AN ANSWER FOR THE GREENS' FAILURE (Letter to Dom Post, September 22)

If the ‘brown girl in red lippy’ (September 22) and the rest of the devastated Greens want an answer for their failure in this election they’ll find it in their policy to decriminalise abortion.

Young voters especially are getting savvy on this subject - 3-D ultrasounds and smartphone apps show them a baby that’s alive and kicking and they want to keep it that way.

WHY 'POOR FAMILIES WASTE MONEY' (Letter to Dom Post, September 17)

Keith Thomas (Letters, September 16) asks why ‘poor families waste money’. Because parents are diverted from their primary employment of caring for their children and driven out of the home into the work force, because society is utterly warped by materialism, because as Alexander Solzhenitsyn said years ago, we have forgotten God.

And which of the parties in Saturday’s line-up has the political will to address that problem?

I CAN'T GET EXCITED ABOUT MORE 'COMPENSATION' FOR EGG DONORS (Letter to Dom Post, September 17)

I’m sorry, but I can’t get excited about what Andrew Murray of Fertility Associates Wellington sees as a need for more ‘compensation’ here for egg donors for women in their 40s trying to conceive. Quite apart from the highly questionable ethics of surrogacy, they’ve made their bed and can lie on it, like all the women who forgo a career to have babies in their 20s and live with the consequences.

 

Murray’s exercised about driving couples offshore with associated  ‘risks for families to the health and wellbeing of mother and baby and the large financial investment’. (Not to mention loss of customers onshore.) What about men aged 70+ being accepted for hugely expensive IVF treatment? Should he not be exercised about consequent multiple pregnancies - which he acknowledges as frequently having expensive complications - a mother’s life-threatening illnesses, the grief of deaths in utero and in at least one case, resulting poverty and stress culminating in the removal of surviving children by the supposedly benevolent offices of Child, Youth and Family?

 

Dr Murray is entitled of course, to make a living. But how much of a living, and at what cost to others?

SPRAYING GORSE IS DAFTER THAN YOU THINK (Letter published in Dompost, September 15)

No, Susan Thrasher isn’t the only one who thinks sprayed gorse is an eyesore (Letters, September 15). And ‘the killing off of substantial plants or trees’ by spraying is even dafter than she thinks. You have only to leave gorse alone long enough for those tree seedlings to grow up through it, say 20-25 years, and it’s goodbye gorse. It can’t survive in shade.

My brother Karl commented that I must be one of the few people still alive who know where to put the word 'only'.

That was nice of him. Except as 'one of the few people still alive' I wonder how long I have to live. Hmmm.

EAVESDROPPERS HEAR NO GOOD FOR THEMSELVES (Letter to Dom Post, Sept 5)

Nick Hager’s book Dirty Politics, an attempt by the Left to damage National, ‘seems to have damaged Labour’ (September 5). As hacking emails is the new version of eavesdropping, we may conclude that not only do eavesdroppers hear no good of themselves, they hear no good for themselves, either.

ACC SHOULD BE PAYING US ALL TO GO TO YOGA (Letter to Dom Post, August 14)

If people losing their balance are costing the country 9 million days of lost productivity a year (August 14), maybe ACC should be paying us all to go to yoga.

BEST MOVES FOR CATHOLIC SCHOOL PRINCIPALS (Letter to 'NZ Catholic, August 12)

My reaction to the NZ Catholic Primary Principals ‘learning dance moves’ (NZ Catholic, July 26 - August 9) was one of dismay, which judging by their faces I suspect was shared by the principals themselves.

In view of the grave and fundamental nature of the problems besetting our schools, I’d have thought the best and only moves necessary for ‘Igniting the Spirit of Catholic leadership’ would be making the Sign of the Cross, kneeling, standing, shaking hands and processing for Holy Communion as surely they would have done, at Mass.