MPs’ acts beg question who do they represent?
The deputy prime minister is right: "Parliament has morphed into an embarrassment to the very people we are here purporting to represent".
The New Zealand Herald, in reporting his views, found it necessary to point out that Winston Peters is an octogenarian. As if that was relevant. Age after all, sometimes brings a great deal of wisdom.
Put simply, the circus that the members of Te Pāti Māori love to indulge in was absolutely deserving of severe censure, and should have been dealt with far more severely at the time by the ever-increasingly ineffectiveness of the Speaker of the House.
Equally deserving of censure was the gutter depth comments aimed at women parliamentarians by a member of the Fourth Estate in her recent opinion piece. That censure seems to be either slow in coming or won’t arrive at all.
Not often that I would agree with anything the former MP David Parker would say, but his view in his valedictory speech that MMP was perhaps the wrong choice for New Zealand and that we should return to a true House of Representatives is something that we should collectively ponder.
Surely a House of Representatives should comprise a body whereby every member is truly a representative of an electorate and not a person selected by a small, mainly anonymous group of party officials? None of these people indulging in this circus represent me and I suspect not too many others.
As I was saying
My letter (8.5.25) was to highlight the Prime Minister’s lie when he said "six years of Labour government utter inaction didn’t deliver a single thing for the people of Dunedin on the Dunedin hospital". So having a dislike of lies and especially those from the highest elected position in the country, I wrote my views.
I am also disappointed that this government has not "turned a sod" at the site of the proposed inpatients building since they came to power 18 months ago. Time is money. It will be mounting every day, so get on with the build.
A stranded whale
I would like to comment on the letter from Ewan McDougall (10.5.25) in which he demonstrates a classic case of Trump derangement syndrome.
I must admit, it is a rare thing in this modern age for the leader of a Western country to put the interests of his own country first. We all know that Donald Trump gets caught up in his own hubris, but essentially, he wants years of United States moral and industrial decline to be arrested, and America made great again.
What a pity we have a leader who does not have the moral or mental capacity to achieve the same result for New Zealand.
I would use the analogy of the failed amphibious landing at the Anzio beachhead during World War 2. Winston Churchill said: "I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat on to the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale".
This best describes in my view, the Luxon administration so far. He has achieved little of what his voters wanted and expected, which means we may as well have kept the morally bankrupt and divisive Labour government in power.
Fresh approach?
Does the purchase of age-care facilities by "Warehouse Storage Limited" signal a new approach to community care in New Zealand? (ODT 7.5.25).
Blaming unnecessary cuts on ‘the others’
Austerity reigns once again, from a UK Labour government cutting winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, to Musk’s destructive crusade against social investment in the US, to our own coalition’s shameless gutting of pay equity legislation.
This government acts out of a mix of outdated ideology and a deliberate strategy to obscure real systemic problems while dismantling social investment, all under the guise of "common sense" and "necessity". This playbook is not new. Dating back to the crisis and reactionary movements that followed the Great Depression, it has always relied on scapegoating others.
Today, it manifests as fearmongering over immigration and divisive culture war issues, designed to distract from the shared pain caused by cuts to social spending. Blame is shifted on to "the others" — minorities, migrants, and the marginalised — precisely because they are least able to challenge the narrative.
As society grows increasingly frustrated with a broken political system and economy, many turn to those offering simple explanations, whether in the form of "necessary cuts" or, more dangerously, blaming "those others".
Just pick up the phone
Being a telephonist requires customer service skills.
It also requires customer knowledge.
Not "Sorry I’m busy, send me an email." Excuses don’t fix problems.
Dunedin is a great city which needs people to promote it, with people who answer the phone.
Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@odt.co.nz
