Radiate and fade away
While news venues carry on extorting the latest misdemeanour and anti-establishment behaviour, the planet quietly goes about using its way to get rid of us - the nuisance to its survival.
"The grave threat of meltdown" (NZ Herald, August 15), if anyone is interested, is a creepy read
about the sun's radiation that we have allowed to increase on the slowly melting white polar Arctic region through our continued use of fossil fuels.
The heating of our planet allows more radiation through to melt the ice into our seas. What's wrong with this is not only does it raise the level of our waters, but it reduces the absorption of solar radiation, sending it back out into space to be absorbed by the sea, warming oceans faster.
So here we are, still scrambling for as much as we can take for ourselves and ignorant or unwilling to face the consequences, while our planet continues on its track to start all over again.
Emma Mackintosh, Birkenhead.
'Pointless geegaws'
The UN 2030 agenda for Sustainable Development includes a statement on the determination to protect the planet from degradation, including through "sustainable consumption and production".
It is odd that the Government is focusing its attention on penalising car owners in order to meet climate change emission reduction targets while at the same time there are one, sometimes two, car transport ships in Auckland's port every week, disgorging hundreds more cars, mostly large SUVs, on to our roads and new car dealerships are popping up all over the city.
In the name of trade, it allows into the country thousands of containers of rubbish in the form of stuffed toys and plastic knick knacks to stock the shelves of the growing number of shops dedicated to selling these short-lived and pointless geegaws that will soon go to landfill.
This does not align with the UN's sustainable consumption and production agenda and demonstrates insincere and hypocritical policies.
J Leighton, Devonport.
Doing the job
Louise Upston (NZ Herald, August 15) proposes to fund providers to offer "job coaching" to those on Jobseeker benefits or, if they say no to this, to have them "struck off".
This seems straight out of the Australian Liberal Party's playbook where similar funding filled the bank accounts of all sorts of spurious private "coaching" providers for little benefit in reducing long-term unemployment.
A far better plan would be to get more vocational training in place to help train people to fill the plethora of skilled job vacancies we keep hearing about.
Neil Anderson, Algies Bay.
Sickness sanctioned
Louise Upston railed against what she claimed were 170,000 people receiving the Jobseeker or unemployment benefit while businesses are short of workers.
According to the Ministry of Social Development's Benefits Fact Sheet for the June 2022 quarter, of the 170,763 on Jobseeker, 70,674 have a health condition or disability making them medically unable to work at the moment.
The Jobseeker benefit is a composite of the old unemployment and sickness benefits, which National merged together in their reforms in 2013. Upston has no excuse for not knowing this, as she was National's Chief Whip at the time.
This deliberate conflation of the two categories of people on the Jobseeker benefit is a false equivalence fallacy, the use of which is a deliberate attempt to mislead.
But there's something more insidious about National's policy. Upston states that their proposed sanctions will apply to all on the Jobseeker benefit, which means National intends to sanction people who are medically unfit to work. This conclusion is inescapable thanks to Upston deliberately including them in her tally of people subject to sanctions.
Jonathan Godfrey, Māngere East.
Taut technology
Several years ago, I was happily teaching for the International Schools Group at the British and American school of Jubail in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia.
This school had a dedicated computer technology suite with a skilled teacher in charge. Every class had a weekly computer lesson and it was compulsory for the classroom teacher to attend. At other times, students had to earn the right to complete written work and research in the suite.
At the same time, New Zealand classrooms allowed and even expected pupils of all ages, to have devices in the classrooms. Since then I have heard that many schools have prohibited in-classroom use.
Good leadership on these technology issues could have made such a difference to academic progress in New Zealand. International schools are always looking for experienced teachers.
Julienne S. Law, Snells Beach.
