Your views: Readers' letters

How can STV be fair?

Steve Baron can rant all he likes that STV would be a fairer voting system than FPP. Fair or not, it is a system that has discouraged health board voters and resulted in a lot of spoiled voting papers that did not count. How is that fair?

The STV system relies on computers to calculate the result, but people would not understand how a candidate who gets most votes could be defeated by transferring the votes for unpopular candidates. How is that fair?

In the US presidential election, the electoral college system meant that Hillary got three million more votes than Trump but he won. How is that fair?

Do we want to have people rioting in our streets because they do not understand the complex voting system or believe computers?

STEPHEN PALMER
Bastia Hill

Fearmongering

"Doctors raise fears of 'snake oil'," Chronicle, August 26.

Snake oil? Really? How dare the medical profession indulge in such blatant fearmongering?

Quite a few in their own profession who have bothered to study the subject acknowledge the efficacy and safety of a range of plant medicines, especially when weighed up against acknowledged detrimental side-effects of certain orthodox medicines (I can't imagine snake oil would be high on the list of remedies that a doctor would recommend).

Pharmacists are now getting in on the act, including, in their "revised code of ethics" plant-based medicines that university-trained medical herbalists and naturopaths have always known about, and prescribe.

I don't suppose the reason for this inclusion would be some economic advantage?

PAMELA DOWSETT
Durie Hill

Extremism

Jay Kuten, lambasting Trump on August 23, should read the following on Antifa, the Alt Left.

A tweet from Boston Antifa 20/8 reads: "No room for capitalists, conservatives, libertarians, "classical liberals" or supporters of the US Constitution in our city."

Extreme leftist and extreme rightist groups are equally as bad, says Trump.

I agree. So do 250,000 - and growing - Americans who have signed a petition wanting the extreme Alt left group Antifa labelled a terrorist group.

Extremism is, and always will be, the real poison of freedom.

GREG WOODCOCK
Wanganui East

Grammar issues

I don't wish to upset a grammar vigilante but note that in the third paragraph of her letter (Chronicle, August 22) Margi Keys writes: "It is great to see more and more Whanganui schools adding the "H" to their name."

Should not that be "their names"?

And since when could signs speak? Para 7: "when the state highway signs saying Wanganui".

Shouldn't that be showing? Perhaps I'm just being pedantic.

Oh well, my birth certificate shows that I was born in Wanganui, and that's the way I will continue to write it.

DOUG PRICE
Castlecliff

Pragmatism

Shortly after hearing Jacinda Ardern had taken over the leadership of the Labour Party, I heard her quoted on National Radio as being a relativist and a pragmatist.

Does anybody realise this is a confession of one who doesn't know where she is going?
Pragmatists make decisions as they go along. There is no goal, circumstances dictate direction by the loudest voice of wealth and power.

Can we build a civilisation with such a leader?

F HALPIN
Gonville

THRIVING: From a bare field two years ago to this . . . Kaitiaki Market Gardens. Photo/supplied

Permaculture success story

A big thanks to Laurel Stowell for her coverage of Whanganui's oldest and best sustainability event: Permaculture Weekend.

Practising permaculturists believe good eco design can effectively address many environmental and social challenges facing our world.

The permaculture ethics are; care for the earth, care for people, share resources. The ethics are well represented by local permaculturists and by our annual event. The schedule can be viewed at ecothriftylife.com.

As an example of good eco design and land management, I have included an "after" picture taken exactly two years after the one that appeared with Laurel's article last week.
Twenty-four months later the rank, sour, compacted paddock has been converted into a thriving organic market garden with windbreaks (blocking much of the shot) and water catchment.

It has produced hundreds of kilos of tomatoes and pumpkins along with thousands of bulbs of the "World's Best Garlic" - all without a tractor or rotary hoe.

NELSON LEBO
Okoia

Send your letters to: The Editor, Wanganui Chronicle, 100 Guyton St, PO Box 433, Wanganui 4500; or email editor@wanganuichronicle.co.nz