Interesting to read about the "catty hate mail" in the daily text column, then the bombshell about the SPCA in financial strife, which may force it to close its doors.
I can't imagine life without this service, one we have all used at least once in our lives, so now is the time to think of ways to generate revenue and support for this cause or the cat-haters will really have something to moan about.
The SPCA has always taken care of our dumped cats, dogs, rabbits and birds, usually by humans who don't give a damn about anything but their own lives.
An unspayed female cat or dog will produce so many litters in a year, so try to imagine the chaos in the city and rural areas without the intervention of the people who actually care about these animals.
We would be overrun with roaming feral animals everywhere and 10 years down the track doesn't bear thinking about.
We all know the stress of vet bills, food and the dreaded registration fee - no one escapes these expenses but do we want the alternatives I mentioned earlier?
I would be happy to have $2 taken from my pay each week. If we all did that - yes, I mean everyone - we could support this service ourselves.
We all get money from some source and nearly all of us have an animal, and by taking a role in the financial side we could make changes to have cheaper vet services for spaying and castration and hopefully eliminate the cruelty and dumping of our so called "pets".
This is not someone else's problem, this will affect one and all, and we need to start helping the only way we can by getting money to the SPCA.
A quick calculation of people in my workplace all paying $1 to $2 a week will give a total of $115,000 yearly, so if the employed and job-seekers alike got on board that would reduce the contributions to 50c.
Come on! What else are you going to spend 50c on? (Abridged.)M. E . Osborne Hastings Treaty oppression Here is my reply to all those folk who question Maori rights and the Treaty of Waitangi - Hobson said: "We are all one people." I ask, did Maori become Europeans automatically or did Europeans suddenly become Maori?
A teacher once asked me, "Did the Treaty achieve its intention?"
I replied: "That depends on what its intention was.
"If it was intended to legally confiscate Maori lands under the guise of local or central governorship, to ban te reo Maori in schools and punish those who disobeyed, to ban majority Maori from voting in the very first elections, saying only 'legal' land owners could vote.
"Maori owned land communally, thus were disqualified under an archaic imported Westminster law. Maori were later offered the vote through a separatist [four seats] system, even though they were the majority.
"Maori numbers were decimated through introduced diseases of measles, influenza, smallpox, syphilis and wars not of their making, and the migration of the '10-pound Poms'.
"If that was the intention of the Treaty then, yes, it has succeeded beyond all expectations."
The Treaty should win the Nobel Prize for treaties in the category of indigenous people's oppression.
Maori are still told how to behave on their marae and how to spell their language (Te Tii Marae and Wanganui) - a language that was constructed into a written format by early missionaries as a form of one-sided assimilation.
Cease ridiculing their oral, ancestral language or telling them how to spend their pittance of a settlement for lands confiscated that are now worth billions of dollars.
If all the settlements were shared out to every member, they would each expect to get less than $1.
Land theft still persists, through the latest Foreshore and Seabed Act whereby Maori minority owners have to prove continual ownership from 1840 in mainstream courts by mainstream lawmakers; yet land in private majority ownership is absolved under the same act - why?
Why the continual separatism in this day and age?
Why one legislated law for Maori and another for private owners who don't need to prove continual ownership from 1840?
With regret, I note that some still bathe in ignorance irrespective of profound evidence to be found in Parliament Hansards, the national library and minutes of the Maori Land Court. (Abridged.) Whati RolloHastings Racial divides Waitangi Day, as Paul Holmes rightly pointed out, has degenerated into a discombobulated morass of racial divisiveness providing an annual platform for the activists to "spew" out their brand of ethnic fundamentalism and hatred.
Instead of the lies, the deceit, the half-truths and innuendo that have fuelled the Treaty gravy train and grievance industry for 40 years, as a fourth-generation "indigenous" New Zealander I would like to know when the radical Maori activists will "honour the Treaty"?
I refer to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, devoid of the partnership, principles, indigeneity and separatist hyperbole and other political baggage that has been added to their contemporary interpretations since.
Historian Butterworth exposes the lies and half-truths of the revisionist and sanitised versions of New Zealand history and also warns: "The control of historical interpretation by emergent and ruling elites is a common political strategy to secure political dominance required to maintain political power and privileged access to economic resources."
The non-Maori who make up 85 per cent of New Zealand's population have had enough of the propaganda and deceit.
I am proud of my colonial (Irish) heritage, which gave me a strong work ethic, pride in New Zealand, a love of its language, literature, music, art and other cultural elements, together with many of the economic and technological factors that have contributed to New Zealand's welfare.
In a multicultural country, I welcome the contributions from Asian and Polynesian New Zealanders who should be entitled to expectations of equality within the law and not, like all non-Maori, be threatened through the politicisation of ethnicity, the subversion of our liberal democracy.Tom Johnson Napier
'The twinkling fires dotted north and south as far as Te Awanga was magical.'