Dave Stewart

It was a mostly excellent letter from Alexander (Sandy) Milne (Beacon, December 11) in defence of our mayor Victor Luca.

Mr Milne expresses what nearly all of us feel about the dreaded and dreadful marina project.

There does need to be a much more transparent discussion about this, and we all look forward to someone, somewhere, sometime, explaining the virtues of it, if there are any.

I was not so impressed with his swipe at Councillor Nandor Tanczos though for his excellent opinion piece ‘What Makes A Good Leader’ (Beacon Nov 27) and can’t help but wonder if that was necessary?

My reading of the piece was that there is a discussion going on about more powerful and autocratic leaders and it is part of the conservative agenda to promote these handbrakes on our democracies. The mayor himself has engaged with this discussion with his piece on the need for more powerful mayors in the Beacon on November 8.

I suppose all of those who read it would have seen in their mind’s eye people who fitted the kind of leader Mr Tanczos was talking about.

I saw Donald Trump and Winston Peters. Mr Milne and his friends saw Dr Luca.

That’s interesting, if completely unflattering, but I guess when you focus on the messenger and not the message there’s a danger that you will jump to subjective conclusions.

If the only tool you have is a hammer, eventually everything will start to look like a nail.

Mr Milne unfortunately didn’t focus much on the message though, other than to say it would make an excellent lecture to fourth formers. I completely endorse this recommendation.

Teaching civics in schools and especially focussing on leadership character should be compulsory. If we did that, we wouldn’t need the likes of Mr Tanczos op-eds because despite what Mr Milne says, many, many people are disengaged and disinterested by any form of politics.

Some people are willing to trade freedoms for more authoritarian leaders. We do need to have a mature and respectful discussion of the kind of leaders we want in positions of power and there is a real threat to our democracy if we leave this conversation to only the very few of us who engage, often on conflicting sides getting ever wider apart.

Because we fight personalities, not policies.

I get that for some reason Mr Tanczos is out of favour with our more conservative activists.

I’d call that a good thing.

If the good councillor was looking for a mayoral campaign slogan, that is as good as any “Vote Tanczos for Mayor – Conservatives hate him”.

But I’d much rather hear Mr Milne tell what he thought of the content of the message, rather than who he thinks we aren’t allowed to criticise.