Hitler
Your article on Adolf Hitler (“Hitler’s shadow”, April 26) and democracy are timely reminders as our own democratic safeguards are being put under constant strain by politicians forever seeking to enhance their own powers.
The answer for us is to maintain our constitutional monarchy and avoid any change for any possible symbolic reasoning. At the moment, the system is already in place in New Zealand to curtail any would be Adolf Hitler, Ayatollah Khomeini or Robert Mugabe. But slowly and surely the system is being corrupted.
The American occupiers of Japan in 1945 allowed the Japanese to keep their Emperor because they could see that if the Allies had not deposed the Kaiser after World War I, there would have been no rise of Adolf Hitler and therefore no World War II.
Helen Clark has taken enormous strides during her time as Prime Minister to enhance the power of her own position. She now selects the military chiefs and the head of the police, controls the Security Intelligence Service, has absorbed the Governor-General’s office into her own department, and time and time again has trampled on the expressed wishes of the people.
Let us keep our MMP system but grant to the Governor-General the right to refuse vice-regal assent to bills that he/she thinks could be contrary to the people’s wishes. The bill should then be put to a referendum for a final and binding decision.
The Electoral Finance Act would be good place to start.
Chris Barradale (Remuera, Auckland)
The article by Sir Ian Kershaw, on the possibility of another Hitler appearing on the world’s political scene, overlooks one detail: Pol Pot. The death toll in Cambodia under the rule of the Khmer Rouge is thought to have been around three million. It is estimated that about one out of every three Cambodians died during that regime.
Pol Pot’s purges were largely aimed at intellectuals and city dwellers who would not mend their capitalistic ways. Some ethnic minorities were targeted, however, such as the Cham and Cambodians of Thai extraction.
I visited Cambodia early this decade on business. One of my Cambodian colleagues, who had returned to Cambodia to take part in the nation’s rebuilding, told me how he held his younger brother and then his sister in his arms as they died of starvation in one of the communes out in the killing fields. Only after his brother and sister had died did he try to make his escape, eventually finding refuge in Canada.
Pol Pot was just as much a monster as Hitler.
Steve Streater (Tauranga)
GST ON FOOD
Thank you for printing such a thought-provoking and insightful editorial (April 12), which raises several valid points about the need for healthy eating and New Zealand’s ongoing battle with obesity.
However, one point I wish to clarify was made towards the end of the piece: “[The Government] has made smoking anathema yet promoted debate about legalising cannabis.”
The Government has not promoted debate about legalising cannabis. In 2003, the Parliamentary Select Committee Inquiry into the public health strategies related to cannabis use and the most appropriate legal status did not make any recommendation about the legal status of cannabis. Moreover, the current Government has taken a strong position on the cannabis issue and made it clear there will be no relaxation of its legal status. The only legal use is for medicinal purposes and the procedures for approving such use are already built into the legislation.
This is not to say that there is no debate within civil society about cannabis. The New Zealand Drug Foundation has, this year, called for a conversation about the drug and a number of organisations favour a change in the law. However, it is not correct to say that the Government has promoted debate about legalising cannabis.
Dr Janice Wilson, Deputy Director-General, Population Health, Ministry of Health
Dr Wilson’s response typifies the Government’s quagmire over the legalisation of cannabis. Its MMP partner United Future made not legalising cannabis part of its election agreement but another MMP partner, the Green Party, is pushing for its legalisation. The Listener’s editorial referred to the Government “promoting debate” about the issue, backed up by several media reports in recent years, including: “While the legal status of cannabis could not be changed under an agreement between Labour and United Future, [Labour MP Tim] Barnett said it was important to keep the debate over decriminalisation alive. The current law was wrong and increased the harm caused by cannabis” (the Press, August 9, 2003). And also: “Helen Clark says the change to the law in Britain, where possession is no longer automatically a criminal offence, needs to be considered … Helen Clark says she does not support legalisation. ‘What I have said is that approaches around partial decriminalisation, partial prohibition, are well worth looking at’” (NZ Herald, July 19, 2002). – Ed.
CLIMATE CHANGE
In fighting the anti-smoking lobby, cigarette companies got a lot of mileage out of appeals to uncertainty in the scientific evidence against them. Bryan Leyland and Chris de Freitas’ article (“Natural reactions”, April 19) makes some equally disingenuous appeals to uncertainty in the science behind global warming.
