Plus Caption Competition, Quips & Quotes and 10 Quick Questions

I have never wanted to talk about it publicly, and hardly ever in private, but when I was a teenager with a promising sports career, my life was sadly changed forever by a severe attack of paralysing viral poliomyelitis. My mobility, with all that means every day, has been severely compromised since then, worsening over the years. I therefore have strong views about vaccinations against poliomyelitis, which has been eradicated everywhere but Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the Taliban have assassinated nurses administering the vaccine.

Can anti-vaccinators and those hesitant about having the Covid-19 vaccination please think logically and honestly about life as it was before routine vaccinations against previous widespread childhood diseases, such as measles, mumps, whooping cough, chickenpox, diphtheria and tetanus, brought an incredible change throughout the world?

It is illogical, selfish and unacceptable for anyone not to get vaccinated against the Covid-19 virus immediately. Those who do not are not only endangering their own lives, but also encouraging a greater spread of the virus throughout our community, resulting in widespread illness, multiple deaths and the destruction of so many hard-working people’s livelihoods.

Dr Hylton Le Grice, CNZM, OBE, FRCS

(Auckland)

CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION

So, micro-plastics are the latest mistake in pollution threats (“Chemical cocktail”, August 28). Prompt action is required again. We have had to react to DDT poisoning of nature, refrigerant gases damaging our protective ozone layer, lead in petrol poisoning people, green arsenic wallpaper poisoning people at home, asbestos insulation leading to lung diseases, and so on.

They do lead to action, but the actions taken to stop producing polluting greenhouse gases do not compare. This is having initial consequences that should drive a concerted reaction. Can we do something about the resisters? Or should we prepare for something worse than a lockdown?

Paul Bieleski

(Nelson)

PAY RATES

The article on immigration (“Lost labour”, August 28) mentions Immigration NZ has a threshold of $112,320 for skilled workers. The top of the basic pay scale for secondary teachers is $90 000. I guess after 40 years of teaching, here and in Australia and the UK, I’m still an unskilled worker. Maybe if I retrain as a politician, I might make the grade. Chris Brady

(Taumarunui)

The coming of migrant workers into viticulture and horticulture has been a great boon. However, there is a downside. I worked in the industry as the extra staff became necessary. Over the summer, we worked long hours – to make up for the low wages. The employers were not obliged to provide more than 40 hours a week and this advantage was removed.

On piece rates, any worker could earn $26.60, or $38 an hour, given the opportunity. Local workers are not tied to a working visa and may not be as compliant and docile. Some of us tried to discuss our employment contract with a view to improving productivity. Not a thing to be tried twice.

Some workers may use drugs, but this should not be an excuse to turn away those who don’t. Many of us had to support our families, with high rents and high cost of living. I worked alongside backpackers for some years. David George

(Cromwell)

RIGOROUS DEBATE

Hats off to former Listener

editor Pamela Stirling. Unlike University of Auckland ViceChancellor Dawn Freshwater, who tried to shut down discussion on the meaning of science, Stirling instead published a range of viewpoints. Surely Freshwater should be at the forefront of rigorous debate rather than wallowing in stagnant water. Is this the thin edge of the wedge of free speech? Glennys Adams

(Waiheke Island)

SUPPORT FOR THE HUMANITIES

As noted by Michael Neill ( Letters, August 28), education in the Humanities has suffered in recent times. There is a widespread belief that education needs to have a vocational focus and that science and technology are particularly important for our future prosperity. I am a retired engineer, and therefore a practitioner of applied science, but I add my voice to his.

As we enter a phase when climate change will be of increasing importance, it is easy to conclude our responses will involve new and increased applications of science and technology, thereby supporting the desire for education in these fields. Applied science will be important, but the real barriers to effective climate change responses are philosophical and political.

When we have a society in which writers, poets, historians and philosophers are more numerous and more respected, we may then be on the path to recovery from our present destructive trajectory.

