The best professional dog walkers have more control of a pack than inexperienced owners with only one dog.
The true professionals choose places to walk a pack where no chokepoints or sensitive areas could bring them into close contact with the public.
Rather than punish responsible professionals and deprive busy, dog-loving families of an affordable and convenient way to exercise their pet by imposing what is essentially an arbitrary six-dog limit on pack walks, it might be better to try something from the e-scooter playbook first.
Councils could establish a licensing system for dog-walking professionals to enhance safety, monitoring, training, and enforcement.
Ideally, pack walkers would be trained, assessed, regularly monitored, and observed to determine their suitability.
They could be required to be tested and relicensed annually. This would, of course, be user-pays.
The focus would not be on dog numbers but on the skills, experience, and safety orientation of the paid pack walker.
There might also be rules about where pack walks can take place.
Paid walkers might need to register before walking more than, say, three dogs.
This idea isn’t novel. E-scooters created some new problems after they became popular.
Swift and smart regulation, including close monitoring and enforcement by councils, quickly improved what was becoming a Wild West situation.
Let’s find a better way to keep everyone safe.
Paul Jamieson, Ōmaha.
Medical waste costly
In the space of five years, New Zealand’s health spending has inflated from $20 billion to $30b, with no prospect of slowing down.
What has caused this rise in costs? Many reasons!
An ageing population with people living longer. Many new drugs and innovations in surgery. More limb and transplant surgeries.
The Government has failed to maintain hospital infrastructure over many decades, and there is an urgent need for rebuilding.
Infrastructure that is no longer fit for purpose. A lower tax take and higher fiscal debt. Higher wages and salaries for medical staff to keep pace with inflation. The rising cost of medical equipment replacement.
Some of these cost rises could have been avoided.
Last century, almost all medical equipment used was washed, recycled, and reused.
Even in private hospitals (in the 1970s), bandages were rewound (to be reused) by the night staff.
Every piece of equipment was used until it fell apart. Bedpans and all metal equipment were sterilised, repackaged, and reused.
Students were trained on the job and bonded to help recoup training costs and retain reliable staff numbers with appropriate qualifications.
Today, we happily throw away literally every piece of equipment used into the landfill. Nothing is autoclaved anymore.
New Zealand landfills will be swamped in a few decades with unclean medical waste that will not break down.
This clean-up will also come at an enormous cost for future generations.
Single-use plastics and metals are raising the inflated health system budget every year.
It needs some innovative Kiwi to invent a way of reducing equipment costs and our disgraceful contribution to landfills.
Plastic has somehow become the convenient excuse we use for our “throw-away, single-use” wasteful habits.
Until we become more frugal and smart-thinking, our health budget will continue to inflate every year.
There must be a better way to manage costs.
Marie Kaire, Whangārei.
Fuelling consumerism
“Economic growth”, as the National-led Government describes it, is about making more money; it’s about fuelling consumerism.
Consumerism is the cause of the current plight of Earth, climate warming, destruction of the environment, the steady depletion of resources, and the extinction of an increasing number of species.
Increasing foreign investment means we will have less control when the going gets tough.
I wonder how our current crop of politicians and all of us who adhere to such thinking will be judged by our great-grandchildren.
David Hood, Hamilton.
Increasing rent rises
On March 13, 2024, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon asserted that the policy of removing interest deductibility on residential investment properties put downward pressure on rents.
Rents have continued to rise per Stats NZ data on January 22, 2025, with an annual increase of 4.2%.
What does Luxon have to say now about that, given his comments and policy above, and interest costs fallen/falling due to OCR reductions (and less investment required to buy investment property since prices of houses reduced from 2021 peaks)?
A left-field idea: maybe it’s time to introduce domestic rental price constraints (despite this type of intervention normally being abhorrent in a purist sense) via statute that mandates domestic rent be no more than a statute-specified yield percentage of a property’s CV (with CV valuation attached to tenancy agreements and required to be provided to tenants to support any rent increase sought).
Paul Minogue, Silverdale.
