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• Published date: 08 December 2020
• Date: 08 December 2020

Your article ‘Eateries hungry to find staff’ (November 24), regarding the lack of skilled workers in the hospitality industry, could well have been headlined ‘Wealthy restaurateurs need minimum wage puppets for hospitality machine’.

Anyone who has worked in a commercial kitchen in this country will know what I’m talking about - cramped conditions, up to 45 degrees in the busiest season, staff scrambling over one another to use outdated facilities, unsociable hours with no overtime, high-pressure time constraints, picky bosses looking over your shoulder to stifle any of your own creative ideas, and all for a minimum wage.

These are but a short order of things frequently encountered by staff in this sector.

Combine these tempting morsels with WINZ, if your hours are deemed to be part-time, and you may end up with an extra $80 for 20 hours’ work, compared with being on the dole alone.

Gosh, I wonder why not many are tempted to begin (or remain) in this enticing, exciting, fast-paced industry!

Philippa Knight

Kaitaia

Brainless insults

Twenty-seven years of my life I devoted to Māori education. Other Pākehā and Māori served in Māori and Education Board schools with 90 per cent or more Māori rolls. I taught in a remote school where te reo was the main language of some pupils.

Hundreds of Māori and Pākehā teachers struggled to keep te reo going, often with no help in schools that were underfunded but usually well supported in my experience.

We were at home on the local marae for joyful and sad occasions. We gathered kaimoana, went pig shooting and to the pub and rugby with locals. We shed tears at tangi. Many of my Māori ex-pupils are grandparents, as time passes quickly when you are happily and busily engaged.

What a brainless insult to the thousands of dedicated women and men, Māori and Pākehā, who struggled with aroha for their pupils all of my lifetime and since my own school days started in 1937 were the remarks in the introductory speeches of both Māori Party MPs in Parliament. I could say a lot more, but it’s 2020, and pounded fern root is replaced with porridge for breakfast.

Hamiora

Kerikeri

The partnership lie

Tony Clemow (letters, Northern Advocate, November 7), and others who clamour for separatist race-based wards, repeat the Crown/Māori ‘partnership’ lie. There is/was no ‘partnership’, as it is constitutionally impossible for the Crown to enter into a partnership with any of its subjects.

Article 3 of the Treaty gave Māori ‘royal protection’ (from other nations, the French in particular, and from their fellow...