Whanganui letters: Amazing support from health services
With all the negative talk regarding the health system, I felt the need to write this letter.
Over the past 12 months, my husband has had the most wonderful support you could ever ask for from the Whanganui health system and home care services.
This includes safety equipment in our home, wonderful caregivers three times a week and help provided by the emergency alarm services.
This has all been put in place very quickly.
Absolutely fantastic care.
Kathy Park
Whanganui
Climate change biggest challenge
There is a lot of talk these days about preparing for and mitigating against the impacts of climate change.
The problem with this approach is that we seem to have given up on prioritising reducing fossil fuel use and hence on reducing CO₂ emissions. Our current shelving of a rational approach to address the source or cause of climate warming, and the ever more extreme floods, landslides, storms and fires erupting in Europe and globally, threatens our very existence.
This is alarming, a head-in-the-sand approach, modelled on Trumpian policy and influence. It is dangerous, simply because it is not possible, and it is futile to try to outrun climate change, as we are currently trying to do.
The present approach demands exponentially grander measures to mitigate what will be ever-increasing climate change impacts; the final inevitable outcome, if emissions aren’t dramatically and urgently reduced, being an uninhabitable planet. We have hold of a tiger by the tail.
The only political party in New Zealand that even still talks about all this is the Green Party. I see this as still humanity’s greatest existential challenge, AI autonomy and global conflict following close behind.
My vote for the first time goes Green, my own integrity determining that a vote elsewhere is a vote for a world on a crash course to destruction.
Paul Baber
Aramoho
Extend the electoral cycle
Brilliant article by Andrew Ketels (Opinion, Oct 7). Maybe I believe that because I think the same – that too often our politicians are not thinking about what is best, just about gathering votes, which takes the economy nowhere.
This is why I dream of a six-year term: get rid of worrying about votes all the time so politicians can switch their brains to more serious subjects.
In reality, their thinking should be about what our economy needs to do to create more wealth. So adding cost is no help, which too much of their legislating does; using legislation to gather votes is very expensive.
I just hope all our politicians get to read his article.
Garth Scown
Ōtamatea