My Account
RIP green NZ
The latest downside of our once autonomous Rodney County being commandeered by the metropolis to the south, will be its use as a toilet. Three hundred-plus truck movements per day only confirm it. The Dome Valley dump will be a giant tombstone for clean, green NZ and its dream of zero waste. It deserves worldwide advertising of our abject failure at environmental protection, our inability to recycle, as well as our tacit support for a plastic planet. Those who approved the dump clearly believe profit trumps the pollution of 1000ha of pristine land and the inevitable contamination of the Kaipara, one of the world’s largest natural harbours, via the Hoteo river. In the granting of a resource consent, we should be questioning how 971 submissions of protest were overruled by only 10 in support. Of course, the toxic waste dump is all about profit, otherwise who in their right mind would approve the ferrying of colossal quantities of the Supercity’s (and New Caledonia’s) garbage by hundreds of road-pummeling trucks to a fringe zone of untouched land over 100 km from the point of origin? Something strangely familiar has resurfaced – the grim inevitability that these disastrous decisions will just happen, no matter how widespread the storm of protest. It’s sad how easily money and power have made our representatives wilfully oblivious to the scale of future environmental damage.
Hugh Major, Matakana
No need to save us
We write in response to the article regarding the Mahurangi Community Trading Post ‘saved in its final hour’ (MM June 16). To set the record straight, we did not need saving by anyone. The charitable society voted to close our operation for reasons that have been commented on before in this paper. Those being volunteer burn-out and also a rent increase. May we reiterate we did not need saving as we were neither broke nor drowning. We are not in any way connected with any incoming business on these premises. The Mahurangi Community Trading Post has to date donated over $420,000 to local charities and organisations in the general area, all made possible by our hard-working unpaid volunteer team.
John Carr, chair Mahurangi Community Trading Post
Ministerial advice
With Minister of Transport Michael Wood about to make a decision on whether to toll the new motorway from Puhoi to Warkworth, could I offer him some advice? The Government aren’t tolling Transmission Gully because they want as much traffic off the old, hopelessly inadequate State Highway as possible. Could the Minister follow suit? Don’t toll the new road in order to keep as much traffic off the current hopelessly inadequate road as possible. Because it has been shown that even with a reduced speed limit, serious accidents are still occurring. With NZTA admitting that the road is not up to scratch in implementing the speed reduction, how could they then charge a toll on the new highway, forcing many road users to not use the new road? All a toll amounts to is a new tax on road users from a government that wasn’t introducing more taxes this term.
Lloyd Stewart, Wellsford
