Use motor camps

So central government wants us taxpayers to pay for toilets to be built up and down the country for freeloading tourists. And as ratepayers we then have to pay for the maintenance and upkeep thereof.

There’s plenty of good facilities already, they’re called motor camps. Why not insist freedom campers go down that route and put in place legislation to back it up, i.e. stop them at the border for unpaid fines.

It’s doable, it just requires political will. FRANK HARRIS New Plymouth suicide legislation (eg, raiding the elderly) could be seen as a small price to pay for the much greater public good from legalising assisted suicide.

Credence is given to this theory by the current parliamentary inquiry, and with ACT promoting a bill on the subject.

I acknowledge the inalienable right to practise a religion but also argue no belief system supersedes a basic human right, the instinctual need to free a loved one from interminable chronic pain.

Sanity could rejoin the debate if future polls included statistics helping identify the relative percentages of respondents who identified, in the Census, with a religion or belief that opposes euthanasia on doctrinaire grounds.

This would help distinguish unquestioning faith from humanistic reasons while reminding us to protect the secular tenet embedded in our system of government. JOHN BRADLEY Foxton [abridged]