Letter of the week: Neville Cameron, Coromandel.
I have total sympathy for Monique Hodgson (Weekend Herald, June 19) regarding house auctions.
I drove from Coromandel to Tauranga to attend an auction. The salesperson had assured me that this property was with in my range.
The house passed in, and I was top bidder.
I was invited to negotiate afterwards, which involved being harangued by salesmen, who became unpleasant.
The entire process was a waste of my time and money, the concept of secret reserves is stupid and wastes everybody's time. Most purchasers have an absolute bottom line.
The reserve should be advertised to save people like myself from making unwanted journeys.
Numbers game
I trust arithmetic over economics. Arithmetic is much harder to tell lies with.
The Government will be by far the largest buyer of electric vehicles and, with only 191 purchased so far, that leaves 14,909 "to be replaced by 2025/26". Good luck to anybody else even getting on the waiting list for one.
As the "rebate" ($8700 each) is eligible for all purchases, almost $130 million will be sucked back by Government, funded by the rest of us who can't or don't replace our cars, utes, wagons. If the penalty/fine regime doesn't fully fund this new tax grab, then taxpayers have to pay for the rebates.
What about 1.2 million tonnes of coal to Huntly every year, making 2.4 million tonnes of CO2 for electricity users?
Worse, we buy poor quality coal from Indonesia to do it, instead of our own high-grade coal mines and workers.
Used cars may use petrol, but used car imports are a global recycling of resources and actually very minor global polluters.
Arithmetic tells us that manufacturing 1.5 to 2 tonnes of vehicle; steel, plastic, with rare and toxic materials is a much worse global energy and pollution solution, than using one already existing.
Tony Olissoff, Mt Roskill.
Post Christchurch
John Roughan suggests (Weekend Herald, June 19) that the 21st Century's epoch of terrorism might have ended after the Christchurch attack.
The number murdered in terrorist attacks is approximately 10,000 per year, matched by an equal number injured, and this number is steady post-Christchurch, at the average for this century.
In the last month there have been over 800 murdered in 17 countries including five polio vaccinators and 10 mine clearance workers in Afghanistan.
Look beyond Western countries.
Stewart Hawkins, St Heliers.
Undetected fraud
Kelly Tonkin, convicted of a $100 million fraud (Weekend Herald, June 19), is just one of a long line of such fraudsters who have one thing in common: their massively fraudulent behaviour runs unnoticed for years or decades. What does this say about the quality of company auditing in New Zealand?
These fraudulent companies' activities only come to light when they are on the point of collapse and investors can no longer get their money out.
Those investors then face years in courts because our utterly inadequate commercial laws make it so difficult for investors to get their money returned equitably to them.
Welcome to the Wild West.
Andrew Tichbon, Green Bay.
Cup-itulation
Suggesting we spend money destined for infrastructure projects into inflated America's Cup wages is just compounding the infrastructure malaise that has dogged New Zealand for the last 50 years.
While we might not all agree with the cycle bridge project, what Fran O'Sullivan (Weekend Herald, June 19) is actually suggesting is we take $100 million out of the infrastructure pot and put it into Team New Zealand's wage pot.
The failure to secure the next America's Cup regatta here begs the question; if this event was so vital for our economy, why aren't local businesses rushing in to sponsor Team New Zealand?
Neil Anderson, Algies Bay.