Scepticism of what has now become the status quo is healthy, but not when it is based on factual errors and misleading arguments. Leyland and de Freitas argue that the world has stopped warming because 1998 was the hottest year on record, but they don’t mention that the 1998 spike was because of an El Niño event.
Global annual average temperatures vary for a number of reasons and so we expect any warming to follow a “bumpy” path – as in the transition from spring to summer, not every day is warmer than the previous one. A few ups and downs are no reason to think that the general warming trend we have seen over the past 30 years or so has stopped – every year since 2001 (inclusive) has made the top 10 hottest on record.
Leyland and de Freitas peppered their article with misleading arguments like this and they are almost certainly both aware of what they are doing. The UK’s national science academy, the Royal Society, has a list of eight misleading arguments about global warming, each of which it addresses on its website in an effort to promote a public understanding of the science (royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=6229).
Leyland and de Freitas manage to make use of misleading arguments numbers one, two, four, five, six, seven and eight – a remarkable hit rate for a one-page article. I urge anyone who found Leyland and de Freitas’ piece even remotely persuasive to check out the Royal Society web page before dismissing the best minds of our generation as “alarmist scaremongers”.
Dr Quentin Atkinson, New Zealander and biologist at the University of Oxford, UK
Professor Dave Kelly (“Doubting the doubters”, April 19) claims climate change is happening and the evidence has been piling up. Really?
La Niña, a cooling of the surface water in regions of the Pacific Ocean, seems to have sideswiped climate-change theory supporters. Warming predictions are not coming true. Indeed, during the past year, global average temperatures have fallen 0.6°C. Which turns up the heat against the popular argument that humans have any significant impact on the climate.
During the reign of Oliver Cromwell in England, witch-hunters did not have to prove that their victims were guilty. Caught in the trap of proving the negative, the accused witches had to prove their innocence.
Climate sceptics are not yet required to prove the negative. To answer the biggest con trick in the history of mankind, they just have to address one single question to the True Believers: what’s your evidence for this barmy idea? Not: here’s my evidence against it. That’s not how it works.
And the answer is: there are no facts robust enough, consistent enough and verifiable enough to support the mass hysteria. The climate system is hyper-complex, non-linear and poorly understood.
Media spinners are immensely ignorant about real science, and just care about the next scare headline. There’s a lot of wild speculation and a mob of self-serving politicians and bureaucrats who stand to gain a ton of power and money by suckering millions of taxpayers.
In normal, healthy science, sceptics test theories by asking questions. So it’s the apoplectic proponents of climate change who carry the burden of proof.
Alan Waller (Alicetown, Lower Hutt)
Publishing two articles “from opposite sides of the debate” on climate change gives the impression that climate change is best characterised as an argument with two sides. This impression is unfortunate.
A more appropriate description of the current state of play is that there is a continuum of opinion. At one extreme are people who suggest climate change is not happening, and that even if the globe is (or was) warming, this has not been caused by human activities. This was the position taken by Bryan Leyland and Chris de Freitas.
In the middle are people who suggest the climate is changing, that it is almost certainly caused by human activities, and that it may be possible to reduce the impact of these activities on the planet if we take action now. This was the position taken by Professor Dave Kelly. As readers are undoubtedly aware, it is also the position taken by the world’s leading scientific and political institutions.
At the other extreme are people who argue that climate change is happening fast, it cannot be stopped, and the ecosystems human life depends on will alter so radically in the next century that our species will be all but wiped out. James Lovelock is perhaps the most famous exponent of this view. There was no article in the Listener representing this position.
There is an excellent article on the BBC website (www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/theeditors/2007/11/climate_sceptics.html) discussing how journalists should present climate change in light of this continuum of opinion. I urge the Listener editorial team and any readers interested in this issue to read it.
Niki Harré (Pt Chevalier, Auckland)
TELEVISION
“Battle of the box” (April 19) attributed material on TV3’s foreign ownership to “a Kafka Publications”. That would be us, but it’s CAFCA and we’re no relation to the late Franz. There may very well be a Kafka Publications but that’s not us.
The quoted material definitely comes from a CAFCA publication, namely Bill Rosenberg’s News Media Ownership in New Zealand. The latest (January) edition is online at canterbury.cyberplace.co.nz/community/CAFCA/publications/Miscellaneous/mediaown.pdf.
