Letters: Palliative care poles apart from euthanasia and assisted suicide

Euthanasia and palliative care represent entirely opposite approaches, and are therefore incompatible. Photo / Getty Images

Esther Richards (Letters, January 26) conjures up the usual scaremongering to try to bully New Zealand voters into accepting the notorious practices of euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Bemoaning her claim that "New Zealand Palliative Care is the only one which refuses to publicly acknowledge" her alternative facts, Richards shows the ultimate arrogance of the lay person who claims to know more than the expert professional.

Meanwhile, Andrew Tichbon is apparently spouting nonsense when claiming that euthanasia and assisted suicide are complementary with palliative care — they are, in fact, polar opposites.

Legal expert Professor Etienne Montero, in providing expert evidence in the Seales case, described the integration of euthanasia into end-of-life care in Belgium as "disastrous" — a view endorsed by New Zealand professor Roderick MacLeod.

This is hardly surprising, because euthanasia and palliative care represent entirely opposite approaches, and are therefore incompatible. Palliative care affirms life and regards dying as a normal process, seeking to improve the patient's quality of life in a holistic way by providing unconditional care to the whole family.

Doctor-assisted suicide, on the other hand, promotes and delivers on the view that death is the answer to suffering of many kinds, including mental and physical.
Moira Floresta, Kaukapakapa

'World's worst network'

Kerre McIvor should stop "trusting" planners over their hodge-podge of new cycle lanes and bus lanes ("It's all for the greater good — isn't it?", January 26). I am forever baffled about how hard it is to get the right people to pay attention to the harsh realities discussed in a UN Habitat Program Report a few years ago, "Streets as Public Space and Drivers of Urban Prosperity".

That report analysed the amount of surface area devoted to street space, in thousands of cities.

Greenies who are convinced that too much "planning for cars" is our problem will be shocked that this report found that Auckland has an outlier-low amount of street space, and the world's worst "network connectivity". Auckland, otherwise unimportant, got several paragraphs of discussion and accompanying illustrations as a "worst case" example.

One of the main points of this whole report was that the amount of street space a city has to begin with determines the viability of multi-purposing, e.g. cycle lanes, bus lanes, trams, and pedestrian-only spaces. A utopia like Amsterdam has something like 2.5 times as much "street space" as Auckland. It also has a fantastic highway network that separates much car travel from the secondary network.
Philip G Hayward, Naenae

Be tougher on drug dealers

The Police District Commander of mixed ethnicity in Hawke's Bay was a refreshing breath of fresh air when she said the police cannot control the lucrative "meth" drug trade, after the political talk fest in Taradale to try to calm the local senior citzens.

Police can only work with the laws our politicians provide them with the obsessive preocupation with "human rights" and protection of mixed ethnicity "drug gangs", who, like all organised crime gangs, flourish in our midst because of the money they can take home in their tax-free pay packets.

What other activity can give members of these crime gangs the finest motorcycles, motor vehicles, restaurant meals, fine liquor, women with expensive tastes, holidays on the Gold Coast and property-purchase powers higher than any Asian buyers in an auction situation?

Change the penalty for the organised manufacture or importation of any drug to death by lethal injection. These criminals are, after all, bringing about the death of our younger generation in high numbers and the premature death and shortened life expectancy of our older generation. (Abriged)
Jon Philip Smith, Mangateretere.