Your letters: Pensioners living in poverty

Pension plight

We hear from our Government about child poverty levels in New Zealand, but nothing about pensioner poverty. Pensioners are the "forgotten generation" who have worked all their lives, paid taxes, brought up kids, clothed and fed them and now find they themselves are living in poverty.

Child poverty has nothing to do with the kids, it is their parents who need educating. They need to take responsibility and not play the system by asking someone else to feed and clothe their children. Yes, there are those who are genuine cases and it is they who deserve all the help and assistance they can get.

The minimum wage, on a 40-hour week, in New Zealand is $15.75/hour or $630 gross per week but a single pensioner is supposed to live on $9.75/hour or $390.20 gross before tax.

Living and food costs are the same for pensioners as everyone else, but the pensioner is forced to live on $240 a week less – why?

Pensioners deserve more than just to exist, they deserve a "living wage" to be able to enjoy life without worrying how they are going to pay their bills. No doubt this will not suit the millennials who believe seniors had it easy and that they are now having to pay for them but "news flash": who paid to bring the millennials up? They too will grow old, and who will be paying for them? The next generation!

There are over 700,000 pensioners in New Zealand, many living in poverty, so the question must be asked – what is our Government going to do for them?

PAUL RAE
Chairperson, NZSP, Hawera

Polar bears

Starving polar bears have nothing to do with human nature (Nicola Patrick's column, Jan 20).

Polar bears are apex predators. Nothing hunts them. Unlike most other animals, polar bears get old and sick. They can no longer hunt, then drown or die miserable deaths from hunger or bone cancer.

A few might scavenge around human settlements, where the photos were taken. The local humans say that the other polar bears they see are normal weight and healthy.
Their habitats are precarious. However, over the centuries and millennia, polar bears have survived global cooling, global warming, climate change, whatever, and will do so again.

ALAN DAVIDSON
Gonville

1984 plus 100

The call centre operators employed by the big companies and conglomerates sound very much like the recorded answerphone messages you receive before you actually get to speak to a person.

Once you have negotiated the mesh of answerphone options you are forced to endure when you first ring up and finally get to speak with another human being (quite a mission and often with waits of up to 20 minutes or more), and when you then air your inquiry,

what follows sounds very much like the answerphone recorded messages that preceded.
The response to your simple inquiry is delivered in a robotic monotone, with total overload of information and you ask yourself "is this in fact a person? Am I being acknowledged as a person?" When you realise, in a state of confusion, your original inquiry hasn't been answered and you interrupt to inquire again, the same sort of thing happens, with more information, impossible to break down in the short time frame and often from someone who has not mastered the pronunciation of the English language.

Frustrated, you state your business firmly — now it's the call centre operator who appears confused. Does a normal conversation not compute with these people, where there is a to-ing and fro-ing of simple questions and simple answers?
It seems not.

Forget "1984", we are well on the way to 2084.

PAUL BABER
Aramoho

Church of Jesus

I write in reply to S.H. Funnell, Letters Jan 20. As I see it, Mr Funnell wants the church to ditch Christmas because of its beginning as the modifying of a pagan festival.

He says God wants us to keep the Ten Commandments. Great.

My mother used to say that we go to school to learn skills for living and we go to church to learn how to be good. Hence it is important for us to know the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount preached by Jesus. However, these days church seems to be telling us how to get forgiven rather than how to live.

I ask Mr Funnell how he feels about Paul's idea that Jesus was a Passover lamb who died for our sins and is eaten in the communion service.

And I also ask him how he feels about John making Jesus the divine Word of God who "became flesh". This leads eventually to the doctrine of the Trinity, designed to maintain the doctrine of monotheism.

These ideas are developments of the Church of Jesus.

TOM PITTAMS
Whanganui

Clinton Trumped

Jay Kuten is pushing the line that governments should respect their citizens' privacy, and I agree, but they also need to protect their citizens from those that have no respect. This, of course, means there has to be some surveillance. Therein lies the twist in the tiger's tail. This surveillance can be corrupted – easily done in authoritarian regimes – but, as is being revealed in the US, is achievable in the bastion of democracy.

It appears that under Barack Obama and the Clintons they have managed to corrupt the FBI and the Justice Department, using them to corrupt the rules that are supposed to provide protection to those who are accidentally caught up in this surveillance.

This, it is coming to light, was used to spy on the Trump presidential campaign. It appears that the Clinton camp were so sure of victory that would have allowed them to sweep all this illegal activity under the carpet that they got careless. When their run for president failed, there was a frantic effort put into destroying all evidence: They smashed phones, destroyed hard drives, acid-washed computers ... activities that point to a very corrupt group. Even, it appears, the FBI destroyed evidence.

Now, due to their attempts to portray Trump as the villain with this Russian collusion business, the setting-up of the inquiry, because, I believe, they thought they could stir up the voters and get Trump kicked out and save themselves, it has backfired and now they are the ones on the ropes. I also appears that the Clinton foundation did some dirty deals that were exonerated but which are now being looked at again, and in a different light, of course.

This sort of thing can happen when our free press takes sides. It blinds them, stops them doing their duty of exposing corruption, so they will have to take a long, hard look at themselves.

G R SCOWN
Whanganui