Patrons enjoying open cafes in Ponsonby during Easter weekend. Photo / Alex Burton
Easter trading restrictions
When one learns what is open, and what is closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday it can only be described as a variable illogical mess. By all means have some restrictions throughout New Zealand until say midday on Good Friday and Easter Sunday, but they must be consistent. After that let’s have everything open for normal business. It would make a lot more sense.
Dr Hylton Le Grice, Remuera.
Defence plan
What a tragedy the Defence Capability Plan presents.
It fails to properly understand our threats or consider the most effective way of addressing them. The $12 billion committed risks undermining our security rather than increasing it.
The principal threats outlined are only climate change and strategic competition, with the key disruptor being our greatest trading partner: China.
To respond to these threats, the Government proposes upgrading our traditional military hardware to provide greater lethality.
The basis of this response is interoperability with our 80-year-old partnership nations. Such responses have very little to contribute to the stated threats, and may even compromise our trade. The main justification for this military solution is that other nations are enhancing their military.
And what is being sacrificed? Our health services, our education and other public services, our poor, marginalised and children.
What we have, in fact, is a defence wish-list masquerading as a security strategy. The Government is appealing to our emotional attachment to the assurances of our world war experiences, assuming that our established partnership would still underpin our security.
What we need is a thorough analysis of the threats that we have now, and are likely to have in the future, developing a range of options for addressing them.
What that is likely to find is that many of our threats would involve such issues as environmental degradation, economic inequalities, mis-use of powerful technologies and governance failures, including the decline of democracy.
Many of these threats would be common amongst nations, and thus there would be great benefits from co-operation. Solutions would require very different ways of thinking, with increased reliance on international co-operation, even beyond those nations that we are accustomed to co-operate with.
It is a rapidly changing world, and we need to be responsive to the changing threats, and to the increasing opportunities in addressing those threats.
Gray Southon, Hamilton.
EV trucks
Ian Pashby (April 17) wonders when someone will invent a 40-tonne freight EV to deliver goods to supermarkets and the like.
Well, there is some good news on that front: Scania are already selling them. Related are the mining dump trucks built by Hitachi.
They have the advantage of not needing to recharge because they weigh more coming down from the mine face with a load of ore than they do going up empty, and like any modern vehicle it has regenerative braking.
Morgan L. Owens, Manurewa.
Political leadership
Much is being made as a measurement of leadership of Chris Luxon’s slap on the wrist approach as punishment to his erring deputies Winston Peters and David Seymour.
That conveniently avoids Chris Hipkins’ even greater damp squib approach as punishment to the Green and Māori parties’ abuse of parliamentary procedures and other unacceptable indiscretions. 1/10 perhaps?
Gary Hollis, Mellons Bay.
Demise of language
As a former teacher of English, I am dismayed at the current trend in some quarters to ignore the language’s rules and grammatical conventions.
Upper case (capital letters) is used in proper nouns to indicate important people, places or things. It is also used to mark the beginning of a new sentence.
As such, both of these applications are an important aid in reading fluency. Everything shouldn’t be written in lower case. To do so is just being lazy.
In a similar vein, punctuation, including the use of the apostrophes (possession and omission), is not an optional extra.
All of those little marks serve an important purpose. As for the use of a plural pronoun (they) in place of a singular subject ... don’t get me started.
This all amounts to language abuse and it has to stop.
It is not okay to mangle and abuse the English language. It is not okay to think “ya can rite it wot u like” because, in my view, it ain’t.
Steve Alpe, Birkenhead.