Passport design

John Carter’s comments re the redesign of the passport resonate with me for the following reason. About 12 years ago I was at a dinner for my old Rotary Club held in the Beehive in Wellington.

I was seated with a well-known Wellington entrepreneur who described how his firm had been paid a few hundred thousand dollars to redesign the then passport to its current form.

Given that the people who mainly open a passport are immigration officials who look at the photo page and go zap zap with a stamp on another page, one wonders why it needs to be redesigned at all and if so how much was paid out to the redesigners this time!?

Another waste of taxpayer/ ratepayer money like the Christchurch bus redesign. What do these public servants think about when looking to spend our hard-earned dollars?

Wayne Hawkyard, Loburn