Doctors doth protest too much

Junior doctors must work 10 days continuously with four days off. So they work 10 days a fortnight – common in the general workforce, as is the 81⁄2 hours on day two of the story, Four days in the diary of a junior doctor (Dominion Post, Mar 1).

First and second-year junior doctors are not totally responsible for the patient’s care – that lies with specialist registrars and the specialists themselves.

Junior doctors should choose carefully if they intend specialising. Become a surgeon and you will work long hours and have 24/7 responsibility for your own patients.

A tired doctor is not good but two 16-hour days a fortnight is not that extraordinary. Long hours are common to many occupations.

If daily hours on the job are curtailed, then extend the training period for these doctors so that experience can be accumulated; this increases the number on site and would improve rosters.

Michael Harrison, Khandallah (abridged)

Snapper problem

We frequently use the Airport Flyer bus, or used to. For a long time we saw notices on the bus that Snapper would no longer be a part of the service, but that didn’t bother us unduly.

Little did we know that the Snapper system was needed for the bus to be on the Realtime system. Now there is no Snapper and we have no way of knowing when the bus will actually come or whether there will be one at all as cancellations are pretty frequent.

I have had no joy contacting NZ Bus or Metlink about this. So without a reliable airport bus service, car usage will increase, and shuttles, Uber and taxis will be the ones to benefit.

However, our cities and we citizens are very concerned to avoid adding to our greenhouse emissions unnecessarily. The bus will lose patronage, our roads will have more congestion and we will help the planet to warm a bit more. Come on whoever is responsible, please sort it out! Norman and Linda Wilkins, Petone

GE — another view

John Flux (March 2) supports Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage’s ban on GE research. He suggests waiting for overseas labs to hand us solutions, and he may be right. Kimberly Cooper’s team at the University of California San Diego could come up with the answer.

Cooper views difficulty making gene drives for mammals vs insects as perhaps a very good thing. Male mice genes are presently not cooperating with inheritance.

Meanwhile, Scientific America reported back in November 2017, ‘‘Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Absolutely Anyone to Hack DNA’’. So, I can buy a CRISPR kit online for a few hundred dollars, have a play and learn at home now. It’s happening outside controlled labs all over the world.

Given this, I’m agreeing with Peter Griffin (Genetic research on predators necessary, Feb 25) and arguing for more carefully weighing the costs and benefits of our own research. No threat to our GE-free brand, it would be a learning opportunity. If biosecurity reports each single fruit fly incursion costs at least $1 million, imagine the future costs of keeping NZ free of killer rodents, mustelids, possums and wallabies without GE.

It is the only realistic way to meet the minister’s 2050 aims — do we at least agree on that? Jim Coyle, Avalon

Youthful dissent

I am writing to express my concerns as a young Kiwi about the proposed capital gains tax put forward by the Tax Working Group.

I do not think it’s fair, when people have worked hard and have paid tax on their income at the time. This includes my mum and dad and many other parents.

They have then chosen to spend that wisely on investments as opposed to spending it on consumables that do not add any future value. Then these people are taxed again on the increase in value of that investment, which is often beyond their control. The tax penalises all New Zealanders who work hard and are sensible with investing their money. It will cause a decrease in people willing to spend their money on New Zealand investments.

As said by Winston Churchill, ‘‘I contend that for a nation to try to tax itself into prosperity is like a man standing in a bucket and trying to lift himself up by the handle.’’ So may I ask, is the proposed capital gains tax going to hinder the economy more then help it? Hamish Hull (11), Wadestown

Green concerns grounded?

Tackling the growing climate emergency involves some very difficult political decisions. Our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said that climate change was our nuclear moment.

Take the case of Air NZ recently reducing its fares so dramatically – resulting in more people flying and more emissions. But Air NZ is 52 per cent owned by the Government, so we have control.

On the board of Air NZ I don’t see any evidence of the current Government being 52 per cent represented by their seven directors. Instead we have the chairman of Shell, the chairman of Westpac and Sir John Key. So is the Government being green on the ground but not in the air?

Planes have to rely on fossil fuels for take-off in the foreseeable future and Air NZ has tried hard but unsuccessfully to source biofuels. Emissions from air travel remain the fastest-growing sector of emissions. And also, aviation-dependent tourism is our top export earner and last year grew by 7.8 per cent.

So meaningful action on climate change will involve big political challenges and massive social change.

Deirdre Kent, Waikanae

Wealth of ideas on tax

Columnist Martin van Beynen (March 2) seems to imply the Government could achieve its tax fairness goals more easily and with less damage by raising the top income tax rate to 35 per cent.

If he means that, he doesn’t understand wealthy New Zealand taxpayers. Raising the top income tax rate just makes it more worthwhile for more taxpayers to employ tax lawyers and accountants to find ways of shifting their gains from taxable income to non-taxable gains.

That’s been true in NZ for decades. Remember it was Bob Jones in the 80s who said that for the rich in NZ, paying tax was optional. And NZ remains pretty much the only developed country that has not only no capital gains tax (CGT) but no wealth tax, no inheritance tax, no gift tax, etc.

Which makes the argument that a CGT will drive investors offshore a bit silly — they will find all those taxes waiting for them.

Meanwhile, a large proportion of our best legal and accounting brains devote their talents to enabling themselves and their wealthy clients to avoid paying tax.

Perhaps they’d prefer a simple, comprehensive wealth tax — 0.5 per cent on all their net wealth over, say, $500,000.

Peter Rankin, Evans Bay

A little tipple in time

The Feb 28 article about Ted Witterick’s letter written in 1981 and hidden in the walls of his house stated that he wrote that, in 1981, half a gallon of sherry cost $8.50, a box of beer cans cost $11 and New Zealand changed to decimal currency in 1973.

In actual fact decimal currency was introduced in New Zealand in July 1967, so Ted’s dating of the change to decimal currency was out by six years, which leads me to wonder if Ted had been sampling some of that cheap sherry and beer before writing his letter?

Brian Kennedy, Khandallah