits of walking and cycling; and transition to electric vehicles.

Roger Blakeley

Chair, Transport Committee, Greater Wellington Regional Council