Don’t go there!

A friend of mine recently arrived home from four months of touring the South Island in his motor home. He came back with some interesting observations, like never finding a metal road, despite taking many side roads into remote parts.

The part of his report that intrigued me the most related to his fellow travellers. They were out in force, hundreds of them. In one small town, for example, he counted 800. On average each of those campervans spend $100-$120 a day. That’s $80,000-plus a day.

Imagine that kind of income being enjoyed by Kaitaia on a daily basis. My friend certainly did, and was inspired to promote us, especially in view of the fact that our beaches are far and away superior to any he saw down there. Most of them were pebble or rock beaches, with no sand for goodness’ sake.

That became a big part of his promotion, one he thought would be a winner, but everyone to whom he spoke had the same response: “Oh no, we’re not going up there. Too many stories of tourists being robbed. Not a place we want to risk visiting.”

What a shame! Imagine if locals got together and agreed to watch over and protect visitors, and word went out on Trip Advisor. “Things have changed up there. The locals are policing the place. Tourists are now safe. In fact, they guarantee tourists’ safety, even to the point of having a locally generated fund to reimburse stolen items, in the unlikely event of any thief slipping their vigilant oversight.”

MARK CHAMBERLAIN

Kaingaroa

I remain committed to supporting MAN UP’s efforts to have their work recognised.

And I am disappointed that the Minister of Corrections chose to launch personal attacks on the Tamaki wha¯ nau rather than deal with the facts of the situation. The prison population is higher than 10,000, more than half of those are Ma¯ ori, and nothing the government is doing is having any impact on that. Your people are screaming for answers Kelvin, not insults.

I congratulate Hannah Tamaki for being bold enough to say that if the government won’t support them they’ll go to Parliament themselves to campaign for their programmes.

I have spoken to both Brian

and Hannah on a number of occasions over the past few weeks, and of course politics has been part of those discussions, but the truth is that since leaving Parliament in 2014 I have been incredibly busy building community resilience and developing options for wha¯ nau and hapu across the North, and I am fully committed to following through on these projects. HONE HARAWIRA

MANA

England. This is the only legitimate Treaty translated from the final draft English version (Littlewood Draft).

The chiefs ceded full sovereignty (kawanatanga), and they knew it. Read the chiefs’ speeches in Colenso’s record, further supported by chiefs’ speeches at Kohimarama 20 years later. It is utterly absurd therefore to say that in Article 2 they somehow retained it.

He further discredits himself in referencing a racially stacked, biased Waitangi Tribunal report, who the then AttorneyGeneral, Christopher Finlayson rebutted in the media: “There is no question that the Crown has sovereignty in New Zealand.

This report doesn't change that fact.”

Auckland University Professor Paul Moon also stated at the time: “I was shocked by some of the statements contained in the report. This is not a concern about some trivial detail, but over the fundamental history of our country, which the Tribunal has got manifestly wrong.”

Perhaps Mr Howard could explain, if the chiefs still thought they had full chieftainship, then why did they release their slaves, cease cannibalism, female infanticide and tribal warfare?

GEOFF PARKER

Kamo welcome Queen's Sovereignty.

At the Kohimarama Conference in 1860 Nga¯puhi were represented by Tamati Waka, Wiremu Kaitara, Huirua Mangonui, Wiremu Hau, Tango Hikuwai, Wi Tete, Hori Kingi. The conference unanimously endorsed the sovereignty of the Queen, and also denounced the 1858 Kingite movement in the Waikato.

History is a verifiable recording of facts and not convenient opinions or wishful thinking. The Waitangi Tribunal is once more shown to be unreliable and its rulings biased. BRYAN JOHNSON

Omokoroa muscles in the direction of the Otorohanga District Council, demanding the addition of a macron to the name Otorohanga, via their comrades-in-arms, the National Geographic Board.

That anyone would take any notice of such a ridiculous proposition is beyond me, but the Mayor of Otorohanga is genuflecting to this demand in “an effort to embrace New Zealand’s indigenous culture.”

On the one hand, Ma¯ori are not indigenous to New Zealand. It is well known and acknowledged even by the most careless historians that Ma¯ori came to New Zealand from somewhere else. That’s generally thought to be the Republic of China.

On the other hand, Ma¯ori had no written language until the British missionaries created it, using the English alphabet, phonetics and punctuation. There are no macrons in English language, and there were no macrons in the written Ma¯ori language.

But hey, if it helps to keep one in power, run with it, eh? LEO LEITCH

Taupo¯ grow our own organic cannabis plants, and is aligned with our human right for access to health supplements. We must be able to look after our own health, where we can.

Currently, health supplements containing plants such as ginkgo, saw palmetto and hawthorn are under threat in the US. We remember Annette King and Jonathan Coleman also tried, unsuccessfully, to restrict our access to some health supplements. We understand the Health Department will be again be reconsidering our access to health supplements in the near future.

The hysteria around cannabis is unfounded and mischievous. To say

it

causes violence is absurd. There is much scientific evidence that cannabis calms people. With the high usage of cannabis in New Zealand because it is helpful for so many health issues, one may be reassured anecdotally as well.

The police have also been reported as saying they would prefer to confront a person who has consumed cannabis than one who has consumed alcohol, because alcohol can cause a person to be violent.

With 180,000-plus people admitting to consuming cannabis currently, and knowing that some people have used it all their lives, even before it was made illegal 60 years ago, we could expect the streets to be dangerous because of these violent psychotic people.

That is simply not the case. Those who are unsure about re-legalising cannabis are encouraged to read the science. Those who are fear-mongering, promoting the fear of violence and psychotic episodes from cannabis users, must know they lose credibility from such bizarre statements.

We are embarrassed for them, as in those words of wisdom we were taught as children, “It is better to be a fool and keep your mouth shut than open it and remove all doubt.”

BEVERLEY ALDRIDGE KATHLEEN PATTINSON Seniors’ Voice, Otamatea Mitch Morgan’s highlighted letter (A long time coming, May 21) is an example of how climate science deniers try to deceive readers with selective and false information from their denialist sources.

He quotes correctly — irrespective of paragraph re-ordering from his cited November 2, 1922, edition of The Washington Post, which published a brief summary of a report submitted by the American consul at Bergen, Norway, to the US State Department. This report was published on page 589 in the November issue of the journal Monthly Weather Review that year.

The Review report was mainly about a Norwegian Department of Commerce expedition to Spitzbergen and Bear Island to survey and chart the islands adjacent to the Norwegian mines on those islands, take soundings of the waters and make other oceanographic investigations. Although local climate changes were observed, it was not basically a climate science report.

The original source of The Washington Post story resurfaced in 2007, but it was in early 2010 that the final paragraph quoted by Mitch Morgan, ‘Within a few years it is predicted that due to the ice melt the sea will rise and make most coastal cities uninhabitable,’ was added.

The Washington Post article, with this fake additional quote, has done the rounds of most major climate science denial sites since.

As former Senior Scientific Affairs Officer at the United Nations Centre for Science and Technology for Development, Dr Tom Goreau, says: “Those who seek to deny global warming constantly use transparently obvious tricks, selecting data from a single time, a single place, or both, to deny the larger long-term global patterns and is repeatedly used by the climate change deniers to fool people who haven’t looked at the data themselves.”

It is clear that what happened in Spitzbergen in 1922 did not represent the Arctic as a whole, and for Leo Leitch (Well said, letters May 23) to say Mitch Morgan has identified an “authoritative report from 1922” shows how limited is his understanding of climate science. ROSS FORBES

Kerikeri