Urban nightmare
I am sure most homeowners in New Zealand's cities are unaware that legislation passed in December 2021, and effective very shortly, has removed all urban zoning protections in all major cities in NZ. The legislation is The Resource Management (Enabling Housing Supply and Other Matters) Amendment Act 2021.
For
Auckland, this means the thousands of hours and no doubt millions of dollars to develop the Unitary Plan are thrown away and overridden by this legislation.
Think about it: As a homeowner, you have no right to object to the removal of sunlight, privacy and views from your house and the filling of your street with extra cars parked.
At the moment, some protection is being sought for older suburbs but Housing Minister Megan Woods may still reject even that greatly reduced protection.
Yes, the housing problem will not be solved without much more home building. But home building was already underway at a record pace, so why was this destructive piece of legislation, affecting every homeowner in our cities, rushed through with almost no consultation?
Why aren't homeowners marching in the streets?
Alan Kemp, Herne Bay.
Characters lost
It is very frustrating hearing MPs deride Aucklanders who want to protect our city's architectural heritage.
Thanks to protections being in place for character housing areas, private landowners and companies have spent vast amounts of money renovating and restoring classic villas. They should be thanked, not lambasted.
Much as I would like to, I doubt I will ever be able to afford a classic house in Ponsonby (where a number of my forebears once resided), but I don't begrudge those that can. They have contributed to a collective beauty that is now a feature of our city, and known internationally.
There are other character houses that do not have the same profile, as they tend to be dotted around areas such as Birkdale and Glenfield. They were built using kauri and other native timbers from the North Shore and Northland. One-by-one they are being plucked from the streetscapes and a layer of our city's history is being lost there.
Matt Elliott, Birkdale.
Our underclass
Would someone pass me a cool flannel, please? I find myself agreeing with something Richard Prebble wrote. School attendance and achievement go hand-in-hand.
A few years ago my staff and I compared attendance with achievement in our South Auckland primary school. Based on that data we set an attendance target of 90 per cent and reported to our board on that target. We also brought in a range of measures to raise community awareness of the situation and to encourage better attendance.
I no longer have access to that data but the difference in achievement was dramatic. Students achieving our attendance target consistently achieved significantly better than those not meeting our target. For those with attendance under 80 per cent the under-achievement was dramatically worse.
Prebble is right on this score; we must get students in front of their teachers more regularly, if we are to see them achieve their potential.
David Tennent, Wattle Downs.
Familiar straits
No one would argue that some families are being squeezed with higher interest rates. Petrol and supermarket prices too are caught up in a "perfect storm" of global turmoil, skills shortages, and supply chain disruptions and cause more stress on a country's inflation rate and impact their citizens.
For the Opposition to claim that inflation is almost all the Government's fault, as they do, is disingenuous. On a recent holiday to Western Australia recently these sentiments paralleled those of one of the local paper's editorial. Almost every country in the OECD would find editorials written in a similar vein.
In other words, what NZ is experiencing is problematic for many countries and many inflationary factors are beyond the Government's control.
Diana Walford, Greenlane.
Earlier intervention
The most disturbing thing about the Health Minister's plan to "woo health workers" is that it's at least two years, if not more, too late. The entire country has gone through the hell of a pandemic and we're not out of it yet but actions taken in that time do not add up to much. Even the vaccination programme was six months too late.
The intent of the various lockdowns was to give our then fragile health system the time to expand both its Intensive Care Units and staff to cope but government inaction has meant we've suffered much of that for no gain.
Worse, we have health professionals who have been at breaking point for many months. It will take years to result in any improvements and will probably not do much more than replace those unappreciated workers who have either left the industry or the country.
Andrew Little does deserve some credit for finally acting but he has earned considerably more opprobrium for his failure to act far earlier.
With three associate ministers he could scarcely be overloaded - we might have expected better.
Rod Lyons, Kumeu.
