Spending priorities

of the ersatz relationships we commoners have been encouraged to conduct with England’s Queen Elizabeth, her heirs and successors.

Informative and entertaining journalism – a rare treat.

Jane Margaret Livingstone, Auckland

Jonathan Milne is well behind the times. Royal succession changed while he wasn’t watching. For a generation or two, the succession has been through the first-born child, no matter the gender.

The reason we still have the Queen as head of state is a protection for the people of New Zealand. Perhaps it’s not quite so important these days, but back in the Holyoake/Muldoon era it was our only safeguard.

With the weird and unpredictable coalition of strange bedfellows we now have, protection is vital.

Delys Saunders, Upper Hutt

Editor’s note: No, the principle of primogeniture for male heirs has been abolished only prospectively for Princess Charlotte and future generations. In the current generations, Anne, the Princess Royal, takes a back seat to her younger brothers Andrew and Edward; Peter Phillips takes precedence over his older sister, Zara. The nature of this Government’s reluctance to get on with upgrading the remuneration of teachers and nurses, to name but two, which had stagnated under the previous Government, is revealed more by their plan to spend an extra billion or so on an attack warplane than their current reaction to the surplus revealed by Treasury.

The need for a plane capable of Pacific disaster work is positive for the region, given the likelihood of more fierce storms. But a warplane will be destabilising in its threat to China and in its contribution to a Five Eyes relationship defined by Trump’s America First policy.

So what we see is a Labour Party primarily driven by Anzus Cold War roots of the fifties and by its neoliberal transformation of the eighties.

They won’t be able to reach their stated ecological and social agenda goals without a fundamental revaluation of who they are.

Richard Keller, Wellington