Parking building the answer
Re the ongoing parking problems at the Hastings Hospital.
Like the person who wrote in your paper on Thursday, I too despite having a mobility car pass for my wife, have bemoaned the then hospital board selling off the land from the Apatu’s opposite the hospital, which was originally intended for future hospital expansion with no foresight to what would be required now.
I have written to this paper before, and also to the Government on many an occasion, suggesting to do away with the silly notion to build another hospital elsewhere, when a one or two storey concrete carpark could easily be built directly over and above the existing carpark, with a new hospital then being built above it. Thus no money would be required to purchase land. But no, this Government would rather spend $6.8 million purchasing guns and armaments for Ukraine, instead of building us a very much needed new carpark and hospital.
Lou G.Klinkhamer
Havelock North
Time to take a stand
And so, with its declaration of an intention to set up an independent Māori Parliament Te Pāti Māori reveals its true colours as a party which presents a threat to the democracy New Zealand currently stands for. Their absence from the Budget speech yesterday, the high point of the parliamentary year, further shows the contempt this party has for Parliament.
Fortunately Te Pāti Māori actually speaks for only a small proportion of Māori, though of course it claims to speak for all which is itself a disingenuous, false and misleading claim.
With its latest declaration of independence and demand for a separate parliament the obvious next step for Te Pāti Māori will be to call for a separate Māori state in order to oversee the different set of laws, institutions and basis of representation it is calling for. The so-called Māori parliament will be of a kind quite unlike the equal rights based democracy which New Zealand represents.
These goals are based on many false and hysterical foundations including that of Rawiri Waititi saying: “This House set out to exterminate us 100 years ago.”
This is manifestly wrong, deliberately divisive and historically false. In fact the existence of the Treaty of Waitangi, established between the strongest power in the world at that time and collective native tribes in New Zealand, stands as a proud refutation of the
nonsense Te Pāti Māori is spouting.
It’s time decent ordinary NZers and the media, which too often fails to take a stand for the system we live under, which has successfully established New Zealand as a first world country, to take a stand and condemn this.
Simon Nash
Napier