Parking overreach
Auckland Council and Auckland Transport are empowered to regulate roads and parking for safety, amenity and sharing objectives. The powers do not authorise blanket overnight parking charges where the primary purpose is to increase council revenues. The latter function is managed through property rates and borrowing, and possibly road tolls and congestion charges (if specifically approved). A court could determine the proposed overnight parking regime to be beyond the powers - unreasonable and invalid.
Kenneth Palmer, Ōrākei.
Safety spend justified
Kudos to Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown for making bus driver safety a priority and setting aside $6.5 million to install security screens on buses as soon as possible. For once there shouldn’t be a hue and cry about spending by the council.
Lorraine Kidd, Warkworth.
Power to the people
Murray Boardman’s letter (NZ Herald, May 14) contains a very good explanation for the potential power crisis last Friday morning. I well remember as a child sitting with my parents in our kitchen around the coal range on many a wintry Waikato night by candlelight in the late 1940s as the hydro dams planned by our Ministry of Works and built by our skilled engineers and workers slowly rose across the Waikato, Waitaki and Clutha rivers to give us the electricity necessary for our industry and our homes.
I subsequently worked on the construction of the Meremere, Wairakei No 2 and Manapouri power projects and I still feel a sense of ownership and involvement in the latter two, which Max Bradford sent the way of the NZ Railways in the same era.
A small country like ours needs to retain ownership of its basic assets because once they are sold they are usually gone forever. The Manapouri power scheme should have stayed in state hands. What an asset that would have been for us, comprising the ability to produce about 14 per cent of the electricity flowing into the national grid.
Bill Ralph, Hauraki.
Solar solution
I read with interest the arguments for the need for an increase in solar energy (’Power play as profit put before people’, NZ Herald, May 15). Our home has a 4-kilowatt system on the roof with 7.5-kilowatt battery. This is at the lower end of the solar systems. On Friday we were asked to conserve energy. At 8.30am we were putting into the grid 2 watts of power, a very small amount. But what is important is that we were not taking any power from the grid.
The Government needs to enable people to access solar through a subsidy system. This would be more effective in the long run than going backwards by using coal and oil. We need to be a forward-looking country.
Mark Beale, Wattle Downs.
Where’s the vision?
Last week, columnist Richard Prebble complained that our Government lacks a clear direction (NZ Herald, May 8). This was followed by a somewhat similar article by Matthew Hooton (NZ Herald, May 10) who thought Prime Minister Christopher Luxon was struggling to explain the Government’s strategy. I think it would be more reasonable to conclude that they don’t actually have a strategy – they just muddle along dealing with details but failing to commit to a vision. They do seem to have a default strategy of continuing the significant immigration with which past governments propped up their GDP numbers. This level of immigration (four to five cities’ worth a year) continues despite our not being able to provide the houses, nurses and doctors, teachers and schools, water, roads, sewage disposal and now electricity for our current population.
We need a strategy that achieves more equality of income. We might then enjoy healthier, less stressed children, a lowered need for prisons and be safer walking down Ponsonby Rd. Perhaps our Finance Minister might consider a token gesture toward this equality by making her debt-funded tax cuts provide the same number of dollars for every taxpayer rather than giving more dollars to big earners.
Allan Bell, Torbay.
