• Published date: 11 February 2021

The facts required by Mr Leitch I found today while reading The Guardian. Sea rise a few centimetres so far, but as the rate of ice melt continues, science predicts 1.3m, but probably more in the next 50 years as the ice melt figures are increasing annually. Enough to put a Hokianga urupa with the mortal remains of several old friends there under water at high tide, plus other vicissitudes along the shorelines of the world, not counting storm surges.

Sam McHarg

Kerikeri

One team

I have to hand the form from Democracy Northland regarding voting for the Northland Regional Council. I am rather puzzled.

For the last year or two we have been hearing from Ms Ardern, ‘We are one,’ which is right. We are. And also ‘the team of 5 million’ - note one team, not two - which has been well received.

Why then do we now have the government dividing us with two sets of voting? Is this a case of double standards?

Dorothy Ramsay

Kaitaia

Who are they?

Further to ‘A dark day’ (letters February 9), John Bain, Robin Grieve, Craig Jepson and Ash Nayyer suggest ‘Having taken away our right as voters to have a binding referendum on the issue of Māori wards, we are left with the only option, which is to campaign against the councillors who supported these wards.’ So who are our councillors who supported this undemocratic motion?

The motion was moved by Kelly Stratford and supported by David Clendon, Rachel Smith, Moko Tepania and John Vujcich. If you are interested in having a democratically elected council then I would suggest that you think twice about voting for those five people at the next elections in 2022.

Bruce Bell

Kaitaia

No greater rejection

The public is sceptical of politicians’ promises, and not without due cause, but the latest move by the government to pass with urgency a bill to abolish local government petition rights is a direct reversal of their own election promise: ‘Labour will ensure that major decisions about local democracy involve full participation of the local population from the outset.’

Can there be any greater rejection of democratic principles?

Bryan Johnson

Omokoroa

Meaning what?

I am unsure what Leo Leitch means by “hard evidence”. Perhaps he is looking for a double blind placebo controlled trial, in which half of a group are provided with dummy seatbelts and the other half with real ones, with neither the wearers nor the assessors of death and injury aware of which is which until the end of the study.

He will find a lengthy summary of the evidence here: https://www.roadsafetyobservatory.com/HowEffective/vehicles/seat-belts. It is all one way: seatbelts reduce the risk of death or serious injury in a crash.

He may even be convinced by it, though his finding that ”... there were more fatalities in America of seat-belted occupants than of not-seat-belted occupants” demonstrates a rather muted understanding of evidence.

When most people wear their seatbelts, more people will be noted to have been wearing belts in fatal injury crashes.

However, as stated at the beginning of the very US National Safety Council piece on seatbelts that he quotes with such triumph, wearing a seatbelt roughly halves your risk of death or serious injury in a crash.

I suspect none of this is likely to change Mr Leitch’s skewed view of evidence. Happily, most people understand that a body rattling around in a vehicle is damaging to itself and others. In this context the “principle of subsidiarity” has no...