Two tails wagging the dog
It is unbelievable — the total arrogance displayed by Winston Peters in his State of the Nation speech.
Does he truly believe that the Labour Party was solely responsible for the decades and decades of non-maintenance of infrastructure, declining education system and broken health system because he was not in partnership with them from 2020-2023?
Who do people believe: Winston, TikTok or a very balanced New Zealand news media? Because that is the arrogant message that he is spouting.
The economy has been in decline since the 1980s through the mismanagement of various governments. How can anyone erase from their memory the mosque shootings, the global pandemic and Cyclone Gabrielle — issues a woman-led Labour Party dealt with, showing passion, sympathy, empathy and total manaakitanga over the past four years?
And now he ignores the inequity for Mā ori, whom he openly discredits, that goes right back to the early 1800s. As a lawyer, how can Peters defile the Treaty, a legal document signed by peoples of two separate nations? How can he state that “elite” Mā ori wrongly benefited over “ordinary” Mā ori and quote Sir Apirana ¯ Ngata in the same breath?
As the head of a minor party that has a limited number of seats in Parliament, along with Act, it is against the principles of democracy for two tails to be wagging the dog.
Marie Kaire, Whanga¯ rei.
Convoluted thinking
Co-governance is about mutually beneficial, cross-cultural collaboration — the clue lies in “co”. There is nothing to fear and much to value about the aim of cultural inclusion and equity.
What convoluted thinking has led Winston Peters to lose the plot by equating co-governance with Nazi Germany? Third Reich Aryan supremacists set about exterminating those who did not meet their pure Aryan specifications — the exact opposite of what co-governance sets out to achieve.
Michael Smythe, Northcote Point.
Spitting tacks
It is totally unacceptable behaviour when a person spits at anyone, let alone at a politician such as David Seymour.
We all have views and rights to express ourselves but this borders on arrogance and rudeness, which is not tolerated by any society. What is this country coming to when we have rude protests, spitting and violence happening?
It is time New Zealand came back to learning respect for all people and all races and learnt to keep their opinions to a more respectable level.
Marilyn Cure, Pa¯ pa¯ moa.
Lost in translation
Your editorial (NZ Herald, March 15) repeats the mantra that anyone criticising the inclusion of te reo into TV news is somehow offended and lacks appreciation of New Zealand’s Mā ori culture.
I would like to see research into the substance of viewer comments and believe it would show most Kiwis enjoy and respect all sides of our multicultural society, but are irritated by forced adaptations to our languages.
Simply put, English and Mā ori languages have entirely different syntax and structure and so clumsy attempts to mix them interrupt the fluency and comprehension for the listener; this would be the same with Chinese, Greek, Zulu or any non-Latin based idiom.
English has always absorbed words from other tongues and continues to do so naturally. “Mana” and “taonga” are in common usage because they represent ideas for which we did not have a succinct noun and “kia ora” has been in English dictionaries for decades.