Colin Bell

(New Plymouth)

LETTER OF THE WEEK

AFGHANISTAN’S AFTERMATH

The August 28 Editorial made some valid points about the possible outcome of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan as the Taliban seek to institute

a new form of government, which may result in some of the 20-year “gains” being reversed. However, I take issue with the statement “because of our membership of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, there is less need for physical involvement in troubled regions …”

Surely it is at least in part because of our membership of this group that we got dragged into this mess, not to mention Vietnam and other conflicts. Some commentators in the UK and Europe are suggesting they will reassess their unquestioning following of the US into conflicts. Perhaps we should be doing the same. Geoffrey Horne (Wellington)

LIVING WITH TESTOSTERONE

“Sex, lies & stereotypes” (August 14) on the role of testosterone in problematic male behaviour reminded me that in the 1960s, we were taught at school that oestrogen was the most problematic hormone. It was said to cause regular mood fluctuations that made women

unsuitable for any important role in society. I remember thinking at the time that surely testosterone was the hardest hormone to live with, as evidenced by the aggression and crime perpetrated by us males.

The good news, as the article noted, is that humans are self-reflective and have selfcontrol. Testosterone doesn’t compel us to assault, murder and rape. If we do so, it is a conscious choice.

David Shapcott

(Auckland)

TRANS DEBATE

I feel deeply sorry for children, and for parents, caught up in the trans contagion that has redefined a real problem for a tiny minority, and the personal adjustment issues of many other young people, as a social justice cause ( Letters, August 21). I am also angered by the health practitioners who have trashed established understandings of professional roles, and of the protection of minors, for so-called “affirmative care”. As well, it is bewildering that the

present debate does not give due acknowledgement to the effects of online sites, peers, schools and the family in shaping children’s development.

Attempting to change a child’s sex by chemical and surgical means is blatantly “conversion therapy”.

And quite apart from any unwanted physiological effects of puberty blockers, it is also impossible to arrest human development without psychological consequences, as those who were late developers will likely attest. We know that achieving a mature sexual identity is a journey, and it is relevant that most individuals who initially identify as transgender ultimately adopt a gender identity that is consistent with that assigned at birth.

As with recovered memories, lobotomy and Soviet psychiatry, there’s a right and a wrong side of history for health professionals (and for educators) on this one. And isn’t it intriguing how the moral certainties of one time and place can so quickly be recognised as professional travesties? With respect to the slipstream for trans children, I know where I would want to be when the regret, reviews and recriminations roll in.

Dr Peter Stanley

Retired counselling psychologist (Tauranga)

SCIENCE AND KNOWLEDGE

It seems self-evident that mātauranga Māori can contribute to an understanding of applied science relating to

such areas as the environment and society, especially within a New Zealand context. Equally, science can contribute to an analysis of mātauranga Māori, especially in discussing how much of current knowledge compares with that of 200 years ago, before the influence of any “Western” scientific methods or European traditional knowledge.

It is pernicious of Ministry of Education activists to politicise the curriculum by setting up a conflict between the values of science and mātauranga Māori. It is also disappointing that Dame Anne Salmond ( Letters, August 14) should criticise the authors of the original letter ( July 31) on the grounds they should not comment on matters outside their own scientific disciplines.

This simply reinforces academic silo culture and suggests we should not listen to anything she has to say outside the area of Māori studies. That would be unfortunate. If nothing else, surely mātauranga Māori encourages people of all disciplines to sit around the table and discuss the values and consequences of scientific research.

Dr Philip Temple, ONZM {Dunedin)

CK Stead ( Letters, August 21) goes to the heart of the matter in the debate over the proposed inclusion of indigenous wisdom inside the science classroom. Nobody would have a problem with traditional Māori knowledge being taught in a history or social studies class, but to place it in the science syllabus represents for many a category mistake. It is the same reason we do not include the study of creationism inside the science classroom.

If students are crying out for spiritual knowledge, as is claimed by Māori, they are at liberty to obtain that knowledge and be persuaded by that knowledge inside the marae or at other appropriate venues, but not inside a secular staterun science seminar room. Church and state need to be kept separate.

Some Māori academics have argued for a two-way approach to research, using examples that involve treating things such as the taniwha in a metaphorical way. What is instructive here is that this is exactly the same kind of manoeuvre liberal theologians play at to keep their own metaphysical enterprise afloat while living against a modern background of quasars, black holes and quantum shifts. Peter Dornauf

(Hamilton)

It is difficult to integrate science and mātauranga, a current aspiration, because they have substantial epistemological differences.

Modern mātauranga emphasises integration over separation of knowledge categories, received over hypothesised interpretations and experiential over experimental practice. Science and mātauranga are thus intrinsically contradictory approaches to knowledge that resist both combination and interrogation of one by the other.

