The Bay of Plenty Times welcomes letters and comments from readers. Below you can read the letters we have published in your newspaper today.
Cast your vote for wonderful future
This green and pleasant land is still one of the great small nations on the planet. And this, despite our best efforts to stuff
it up.
How do we know that? Well, the queue of people trying to get into New Zealand is longer than the queue of people trying get out of it at all times.
We are so lucky in New Zealand for so many reasons, namely, heaps of land and water for everyone, good air in most places, big and beautiful and often empty beaches, surrounded by sea on all sides and living so close to Australia.
And, with this particular city/region being one of the current boom towns, it's got to be a 9 point something out of 10, surely.
We've made life tough for ourselves by not being able to hold together our key family and key community and city and national medium and long-term relationships, thus complicating things, somewhat unnecessarily.
However, there is hope. There is time. And there are good people out there to help bring it together.
Leadership has a big part to play in it, so vote wisely this week. Read the pamphlets and know who the goodies are. It's our decisions that begin to create the leadership and if you can't vote, you can't grumble. Sorry.
Awake oh Tauranga. Awake and vote. Awake and vote wisely, please.
This could the beginning of something great.
(Abridged)
GRAEME MARTIN Otumoetai
Shame on dodgers
Re: Art fans dodging cost of culture.
Typical $10 Tauranga. It's out-of-towners that pay the dollars.
Tauranga WANTS are just that - a joke.
Tauranga is NOT a city.
If it wasn't for Winston you wouldn't even have a harbour bridge.
IAN MacDERMOTT Tauranga
NZ data required
I read with some interest the impassioned letter from Peter Tomlinson where he berates Minister Steven Joyce for not reducing blood alcohol levels (BAL) because "Australia and other countries' experience is not good enough".
Was that a propaganda statement I thought. So off to the statistics I go. Using the promoted assumption that lower alcohol levels equals lower road deaths I look at the "official figures" for road deaths per 100,000 of population and the reported BAL for each of the countries.
Given the current enthusiasm for lower BAL levels I would have thought there would be a strong correlation between lower road toll and lower BAL.
Seems not. Many countries with BAL the same as New Zealand (e.g. UK, Switzerland, Canada) have lower road tolls.
While many with the proposed 0.5 limit have a much higher toll than New Zealand (e.g. Austria, Spain, Portugal).
I was amazed to see that with a BAL of zero the Czech Republic has a much higher road toll rate that New Zealand. What does it all mean?
All in all I think Minister Joyce has made a correct decision to gather some New Zealand data for 24 months before making a decision. Its not clear-cut from these international figures.
ROY EDWARDS Tauranga
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