Letters: Bridges' ideas are good, they're just not his

National Party leader and Tauranga MP Simon Bridges. Photo/File.

Local MP Simon Bridges is having a tough time of it with scandals and bad polls. His best effort lately has been his state of the nation speech, in which he reeled off a series of long-standing ACT policies as National's priorities - bringing back charter schools, scrapping the Resource Management Act and starting again, indexing tax rates to inflation and so on. All good ideas, just not his.

Perhaps it is time for Tauranga National voters to cut out the middleman and start supporting ACT again. The party is after all the only reliable coalition partner National has ever had. And whether Simon is still leader then or not, they will need a strong partner.

Not so long ago ACT had nine MPs. That should be more than enough to get the Nats over the line next year.

Stuart Pedersen
Mount Maunganui

Children's bike park

Great to see Bike Tauranga and Sport Bay of Plenty getting together to encourage families and especially children to get back on bikes.

It would be great if the Tauranga City Council would provide some ongoing support for children in our community to learn to ride bikes safely.

Possibly following the excellent children's bike park that Napier City Council has created on the foreshore there, a small area put aside for children to learn to ride on the road, it has stop signs, give way signs, traffic lights, pedestrian crossing etc, etc to create a fun and educational place for children to learn, it was full of children and parents the day I visited.

Perhaps somewhere reasonably central close to an existing cycleway?

Yes, I know it will cost money, but it is not a large project, and I would expect the Government would look favourably on this as an investment in our children's future.

Russell Wenn
Oropi

Museum for locals

I'm a little annoyed that the writer on Saturday would assume that we would be building a museum for overseas tourists.

In my mind, the main purpose of the museum is to educate and entertain the local people of Tauranga. It will be a great resource for schools and the community. We are the ratepayers; it is our community. It's like saying the tourists don't use SH2 so why bother fixing it, though thousands of locals are stuck in traffic daily and serious accidents are happening weekly.

Stacey Walden
Pahoia

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