Toxic waste and debt burden
A huge takeaway is being prepared in Southland. But although the aluminium smelter may go, Rio Tinto is leaving masses of highly toxic waste stored around the province.
Meanwhile, up north, the beautiful Dome Valley awaits despoliation as a future dump-site for urban trash, when a low-pollution waste-to-energy plant would prove to be a cheap option, both financially and environmentally.
Then, there is another kind of dangerous dumping - accentuated by the Covid-19 crisis.
All of our current cohort of MPs are wedded (not even legitimately) to the neo-liberal debt-funding dogma. Our mokopuna are threatened with having a multibillion-dollar debt burden dumped on them as the financial institutions demand repayment. The resultant rise in income inequality and asset sales hardly bears thinking about.
Fortunately one bright spark does shed some light, thanks to said crisis revealing the powers of our Reserve Bank to create fiat money even though it is snatched away by the banks before the public gets its portion.
To date only the Socreds maintain that this money could go directly into our economy without interest - and without the sky falling in. Nothing to prevent agreement from other parties, except pig-headedness.
Indeed, with most parties claiming to honour the Treaty of Waitangi, it is a mystery why successive governments insist on dumping the debt on to future generations. The words of that celebrated Swedish teenager can be levelled against anyone who clings to such a notion: "How dare you!" [Abridged]
HEATHER MARION SMITH
Gonville
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Division as a megaphone
D Partner (Letters, July 17) is another name for common sense. All lives matter is the ideal for the common good, a warning that those who deliberately use division (one tribe against another, secular against religious) as a megaphone to magnify their political aspirations, equals a divided country, a divided future.
One yawning division over the value of life. If D Partner is correct would not a healthy zygote come under the protection of all of us and continue to a death in old age? As John Malcolm told us the Labour Party in the 1930s got rid of capital punishment in case we execute an innocent. When justice allows the death of an innocent, nobody is safe from those who encourage that death. Surely unborn healthy boys and girls are innocent.
When you listen to a political candidate, ask them what their opinion is on an unborn child. If they say "That's a person" you know they have the basics right. Justice, as D Partner seems to indicate, is for all.
FR HALPIN
Whanganui
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