Letters to the Editor: The lesson rugby can learn from football’s win
Auckland FC fans enjoying the A-league grand final at Go Media Stadium in Penrose. Photo / Alyse Wright
Skill on show in sporting code contest
We were fortunate indeed to have the opportunity to watch three top sporting codes over the weekend. One would make the following observations.
Football, or as I still call it, soccer, probably tops the skill level as brute force is not required and is a non-stop game. Similarly with league but it’s a bit too much bash-and-crash for my liking.
Rugby is becoming a bit of a bore at times with its TMO intervention stoppages at the breakdown and the battering-ram try at the line. Rugby has always been my game but the rules need to illustrate that it is a running game. For all of that, the players in all three codes showed just how skilled one needs to be to play at that level.
Reg Dempster, Albany.
Rugby’s lessons from AFC
Rugby needs to wake up and look at how Auckland FC and the Warriors are successfully promoting their games.
They have completely engaged their fans and turned the game into full-on entertainment and excitement.
Rugby’s answer is some screaming skull yelling into a mike at full volume, playing Neil Diamond and Bruce Springsteen over and over again.
Jock Mac Vicar, Hauraki.
Gender definition
Monique Leary (Saturday letters) suggests this issue is not important to women. After hundreds of years of inequality and fighting for the same status as men in society, for education, equal pay and true acknowledgment of the importance of motherhood and raising children, now we have to tolerate a male thinking he is female and pushing into our hard-earned space.
I am sorry, but men have no idea what it is to be a woman and that’s the truth of it. And don’t get me started on the misogyny and violence towards women that is still prevalent.
We still need to protect ourselves, as real women.
Wear a dress if you want to, but it does not, and never will, make you a woman. Sorry.
Lynda Cartwright, Auckland.
Trade Unions continue to oppose progress
CTU president Sandra Grey rails against the proposed public service cuts in her opinion article “Public service cuts don’t help”. Her wild and totally unsupportable comments are pure conjecture and typical of trade union rhetoric over many decades.
We have all heard such strange reasoning previously from an organisation steeped in opposing any form of progress or efficiency gains. Sandra Grey expects taxpayers to continue paying to support over-staffing, in her words, “Nicola Willis has suddenly discovered tremendous over-staffing in the public service”.
So, there is over-staffing then. I think most people reading this will feel Nicola Willis is quite justified in driving economies and efficiencies in this manner.
Trade unions continue to oppose progress with new ideas or on each new form of technology overcoming what went before it. The cloth cap and blue-collar image have long died. My advice to the CTU, if it wants to be relevant to society, is to have a major rethink and treat this as an opportunity to be involved fully in the process and work with Government to get the best outcome, and not present opposition with the old, tiresome attitude of the past.
David Hallett, Mount Maunganui.
Super entitlement
There are several considerations at play here, central to which should be: does a person at 65 need it?
In which case, the current system of means-testing whether a person needs it based on other sources of income should be perfectly adequate.
Secondly, research in the UK showed people who work longer live longer and should be encouraged to do so. Sir David Attenborough is a good example of that.
Thirdly, why should people at the peak of their skill, whatever that may be, be cut from the workforce, thereby reducing, in effect, countries’ GDP.
Fourth, governments, through economic mismanagement as this one is, find themselves drowning in debt and raising the New Zealand Superannuation age to 67, relieving them of two years in payouts and giving them a temporary reprieve. But it is also letting them off the hook in such a way that gives them a false sense of security, allowing them to continue their flawed doctrine, as coined from the Muldoon era, of “borrow and hope”.
Just as this Government is doing, it is not good or healthy economic management in any shape or form.
Gary Hollis, Mellons Bay.