Gisborne letters: on mobility parks, shared footpaths, C-list hubris

Mirth expressed over a mobility park by Gisborne's skate park has prompted Sue Omer to write in about the need for mobility parks everywhere - "people with disabilities do have lives", she says.

Letters to the Editor

OPINION

Mobility parks are needed everywhere

Re: Lance Stopford letter titled “Mobility issues”, June 20.

So you thought you had heard it all with the placement of a mobility park by the skate park, and dare say you enjoyed your sarcasm about it enabling mobility permit holders less distance to go with “their” skateboards and “to utilise the skate park facilities “. BUT ...

You are right, it does enable us mobility permit holders easier access - it’s great for myself as a parent to be able to take my child to the skate park, my mother at 79 to take her grandson, and I am sure if you look online or in social media you will find the huge competitive wheelchair sports in skateparks.

We need mobility parks everywhere - people with disabilities do have lives.

And yes, let’s hope no inconsiderate person takes it first, even for a minute just to drop off.

Sue Omer

Let’s share footpaths

The letter by Barbara Barwick on June 18 concerning the Grey St debate and Grey St footpaths made a lot of sense to me.

Last year my wife and I walked from the centre of Surfers Paradise to a friend’s address in Broadbeach. The urban footpaths were shared between walkers and cyclists, of which we only saw one - who made way for us.

Coming back to Gisborne, I noticed that our urban footpaths were used about the same as in the Gold Coast.

This would be a very good time to start having shared footpaths, as they are hardly used in Gisborne and could save the expense of new cycleways.

In years gone by, there would not be room for cyclists to share the footpath but as news media and politicians tell us about growing poverty and worsening health, there seems to be less walking or cycling by younger people than their parents or grandparents did in past decades.

Tony Dobson

Hubris or ham-fisted?

It’s hard to work out whether Luxon dissing members of former trade delegations as “C-listers” (despite three of them having accompanied him to Japan) amounts to hubris (excessive pride or self-confidence), or is it more a matter of a lack of self-confidence and that this was a ham-fisted attempt to pump himself up?

Either way, it is not a good way of winning friends and influencing people. More like an own goal, scored under no pressure. It’s cheap-shot, competitive business talk rather than carefully crafted diplomatic language.

Bill English told him there was a world of difference between a CEO and being a politician. The PM doesn’t seem to have taken that message on board, and that suggests he’s more interested in inflating his own ego than getting on and serving the needs of the nation.

Bruce Holm

Imaginary hobgoblins

Re: Fast-track Approvals Bill a capitalist attack on nature, June 21 column.

I rest my case ... Bob is anti-progress and advocates for a return to the dark pre-industrial days.

A lot here is simply inaccurate hyperbole ... a quick look at the welfare spend will tell you this Government is no more capitalist than the previous one ... a cursory glance at the Budget will show all the direct Māori spend ... a mere observation of a passing train will tell you it doesn’t run on fairy dust.

He clearly forgets it was a storm that blew out the rail line to Gisborne, yet he seems to think rail is immune to the vagaries of weather. My preference would be for more freight on rail, especially logs, but the money tree is not a magic beanstalk. It has limits.

When Bob says “The rich get richer, while the poor get poorer” I assume he’s referring to people like Ardern who are pushing this global agenda to line their own pockets.

Bob’s sanctimonious posturing reminds me of a quote from HL Mencken ... “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

PS: Bob, have a look at the social vandalism by the current Democrats, the levels of crime, homeless, drugs, illegals is simply out of control. This is a complete abdication of any social licence.

Iain Boyle

A Faustian bargain

Re: Survival as a species before profit, June 18 letter.

Bob’s heart is absolutely in the right place, but our predicament (problems have solutions, predicaments have no solutions but outcomes) is even worse than Bob’s columns suggest.

First, putting “profit before survival” sounds a great slogan, but in US law (and, I suspect in many other countries) it is illegal for companies to put anything before the interests of shareholders, ie profits.

Second, whether we like it or not, fossil fuels are finite - though, they will never actually run out. Rather, as energy companies resort to increasingly difficult deposits, they will become increasingly unprofitable (in the energy return/energy invested sense).

The human population is on the cusp of an overshoot, not only of numbers but also, and more importantly, expectations. As a result, we have entered into a Faustian bargain with fossil fuels - trading unimaginable energy wealth (energy slaves, as Buckminster Fuller put it), for eventual chaos and the near-extinction of our species.

Martin Hanson