Murray Horton, Secretary/Organiser, Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa, Christchurch
WINDFARMS
Full credit to Bill Ralston for writing a sensationalist opinion piece (“An ill wind”, April 19), but I question his understanding of the issues regarding wind energy.
Wind farms don’t get built in windless areas. Birds don’t commit suicide by diving into turbines. Nor will turbines dominate every skyline, day and night.
The real issue is that our demand for electricity is growing, and how we choose to meet this growing demand will affect our environment.
Our first choice is obvious: more efficient use of electricity. But we also need to ensure that new generation has a minimal impact on the environment.
Generating electricity from wind does not create pollution. Wind energy requires no mining, drilling or transportation of fuel. Nor do wind farms need water. Wind farms use an abundant resource that will never run out and never need to be imported. Wind farms reduce our reliance on increasingly expensive fossil fuels.
In return for the electricity to power our lives and reduce our vulnerability to dry years, we get wind turbines on the occasional ridgeline and in appropriate places.
Sometimes we have to make a choice between the view from our window and what will be best for the environment and our future. Wind energy is proven, mature and accepted. It has an important role to play in a sustainable energy future. There are alternatives to wind energy, and as their technologies mature they will work alongside wind energy.
Fraser Clark, Chief Executive, New Zealand Wind Energy Association
DAVID CUNLIFFE
I read with increasing frustration David Fisher’s article on David Cunliffe (“Action!”, April 5) and Cunliffe’s rhetoric about “making a difference”.
My five-year-old daughter suffers from Type 1 diabetes. Apart from the day-to-day difficulties, dangers and the inevitable long-term effects on her health, she will cost the government at least $1 million over her shortened lifespan (for subsidised insulin, syringes and clinic visits to keep her alive). And for those of you who don’t know, Type 1 is genetic – she did not cause it herself by eating unhealthy food.
There are two ways Cunliffe could “make a difference” to my daughter’s life (and the other 15,000 Type 1 diabetics in New Zealand) and save the Government a fortune in long-term expenditure:
n Subsidise insulin pumps for Type 1 diabetics. They cost upwards of $10,000 each and another $1500-plus to run every year, putting them out of reach of many people, yet they have been proven to reduce long-term health complications and save large amounts of money in the long run. New Zealand is the only westernised country that does not subsidise pumps for Type 1 diabetics.
n Give permission for pig-cell transplant trials for treating Type 1 diabetes to be held in New Zealand. His permission is the last hurdle in a process that has been going on for years – all the scientific and ethical criteria have already been met. These simple transplants offer a good chance of effective treatment or possibly even a cure for Type 1 diabetes, which would save lives and a big chunk of the Government’s health budget, which could then be used for others. Giving permission for these trials wouldn’t even cost the government a cent.
So how about it, Action Man?
Kris Parlane (Greenhithe, North Shore City)
NZSO
“A mean-spirited conclusion” with only spleen decorating its opinion would be a nice description of the closing remarks of Rod Biss who reviewed the recent concerts by the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted and directed by youthful (27 years) Finn Pietari Inkinen (“A Finn romance”, April 19).
In describing the world premiere of Rautavaara’s Tapestry of Life as “an aged composer’s uninventive meanderings”, Biss demeans not a jot of the music – moving and exciting in the extreme to our ears – but only his name and himself. To then cast a final slur – “The thought that this might be Inkinen’s idea of contemporary music is disturbing” – on Inkinen was just plain rude. Arrogance misplaced is truly awful and a human condition not easily forgiven. A pity, really, as the remainder of his reviewing of both the Auckland Philharmonic Orchestra and the NZSO was perceptive, informative and supportive.
If I were Mr Inkinen, and if I believed Biss’ comment to be truly held by his audiences at both Auckland and Wellington, I would surely not make again the considerable effort that must have gone into negotiating the playing of this beautiful piece of music publicly for the first time in New Zealand. Thank you, Mr Inkinen, for your efforts behind the scenes and with the orchestra. Bravo on both counts.
David and Joan Fountain (Ashhurst)
ELECTORIAL FINANCE
Your editorial on the Electoral Finance Act (April 26) is an uncalled for insult to asses everywhere. They are far more intelligent, hardworking and reliable than the people who wrote and supported this dreadful piece of legislation.
Michael Stevens (Freemans Bay, Auckland)
