Letters to the Editor
Wrong prosecutions, poison organised from air-conditioned office decisions.
This week Malcolm Campbell writes a letter to the Editor Issue seventeen.
Press reports of the prosecution of the WIEL Company at Waitoa formerly, J D Wallace Ltd reveal the double standard now being practised by our so-called Authorities. That facility at Waitoa has been collecting and processing fallen (dead) stock for almost 100 years. Dealing with dead or injured stock is an unpleasant chore. Burying a dead sometimes bloated cow or bull requires a huge manual effort slightly eased by mechanical equipment if conditions allow, but in winter sometimes tractors cannot work. Back to the shovel. Therefore, JD Wallace was actually carrying out environmental saving work and it was a relief over the years to thousands to see the ‘dead truck’ arrive and remove the animal. Not only that they turned that carcase into blood and bone fertiliser, tallow and other products. Further the dead truck driver at times had to put injured stock down before removal. Sometimes accidents happen and there was an unfortunate spillage into the Waitoa River. The Resource Management Act does not allow accidents. Section 341 states ‘It is not necessary to prove the defendant intended to cause the offence’ as MPDC found out when a tree smashed the sewer line in a storm in 2018. The staff at Environment Waikato initiate the prosecutions not the councillors and the Environment Court just rubber stamps the process. There does not appear any record of Environment Waikato ever losing a court case in the Environment Court. However, the Double Standard prevails. The Regional Council has just published their latest spraying programme issued October 27th where they will be using the listed poisons, haloxyfop, imazapyr, metsulfuron-methyl, triclopyr and these may be delivered by helicopter, gun and hose, mistblower or knapsack. It is unbelievable that this programme is being carried out accidentally or deliberately on the rivers, wetlands, lakes and unlisted sites when the whitebait are starting to run, ducks have their ducklings and all the other water fowl are welcoming the spring. Under The Official Information Act about 50 tonnes of poison concentrate is unleashed annually on the Waikato. Easy to orchestrate from an Air-Conditioned Office with resource 124871 to legalise the blatant disregard of anything and everything natural. Even easier to prosecute people spilling bio-degradable waste.
Comment. There are numerous cases where firms or people have decided that the hassle from the authorities has caused the closure of the business. Environment Waikato and Patrick Lynch who is head of the Prosecution division should be careful. I doubt if they would want these animal bodies in Ward St. Hamilton. Accidents do happen look at the situation in Auckland Waitemata Harbour at this very moment not just a relatively small spill into a river but whole waterfront and beaches polluted.
Malcolm Campbell
Waihi
A sense of no democracy
I’m so angry with our TCDC elected members. Did any of them, when standing for election, say they were in favour of establishing seats at Council for Maori members only? This action, at the latest meeting (Informer1079), smells of apartheid and lacks democracy.
The excellent picture of the stacked public seating shows how this action was not mentioned in the full page of TCDC news adverts and allowed vested interests to emotionally affect the meeting votes. After-all, a unanimous vote on such a contentious subject by so many must be suspect.
Humanity isn’t like that. In other councils, this matter was defeated through a public referendum. Where was ours?
I thought the Treaty of Waitangi made us all equal citizens, ie equal voting rights. Yet here our representatives are making a group of citizens, through race, more important than other ratepayers. Note the letter by Ady Ewen-Cole in the same issue. On Council, the occupiers of these seats will make decisions that will affect my life while denying me democracy or a referendum.
Language as ordered our cultural society where a label for a group produces apartheid which I thought we were against. If a group of citizens is more important than the rest of hr population, let us state this issue so we know what we are dealing with.
This can be delineated by local body elections instead of this ‘fait accompli’ foisted on us (ratepayers]. Is this a precedent to allow seats for Chinese, Asians, landowners, Polynesians, refugees, religious groupings, wealth groupings?
Elected Councillors have to be held accountable, as our representatives for this racist, up democratic, and underhand motion that was passed, overseen by the stacked observers.
Peter H Wood
Whitianga
Note: The author of the letter does not have access to TCD weekly newsletters. He is not the only one. The author was not aware that about a year ago the law that prevented any form of local Government restructure without a referendum was changed by the then Labour government. Referendums are no longer required. The matter of establishing Maori wards to give Maori a voice had to be dealt with by all local governments by 31st October.
The poisoning of our wildlife is indefensible.
This is not about Issue 1080 of The Informer but the Poison, 1080
When such a habit is criticised for any reason, the “poisoners” personally attack the critic. If it is government doing the poisoning, then the critic is called an anarchist. If the critic encourages others to open their eyes to the reality, the ‘anarchist' becomes a ‘terrorist’. The pro-poison propaganda gives the impression that armies of possums are swinging from every tree and rats are scuttling underfoot wherever you walk. As this is all many people hear, it is widely believed. However, the reality is quite different. Possum numbers on the Coromandel have never risen very high. At the very most, perhaps one or two to the hectare. IF there were as many as three possums to the hectare, a professional trapper would gladly come and clean them up for nothing. Trapping has always been dismissed by those involved in the poison industry, because sensible trapping operations would see them out of a job. At Whenuakite, DOC/WRC are dropping enough poison baits to kill 120 possums in a hectare, 100 times more poison than is needed. One 1080 bait contains enough toxin to kill 24 rats. Once again, the reality is perhaps two or three rats per hectare for which DOC/WRC are spreading enough toxin to kill 3000 of them; 1000 times more than is needed. The residual poison remains in the forest floor, the leaf litter, which contains more than 90% of the forest’s biomass. This could explain why people are noticing the disappearance of so many insects. There are cleaner and more efficient ways of controlling our wildlife. How long before DOC/WRC accept the truth?
John Veysey
Colville
Change of font
Dear Editor,
I see “The Informer” has decided to go backwards by using Sans -serif type. Every test that has ever been done proves that serif type is more easily read, and that’s why books, magazines, and newspapers (except The Informer) use it.
Peter Gerald Hull
Whitianga