Wetting your whistle in the rain
I went to see the Crusaders play the Hurricanes last Friday night and while I got soaked, the rugby was enthralling and the crowd very vocal.
What wasn’t so good was the time it took to get a hot drink. Wet and cold, all I wanted at half time was, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, a cup of tea to restore my normality. Instead it took all of half time while the industrious people behind the counter made trim soy lattes topped with cinnamon and all the other fancy hot beverage combinations.
What happened to large urns of plain old tea and coffee, like at English football grounds? It may not be that flash but it is hot and quickly served. All I could think of while shivering away and waiting wasn’t about the need for a covered stadium but whether V Base could serve hot drinks at the same speed they do cold beer. What makes the life of the unborn child any less human today, than it was in 1977 when our laws on abortion were drafted? In fact those laws were written with the express intent of giving their lives meaningful protection. It is only through a legal loophole that the lives of over 500,000 New Zealand unborn children have been poured out.
Is our society now so ‘‘enlightened’’ that it considers the life of an unborn human child a simple health matter? Jacinda Ardern, the driver of this action, obviously thinks so. Isn’t it highly ironic given her current situation?
If she gets her way we will effectively have a two-tiered system in which if an unborn child is wanted it will be cherished and loved; if not, there will be no restraints on it being cruelly murdered in the womb and disposed of as trash.
Enlightened we may be, but that light is full of darkness. to think it is acceptable to exclude the current zones for Shirley Boys and Avonside Girls (ie Dallington, Avonside, Richmond, Shirley and the St Albans Edgeware postcodes) from the proposed new zones once the schools move from Shirley (Richmond) and Avonside to QE2 Drive in term two, 2019.
It is not OK to take away the access of children in the current zones just because the Ministry was short of a secondary school in northeast Christchurch. It should have been possible for the Ministry to a) remediate the land and/or enhance foundations enabling the schools to remain at their existing sites and b) build a new school at QE2 for the children of North East Christchurch.
Instead the Ministry has chosen to move both high schools and is now proposing to deprive the children and families in the current zones by excluding them from the new zones. I need to correct several factual, and potentially harmful, errors in your correspondent Philip Bayliss’s letter (May 29).
Around a quarter of Christchurch’s water bores cannot be classified as deep and there has been at least one positive E.coli result in a city supply bore.
Water New Zealand supports the recommendations of the Havelock North Contamination Inquiry because the findings were based on rigorous evidence-based science.
It found that the concept of a “secure” bore classification was fundamentally flawed and should be abolished. It also recommended that appropriate and effective treatment of drinking water, including residual disinfectant, be mandated by law for all water supplies and that any exemptions should only occur in “very limited circumstances”.
Our membership consists of 1900 members made up of decision-makers and technologists from central and local government, industry, the academic and research communities, consultants as well as service and equipment supply organisations. It is farcical to suggest we are a lobby group for water treatment companies.