How to make light rail work
Patrick Morgan (Letters, Oct 4) rightly states that light rail has huge benefits for businesses along its route, but then goes off and plans a route which bypasses the greatest concentration of businesses and population.
To ensure its success, light rail must fulfil two essential functions.
Firstly, it must pass through the corridor of greatest demand, and that means the Golden Mile. As Brent Efford stated (Oct 4), disruption will be minimal if best practice is adopted. The other important destinations Morgan names will still be served via Courtenay Place, Kent and Cambridge terraces, a redesigned Basin Reserve, and Adelaide Rd. It is also the cheapest route to build, the fastest, and the least convoluted.
Secondly, it absolutely must be an extension of the existing rail system, as outlined by Alan Smith (Oct 1) with all the advantages he listed.
John Westwood (Oct 4) would then see its relevance and be only too happy to use it to go from his nearest railway station directly to the airport, rather than driving through town, degrading our urban environment with noise and fumes, and then paying exorbitant parking fees at the airport.
Demetrius Christoforou, Mt Victoria
Recalling Orwell
Chris Slater (Letters, Oct 5) characterises the thinking of the ‘‘ideological left’’ as shallow and says that ‘‘. . . extreme Leftwing politics is enforcing diversity, the history of which is one of failure throughout the world . . .’’
I find this very strange, because it’s not long since the extreme ideological Left was represented by the Soviet Union and its Eastern European empire.
I well recall a colleague returning from a visit to eastern Germany, and saying that the sameness of everything was what he most found disturbing. He mentioned that every door seemed to have been made in the same factory. Diversity was nowhere to be seen.
How is it that, only a generation later, someone can characterise ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘left’’ as being markers for belief in diversity or otherwise?
Are they now just tribal labels, meaning ‘‘people who think like me’’ or ‘‘people who don’t think like me’’?
How long, I wonder, will it be until that great line from George Orwell’s Animal Farm – ‘‘Four legs good; two legs bad’’ – makes its appearance? Or is a version of it already with us? That would be shallow thinking indeed.
David Wright, Wellington
Vaccines beneficial
A Health Ministry release dated July 18 this year says, ‘‘Diphtheria is a throat infection which can lead to breathing difficulties. The illness is very rare in countries with an immunisation programme.’’
When I was boy in the 1040s, getting around Christchurch by tram, I frequently noticed a sign above one of the windows. It read, ‘‘Diphtheria is deadly. Immunisation is safe.’’ That, it seemed to me, said it all.
Diphtheria attacks the throat. It can be fatal. In more than 30 years of medical practice, I saw no cases of diphtheria.
In 1960, I did speak to an old doctor, who practised, many years ago, in Nelson. He said to me, ‘‘The Model-T Fords would pull up outside the hospital. Out would tumble a child, more dead than alive. I kept my tracheotomy set directly inside the front door. I would cut a hole in the windpipe of the child, and insert a metal airway. The child could breathe again.’’
Most alarming; most distressing.
I recently spoke with a midwife from Morocco. She still sees cases of neonatal tetanus in babies, and that, too, is a terrible disease. We benefit from vaccinations.
Roger Ridley-Smith, Khandallah
Clemency failures
Surely, senior Corrections manager Leigh Marsh (Prison break, Oct 5), the lower offending rate of those on home detention is because the Corrections ‘‘customers’’ in prison have failed to respond to the last ‘‘last chance’’ noncustodial sentence they were given; they are the failures of clemency.
John Wilson, Johnsonville