Even attempting to align theoretically rational science with mātauranga faces a fundamental problem in the monolithic construction of the latter. Mātauranga is conceived as comprehensive of Māori knowledge and intellectual approaches, both of which range beyond natural and social phenomena into magic, ritual and myth. Consequently, where mātauranga equivalence with science is simply assumed, eg, in scientific publication of modern fables about Polynesian voyaging to Antarctica as if they were historical events, both approaches are likely to be compromised.

An alternative is to narrow the scope of mātauranga that is brought into comparison, a suggestion with historical precedence. In the 1840s, Edward Shortland found that Māori recognised three knowledge groups: religious knowledge, myths and legends called kōrero tara (fables) and traditional histories. Only the last were involved in comparative analysis. Competing histories were tested in public, in effect evaluation of multiple hypotheses, to determine where land and other rights lay. Similarly rational approaches are implicit in Māori technology and economic relationships.

Returning to historical categorisation of mātauranga could make parallel consideration with science a more credible field of research and instruction than is currently likely.

AJ Anderson CNZM, FRSNZ, FAHA, FSA

Professor Emeritus, Australian National University

This dispute has brought to the fore how intolerant much of academia and university management has become to any point of view that is divergent from that which is deemed the “acceptable norm”. As the article “Sex, lies & stereotypes” (August 14) notes, “[our] cultural assumptions and beliefs inform … and … affect the questions we pose and answers we seek” and academic institutions are increasingly ignoring reasoned, open debate in preference for ideologically based positions and black and white “answers”.

Two clear cases in point are Massey University’s ban/ deplatforming of Don Brash and its cancellation of the Feminism 2020 event in Wellington. Life is complex yet often the response is to label contrary perspectives and those who hold them as racist, sexist or transphobic. Satires such as Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Four Lions provide the best retort.

As noted in previous letters, staff can face serious employment and promotion issues if the “party line” is not vocally agreed with. This is much more in line with a country under authoritarian rule yet New Zealand universities are becoming prone to it – perhaps due to a fear of being “called out”.

To be fair, though, some of the blame must lie with the influence of particular political goals on funding.

If an institution has been directed to include a particular objective and has funding predicated upon its implementation, then it is obviously in its self-interest to promote it.

Undoubtedly, many will take issue with what I have written, but universities should remember it is a very short step from banning books to burning them.

Julius Williams

(Palmerston North)

FAIR ECONOMIC RETURN

Arthur Grimes (“Bringing the house down”, August 28) sheets home the blame for the housing disaster to the 2018 changes to the Reserve Bank Act. He calls for changes in policy settings to hasten a fall in house prices. But no shift in the “dual mandate” for the Reserve Bank is likely to have any significant impact on the current unfair wealth inequality without radically changing the current tax settings around housing.

As Grimes notes, homeowners and investors have enjoyed vast untaxed gains in recent years. Upgrading the family home to a mansion or purchasing investment properties is a highly tax-advantaged way to accumulate wealth.

The recent Government proposals limiting interest deductions and extending the bright-line test period are horrendously complex and the suggested exemption for new builds means they are unlikely to significantly limit these advantages.

A capital gains tax is politically a dead duck. In any case, future gains may or may not eventuate and any new realised capital gains tax would be too little too late, even if the political environment was supportive. Capital gains that have accumulated already are the problem.

To correct the distorted economic signals around ownership of housing for investment purposes, a sharp shock is needed. But not one that destabilises those families tentatively on the homeownership ladder with a mortgage and impending rate rises.

Tax consultant Terry Baucher and I suggested a circuit breaker in our working paper, The Fair Economic Return (FER). It is not a new idea. It says that money held in property should be treated as if it were earning interest at the bank. What is new is setting out the pragmatic way the FER could be implemented.

So, how would it work? For each property owner, the untaxed housing income (the FER rate times net equity) would be included as part of their taxable income. Any feasible scheme would have to acknowledge the centrality of having one adequate home. However, just making the family home exempt could lead to manipulation of the system. A per-person net equity exemption would relieve the majority of modest homeowners.

One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. That would be an accurate summary of the debates on capital gains tax over the past 30 years. It’s time to do something different. We believe it’s time for to try a Fair Economic Return approach.

Susan St John and Terry Baucher (Auckland)

BASKET CASE

In response to Adrian Macey’s letter (August 7), the Nissan Leaf is not a vehicle, it’s a shopping basket.

Alan Hayward

(Cambridge)