Let Maori and Pakeha join together to celebrate our national day

WAITANGI Day celebrations will soon be disrupted once again by the circus of the dysfunctional and disaffected.

It should be a joyous day, celebrating an amazingly enlightened treaty for its time with its citizen equality and property rights.

Its commitment to law and order saw the end of tribal warfare and the development of a peaceful and pleasant democracy.

I cannot understand the foolishness of those determined to ruin the day.

They reinterpret history, and promote lies, resentment, feudalism and separatism.

Celebrating culture is to be encouraged, but instilling apartheid ideology is destructive and dangerous. The only winners are the greedy and selfish tribal mafia.

We just have to look around our homes, sports and workplaces to see that most of us are definitely united as New Zealanders.

We cannot take the Maori out of the Pakeha, no more than we can take the Pakeha out of the Maori. We are one despite the usual familial quirks.

A national day reset is the solution. Let’s celebrate ‘‘New Zealand Day’’, which is what most are already doing informally on February 6 anyway.

Away from the political limelight, we are just Kiwis wanting to share good times with friends, family and our communities. Geoff Parker

Whangarei

Telford

TELFORD’S fate hangs in the balance.

So much for nearly 50 years of outstanding service to the South Otago farming community. How did it all come to this?

The ODT, in its excellent editorial (19.1.19), pointed the finger at Lincoln University following its takeover in 2011 and, latterly, the Mastertonbased Taratahi Institute of Agriculture. It said both had been accused of ‘‘pillaging’’.

A fedup female Telford staff member who didn’t want to be identified said she and her colleagues had been ‘‘shafted’’.

Telford had been a going concern with substantial assets in the millions at that time, and successive operators had stripped those assets for nothing more than shortterm gain.

Lincoln moving on after sucking the marrow from Telford’s bones left meagre pickings for Taratahi which, surprise, surprise, is itself now in liquidation.

A sorry tale worth an article digging deep into this unfortunate state of affairs. G.R. MacDonald

St Kilda ..................................

BIBLE READING: Therefore no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. — Romans 3:20.