Target the right bank for child’s bounced-cheque bill

The father of a 10-year-old is reported as being critical of the ASB for charging his daughter $300 for a bounced €500 ($800) cheque issued by her grandmother in Ireland (News, February 3).

But the ASB is the wrong target – it should be the Irish and English banks who charged those fees. I think it is fair enough to charge a fee to the grandmother for issuing a cheque, and this may well have been done in addition, but to charge fees to her innocent granddaughter is only rubbing salt in the wound.

I retired from banking more than two decades ago, and we never charged a depositor for a returned cheque. In any case, a $300 fee is usury.

Henry Perkins, Botany Downs

Tax and wellbeing

So the Government focus will now be ‘‘kindness, empathy and well-being’’, recognising that quantifiable or measurable attributes and targets such as those given KiwiBuild don’t seem to work for them. Presumably these new qualities will be the principal business case criteria for evaluating prospective policies, projects and propositions. I wonder how capital gains tax will shape up against these new criteria, since at present CGT looks like being Labour’s one-way ticket to Opposition.

Jim Young, Lower Hutt

Treaty definitions

The accusation by Geoff Parker (Letters, February 3) that Ma¯ ori activists are telling lies is not supported by his own information.

The Ma¯ ori version of the Treaty of Waitangi authorises British government (kawanatanga) but not British sovereignty (rangatiratanga), so if some Ma¯ ori want to claim that they did not give up sovereignty the Ma¯ ori Treaty supports them. The Treaty also leaves Ma¯ ori with control of their own resources (rangatiratanga). That is obviously a partnership even though, like a marriage the word ‘‘partnership’’ is not included in the agreement.

The claim that ‘‘land stolen’’ from Ma¯ ori is a myth is not supported by Parker’s figures. He says that only 2.3 per cent of New Zealand land was stolen from Ma¯ ori. So far that has required about $3 billion of justified compensation with more to come. Some myth! Peter Dey, Tauranga

NZTA woes

Yet another woeful story by Alison Mau about the NZ Transport Agency (‘‘The safety undertow’’, Focus, February 3).

While most people seem to consider this a government problem, it is actually a privatisation and free market issue.

As with building, health and safety and alcohol, too much trust was put in the marketplace to control standards. Vehicle Testing New Zealand was sold and put in to competition, with every garage licensed to inspect.

Industry resists oversight at every turn, then cries foul when reality comes to call.

David Patterson, Otaki

NZTA’s handling of the tow-bar debacle is not going to go down as one of their better moments. Patrick Chu’s business has been given a hiding and I would suspect there are a lot of people hurting out in businessland. The calculation on the back of my envelope suggests millions will have been lost before the dust settles.

Tow-bars don’t go from being fit for purpose to dangerous just because Chu inspected them. I would suggest that many of the quarantined tow-bars are still perfectly okay yet they have been taken off the road with the costs shovelled on to the owners. NZTA is beginning to look like a lynch mob hell-bent on creating a scapegoat to cover up its own inadequacies.

Geoff Orchard, Ohaupo

Thank Auckland

Murray Shaw (Letters, February 3) is badly mistaken if he thinks the rest of the country supports Auckland’s roading needs. In fact, quite the opposite situation applies.

A quick check of the facts shows that, in a per capita sense, Auckland supports the rest of the country when it comes to roads. The vast majority of the tax collected in New Zealand comes from people living in Auckland, yet only a fraction of that money is actually spent here. Auckland and its large tax base effectively props up the less populated, poorer parts of the country. We thank the rest of the country in advance for their gratitude. Patrick Houlahan, Auckland

Homes and diets

The claim that ‘‘There’s no simple fix to building more homes’’ (David Slack, Focus, February 3) is false.

New Zealanders are reproducing below the replacement rate so the government could simply remove the need for more houses by stopping immigration.

Moreover, Wellington recently had the hottest day on