New Zealand is playing catch-up - urban areas included. All sewage used to be released into the sea or waterways and industrial waste went into rivers.
The green agenda is to blame farmers all in a bid to get rid of cattle.
Even the RMA aims to stop stock being grazed on steep land.
The idea is to have New Zealand planted in pine trees but people can't eat pine trees.
New Zealand is in a prime position to help provide bushfire-stricken Australia with meat and good food.
China has swine fever killing their pigs and will need meat and we are a country with the best food in the world.
But our Government is intent on regulating our farming industries out of business.
Our great food industries will be destroyed, but not by natural disasters like the above-mentioned countries.
(Abridged)
C Humphreys
Katikati
The treaty: 'We've got to be fair'
Re Buddy Mikaere's column on the Treaty of Waitangi (Opinion, January 2).
I found this column interesting and learned a lot from, but cannot agree with Mikaere's comment that the Treaty was "not so much about nation building but more to assist with the speedy acquisition of Maori land". To support this he cites the Treaty's provision that Maori land could only be sold to the government, and "the flood of legislation in the 1860s backs this up".
But surely the provision regarding only selling to the government was to stop the wrongful acquisition of land by the New Zealand Company? Had this provision not been included Maori would have been cheated out of much more land, with subsequent warfare between the victims of such cheating and the Europeans, as at Wairau and Waitara.
Surely the "flood of legislation" in the 1860s which endeavoured to legitimise the wholesale confiscation of land, was not, as the column says, to back up the land acquisition policy of the Treaty, but was in contravention thereof.
The Treaty of Waitangi is, as Mikaere says, all about a "fair go", but I also believe we've got to be fair to those who drafted the Treaty in respect of their intentions.
Don Campbell
Gate Pā
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