To drink, or not to drink, in 100% grubby NZ
Fake news: You can safely drink from New Zealand waterways. Instructions follow: 1. Find a waterway in which water actually flows. 2. Check there is no algal bloom (read adjacent signage) if there is in fact any water.
3. Check that it is swimmable (read adjacent signage). Please note, swimmable does not equate to drinkable, just as wadeable is not the same as swimmable. And these definitions are ‘‘newspeak’’ – you cannot find them in the Oxford Dictionary. Furthermore, river swimmable is an E coli standard (read faecal contamination) and lake swimmable is an algal bloom standard (read nutrient loading from agriculture), but lakes have E coli and rivers have algal blooms. Confused yet? It is intended – this is a Nick Smith snow job.
4. Observe the whole surrounding area for warning signs not to drink, eg stock standing in the water upstream, effluent irrigaters discharging directly into the waterway, sewage pouring into the waterway – but not an issue if the waterway is dry, in which case you cannot drink, let alone swim nor wade.
5. Finally, check out the photo on the front page of The Press (Jul 15, and above). As noted, she is not actually drinking (clever girl), just pretending.
New Zealand is not so much ‘‘clean and green’’ as ‘‘grubby and dirty’’, and the reason is that our weak, corrupt politicians are more concerned with getting into Parliament than dealing with the thornier issues that affect the wellbeing of the NZ populace when they get there. There are answers to the water issues in NZ that do not send the farming sector broke. We just need better leadership to implement these, and the election is on its way. True News. Julian Shorten Reefton
Stop the environmentalists stopping the dams
I read with interest (Jul 15) how environmentalists want to ban prospective dams with signs such as ‘‘Save our rivers’’ in both islands. I like to think I am a conservationist too, but there is also a time for rational thinking.
We need more power stations and we don’t want to resort to nuclear power, so the only way to get more power is to have more dams. We’ll still ‘‘save our rivers’’, it just means we will have a lake in the middle.
Not many people have grasped the seriousness of the situation. Our lake levels in the South Island continue to drop alarmingly. It means we cannot generate power as we used too. Yet again, we in the South Island are rescued by the North Island sending power to us. Last week was a good example: Did you know they had to shut down the Glenbrook steel mill so we could have power sent to us? Did you know the so-called mothballing years ago of the Huntly coal-power station did not happen and it also now produces thermal power and natural gas? Did you know we have to import coal from Indonesia to feed the furnaces along with local coal?
I think we need to have a hard look at our future options before we get into serious power shortages. John Pritchard Papanui