Whanganui letters: Water pipes won't win award, but are necessary

Whanganui's wastewater treatment plant. Photo / NZME

A few months ago I emailed the Three Waters contact address with two questions.

Would the Three Waters plan include metering and billing all residential water supply?

Would Three Waters have any objection, or support, for residential homeowners collecting rainwater? I didn't hear back.

What troubles me about local councils, is that with the rise in capitalism over my lifetime, much more emphasis and money is allocated to a city's appearance.

Awards are given based on beauty and tourist appeal. There is no award for the city with the most robust water delivery.

Pipes aren't visible. Water treatment plants are not attractions. So I do have a fear that councils can let them degrade in favour of the baubles of surface appearance.

I have no idea whether Three Waters would assure us in this regard, as there has been very little discussion, debate or question time about it.

There may be merits to either ... But I fear we're not going to hear them for all the argumentative rhetoric.

CHANNA MIRIAM KNUCKEY
Gonville

Covid response

Friday's Chronicle showed a cartoon of Jacinda Ardern surfing, with a shark in the background with "POLLS" written on its side. In reality, the "Press" should be describing the shark lurking behind Jacinda, not polls. As they say, a week is a long time in politics.

A year and a half are an eternity. For example, before the 2018 election, National was way ahead. Just weeks before the election, Labour jumped ahead in the polls.

However, in my opinion, a majority of the media has been gunning for her for months.

The attacks have been based primarily on her stunning Covid response ... politically spun as a poor one.

In the same edition, Herald political editor Claire Trevett's op-ed piece comes down hard on the Government pushing through mandates without submissions ... as if in a rapidly changing deadly pandemic we need to wait for submissions.

I personally have problems with Jacinda's conservative economic approach such as her refusal to enact a real capital gains tax or rent control to rein in our housing debacle. But her Covid response has been empirically brilliant.

Our Covid results become strikingly clear when going to John Hopkins' site Our World in Data. When we add NZ to the "add a country" list and click "cumulative (under "intervals"), we see that even as Omicron peaks we are barely off the bottom line of the graph.

If we compare pro-mandate, highly vaccinated Canada to the low-vaccinated, weak-mandated US, Canada has one-third as many deaths per head of population.

When comparing us to that other island nation of the same population, Ireland, there is no contest who has close to 7000 Covid deaths. Indeed, it is no contest among every nation.

BRIT BUNKLEY
Whanganui