Make use of water resource

Water conservation is a national and international issue but no one in New Zealand wants to take a sensible approach to it. What percentage of current water consumption goes down our toilets, on our gardens and other dirty water facilities? What percentage of the water that falls on our cities just falls on the ground?

What about requiring every new house builder to install a dirty-water tank fed from their roof. What about rewarding those citizens who have already installed such a system, a rates rebate. Then, what about encouraging the remaining houseowners to do so, by offering rates or tax relief. That may be as successful as the previous government’s attempt to encourage people to insulate their homes.

Now consider the new Government's goal of building an additional 100,000 homes. Let’s compare the costs of 100,000 Chinese manufactured water meters compared with 100,000 locally manufactured water tanks, and the employment opportunities that it would offer Kiwis. Who would have to pay for all these water tanks? Not the ratepayers, the costs would be added to the cost of every new house. Let’s utilise our existing water resources, and in particular the water that would otherwise go down the drain, by adding and enforcing a clause to our existing building consents.

Brian Main, Hamilton.

Need for debate

I was pleased to see Rachel Stewart’s article about “Terf wars” because it helped me to understand a debate that seems to have been raging on social media, a forum I don’t access. Can it be right to allow people to change the gender recorded on their birth certificate with no more stringent requirement than a statutory declaration? The implications of this change need more public debate.

Maire Leadbeater, Mt Albert.

Implications of bill

Who even knew about the Births, Deaths, Marriages, and Relationships Registration Bill and what the implications might be in its current form? Given the online vitriol that Ms Stewart has endured by daring to speak out, I too care about her 6-yearold niece and the many others who are not currently represented in this debate.

Paul Tudor, Sandringham.

Immigration appeals

Listening to an immigration expert on the radio, I had no idea that the vast majority of migrants have no right of appeal to the minister. They are told by his office to appeal to the civil servant who denied them. Strangely enough, no one ever gets a decision reversed. The right to appeal to the minister was abolished some years ago when the department became embarrassed over losing a number of cases and decided to reduce this to zero by abolishing the process. You have to admire the Kafkaesque mindset.

Tony Marks, Omaha Beach.

Warriors deals

Maybe each player should be paid a retainer of say $60k-$70k, increasing as they spend more time at the club, up to a maximum, and then be paid bonuses after each match depending on how they play. Maybe they’d all play better then.

Karola Wheeler, West Harbour.

Bullying

Paul Judge’s article in Dialogue was a fair and accurate one. I believe this practice of institutional bullying is widespread in the workplace. It has been given a name of “performance management” to enable it to happen by managers who will do anything to prove they are “performing” when they are not. Unfortunately workplace colleagues feel the fear and go along with this victimisation. Organisations need to re-organise their processes of performance management to stop this happening to good employees.

Kathy Brett, Tairua.

Technique not proven

Wednesday’s opinion piece by Neil Holdom, Mayor of New Plymouth District Council, contains misleading, if not incorrect, information. There are no commercially operating Allam Cycle plants operating anywhere in the world and there are no commercially operating carbon sequestration systems in the world that inject CO2 into old oil and gas wells. And we already have too much urea being sprayed over our farm land, as the recent bore water tests in Canterbury confirm. Currently there is just one small scale demonstration Allam Cycle plant under construction, which is in America. It is not finished, it is not working and it has yet to prove that it is commercially competitive. Most carbon capture and storage trials around the world have been abandoned as being too difficult and too expensive.

While we should always be scanning the horizon for new technologies, New Zealand has much better things to spend its money on than subsidising international companies that are touting unproven technologies.

Russell Baillie, Mt Eden.

Banishing cars

The recent announcement of proposals to reduce Quay St to two lanes and to turn Queen St into a pedestrian mall demonstrates the blind determination of Auckland Council and Auckland Transport to make Auckland the world’s most undrivable city. These proposals will benefit the bludgers (cyclists) who make no financial contribution to roading while Auckland motorists continue to pay at the pump for no return. It won’t be long before gridlock is an everyday event in the city. Now would be an appropriate time to rename Auckland, “The City of Snails”.

Dave Murray, Grey Lynn.

Rat bags

Due to the banning of “single use” plastic bags, New Zealand households will no longer have useful containers in which to deposit their food scraps and other edible rubbish, so we could be in line for a plague of rats. As usual, ideas put forward by administrators in the Government have not been carefully thought through, and define the limit of their intelligence. I look forward to some entrepreneur selling retailers surplus stocks as “multi-use” plastic rubbish bags.

Dr Brian Earnshaw, Mt Roskill. What a good suggestion from Grant McLachlan that dogs should be allowed on beaches at any time throughout the year when the tide is low. It is frustrating both for dogs and their owners to be banned from exercising on these big expanses of sand that are frequently deserted during the day.

Jennifer Barraclough, Devonport.

Erebus blame

Chris Lonsdale has misstated the facts of the crash on Mt Erebus. Justice Peter Mahon’s royal commission discovered the crash was caused by Air New Zealand telling the pilots the computer operated autopilot would take the plane safely down McMurdo Sound, while at around 2am on the morning of the 8am flight, the airline shifted the autopilot flight path some 27 miles so that it crossed Mt Erebus. Justice Mahon also discovered Mt Erebus had been made invisible by an Antarctic phenomenon known as whiteout. This same whiteout made the approach to Erebus look as if it were the approach to McMurdo Sound.

Stuart Macfarlane, Remuera.

Huda thought it

Housing Minister Phil Twyford’s latest solution is to create a Housing and Urban Development Authority. Brian Rudman has pointed out some key issues at stake here. Ministers invoking direct and undemocratic rule from Wellington of local authorities and communities, and erasing normal democratic processes, are not acceptable.

It is especially worrying when one reads a 2010 media statement from Mr Twyford, then Labour spokesman for “Auckland issues”. Criticising Rodney Hide’s appointment of Mark Ford to run Auckland Transport, he said, “The transport agency will spend billions of dollars of Aucklanders’ rates . . . but . . . it is Mark Ford who will be calling the shots, not the elected Mayor.”

Who will be calling the shots for the new Huda? Not the mayor or councillors.

Tony Holman, Northcote Point.

China threat

I find it difficult to decide who wins the prize for the most outrageous hypocrisy — the supposed socialists of the Chinese Communist Party who unashamedly employ all the weapons of capitalism to manipulate Western business and politicians to their advantage, or commentators such as Fran O’Sullivan, with obvious right-of-centre political views, who choose to ignore the manifest human rights outrages of the CCP when co-operation with them appears to be economically profitable.

Peter Rodriguez, Whanganui.