Meg Collins  

I am almost too scared to turn on the news now, to hear about yet another cut to services, health, environment and essential services. by this government.

Last week was a doozy.

1. Introduction of the new school lunches, with not a sight of any vegetables and 5+ a day.  Many schools will lose their providers who were catering for their pupils' needs, as well as employment in their areas. To me, this looks like boarding school fare.

2. Then there was a special dispensation to the fishing industry to be able to ring net in the Hauraki Gulf Marine reserve zone. This has outraged the people in that region who have fought long and hard over many years to help restore the Hauraki Gulf, which in some places the marine life and fish stocks have collapsed.

3.  Later in the week the announcement by Taranaki Offshore Partnership, a consortium of partnership with many New Plymouth-based companies, is pulling out of applying for consent process for a wind farm, as the plans by the government to fast track offshore sand mining of the Taranaki coast, in the middle of the area where the wind farms were to be built. According to wind farm experts, nowhere in the world are wind farms and sand mining operating together and are, in fact, not possible. If this sand mining went ahead, the sands would be processed in Australia, and thus not giving jobs to locals.

The wind farms in the North Sea, Sweden and Spain are benign on the marine environment and are usually several kilometres offshore so do not create an eyesore. Surely clean, sustainable electricity produced by wind farms, providing many jobs in the Taranaki area, is more environmentally friendly than wrecking the sea floor, to the detriment to all the creatures that inhabit it.

4.  Another arrow was fired by David Seymour against Creative New Zealand, as they made a grant to Tusiata Avia, and he did not like the work she did. He threatened to decrease their funding, which has already been reduced, especially in the Arts on Tour programme, which had been reduced to three tours a year instead of eleven. Creatives do not matter, according to this government.

Other policies and cuts that have been introduced in the past few weeks, are the possibilities of mining on conservation and stewardship land, putting us on a par with the Amazon, who are cutting down their forests flat out, for "economics gains", instead of conserving the forests for carbon capture. There is also the scrapping of the Environmental Legal assistance fund, which helped local groups and iwi with their legal fees.

Cutting the funding for teachers to learn Te Reo, is a mind-numbing decision. How can teachers teach Māori, when they have not had the help with pronunciation and learning the language?

On the Ōpōtiki front:

One policy from Kāinga Ora is the postponement of building a block of houses on Ford Street. The now-fenced property is grazed by horses. This is at a time when one person who advertised in the Ōpōtiki Notice Board for a three-bedroom house had 41 enquiries. Many of the houses in Ōpōtiki are substandard and in need of repair or replacement.

Cutting the funding for jobs for nature. The Ōhiwa Sanctuary Trust will lose its funding, just as the benefits are obvious with bird life flourishing, weeds being eliminated, and native trees being planted. It will not be long before the possums, rats and weeds will come back, if not properly controlled. Volunteers? Yeah right, they are all getting older and there are no new people coming on to replace them.

I worry about my granddaughters, and the future for them.

What about global warming? The Government's lack of commitment to doing anything about it, and putting everything into the “too hard basket" and then blaming the previous government, is not achieving anything.