Team of five million deserves credit
I'M sorry to hear that Jacinda Ardern is now in isolation with Covid, but she thoroughly deserves a break. Jacinda, Ashley Bloomfield and we, the team of five million, did a fantastic job in keeping the disease at bay. Keeping on top of Delta took a superhuman effort, but it was worth it, possibly saving 10,000 lives. We did well.
We finally had to open the floodgates as Omicron hit, as so many businesses were on the brink of failure. We reached more than one million cases in a very short time, as we all know. If anyone thinks we have failed, then take a look at the ‘‘Death by Country’’ data on the Worldometer website . You will see that we are almost the only country in the world with a death rate at less than 1:1000 cases. We share that honour with only two other countries, Iceland and Tonga. They obviously managed Covid very well too. And how did we manage that? Easy. It was because all the lockdowns, isolation, vaccination and mandates actually did work. I believe that even David Seymour, the man who told us on numerous occasions that our results were purely a product of blind chance, should surely be able to see that. I hold out very high hopes for us. We just need to maintain the wearing of face masks and a little social distancing for a little while yet and we will be fine. We're nearly there. Dave McLean
Broad Bay
Climate change
I HAVE in the past enjoyed Anna Campbell's column as being founded in leading edge thinking bound together with common sense, but her article in praise of ‘‘a megagrowth economy’’ (ODT, 11.5.22) was definitely not leading edge thinking and was so simplistic as to leave common sense out the back door.
Megagrowth more exciting than degrowth? Hardly. In fact the neverending growth which we have experienced throughout most of the 20th century, and which she is advocating we need more of, is the very reason why we are in the midst of a climate change and biodiversity crisis which, unless we urgently arrest this exponential growth machine, is going to tip the planet into an unstoppable spiral of climate and ecological disaster.
The problem is that the global growth economy is consuming way in excess of what our natural world is capable of withstanding.
Climatechanging massive carbon emissions being dumped into the atmosphere are causing droughts, floods, rising sea levels, freshwater shortfalls etc, all resulting in huge dislocations to human existence and of course to all living things on our planet.
We have, hopefully, a few short years to turn this around and forestall the worst effects by significantly cutting back on the growth of production and its accompanying growth in consumption.
Current government thinking seems to be that cutting our carbon emissions through shifting out of fossil fuels will do the trick, but that on its own is not going to be enough. Clean energy will help reduce carbon emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion, urban expansion and mass extinctions within living things.
We need to be thinking of the doughnut economy where our inputs for consumption are offset by equal or greater contribution back into the cycle of nature. Unquestionably megagrowth is the total opposite of what is required.
Megagrowth more exciting than degrowth? Well, it depends on what kind of excitement you are after. Andrew Millar
Wanaka