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• Date: 31 December 2020
• Published date: 31 December 2020

Regional councillors say they consult with the community, and there was a time when councillors insisted on consultation about even small changes in annual plans and long-term plans etc.

Many of those same councillors now turn a blind eye and deaf ear to consultation when it suits them to do so, like when they want to change the voting system and introduce Māori-only wards.

Clearly they think they don’t need to consult about the way they are elected. When councillors change the voting system there is a safeguard to protect the public against politicians acting in their own self-interest. That is the petition right that exists in the Local Electoral Act, and why there is a petition circulating to put the Māori wards issue to a binding referendum.

Raewyn Messham

RD3 Whangārei

Drink up

Your edition of December 17 includes a report of an hysterical politically correct outburst from the increasingly dubious Dental Association.

The outburst is directed at the promoters of Coca-Cola, which has sugar content, for their recent marketing of Coke cans/bottles with names such as Mate, Buddy and Joe on them, seeking to encourage the sharing of Coke with mates etc. The extraordinarily narrow and humourless minds of the Dental Association’s anti-sugar woofters have taken offence, claiming that Coke is encouraging new mothers to share Coca-Cola with their infants.

What absolute tosh!

When are the Dental Association and their like gonna join the real world, and realise that their outlandish virtue-signalling claims only undermine whatever credibility they might once have had?

Coca-Cola has been around for an eternity. It has never been found to be harmful to the health of any normal person, despite all sorts of outrageous claims. I have one son who almost lived on Coke during his adolescence. He is now a perfectly healthy husband and father, with no dental problems.

We would be better off without these virtue-signallers jumping on anti-sugar bandwagons.

Leo Leitch

Benneydale

Prove it

Wally Hicks once again charges Dr Muriel Newman (NZCPR) of using the term “daughter slaughter” (Doesn’t make sense? Letters December 22).

In 2018 Hicks asserted both Newman and Hobson’s Pledge used the term “daughter slaughter”. I challenged him then to provide proof of this. To date he has been unable to do so. This clearly shows that readers should take what this loose cannon writes with a grain of salt.

Hicks is free to believe the oral whispers of his neo “qualified persons of Māori descent” in regard to pre-European Māori female infanticide. I suspect not many informed New Zealanders who have read recorded history would.

However, Claudia Orange, a darling of the pro-Māori, anti-colonist brigade, records tohunga Matiu Tahu as saying, “You forget what we were and what we have thrown away- our cannibalism, our murders, our infanticide, our tapu, which were gods to us. What prevents our return to these things but religion?” (When two cultures meet, the New Zealand experience, page 72).

In the 20s, at Whangaroa, as indeed all over the country, infanticide prevailed (https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZTR19150717.2.52).

As Elvis Presley said, “Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a while but it ain’t goin’ away.”

Geoff Parker

Kamo

Admit it

I have been reading recently about child poverty, child abuse, children and young people barely into their teens turning up in Rotorua’s ever-burgeoning homeless population.

There has been much said about the causes for this, many excuses made, but the truth is, if you are not prepared to admit what is causing the problem, you will never fix the problem.

This...