Letters: Vision needed to grow Whanganui economy

Vision needed to grow Whanganui economy. Photo / T and L Dickason

You asked how the candidates would grow the economy, and when you read the responses there is nary a visionary amongst them. What a dismal selection. Charlie Anderson comes closest, but all the rest appear happy with what is happening already; the status quo. There is an adage that says; if you always do what you've always done, you will always get what you always got.

Whanganui District Council Holdings did take on a high-risk challenge when they purchased the flying academy, but the presence of the academy has highlighted a capacity constraint at the airport. The challenge for Charlie is to now get the council and the Government to develop the airport to ensure it has the capacity to handle the traffic they have now imposed on it and aspire to create in the future. And Whanganui and Partners now needs to step up on the port.

Currently it seems the council seems to be persisting in sticking to working with the existing port/river layout, this despite even the Tonkin Report clearly intimating that the ongoing required dredging will be a mill stone around any economic gain from developing the existing facilities. Vision and courage is needed here to understand that the only way to make the port viable and worthwhile as a project is to divert the river out past Landguard Bluff.

Charlie intimated the port is on his agenda, but so far what is available on their website, indicates that there is no vision and little hope.
MURRAY SHAW
Bastia Hill

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Anti-vaxxers
The anti-vaxxers selfish rejection of a scientifically proven safe method of preventing the contracting of diseases such as measles or polio defies logical contemplation. This requires the gathering and weighing the available facts from various sources, and wherever possible from an empirically gathered and scientifically peer-reviewed source.

All too often rejection of such evidence is due to the formulation of an opinion that lacks such an approach. Instead information is gathered by discussions with friends who share their view of the world and an overconfidence in what a person believes they know. The result for anti-vaxxers is decisions being made that can jeopardise a community's health.

The overwhelming medical community supports the vaccination of children as being safe because of the evidence scientists have gathered and reviewed in order to publish their results. Those who deny the contribution man has made on climate change must be feeling stuck between the rock and a hard place, support or condemn the anti-vaxxers.
MAX WARBURTON
Whanganui

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Editor, Whanganui Chronicle, 100 Guyton Street, Whanganui 4500.