Building and planting

Alan Bollard’s accounting of this country’s infrastructure problems does not invite much argument (“Digging deep”, May 22). The solutions are all built on vastly increasing New Zealand’s population to generate enough economic activity to pay for it all.

Our geographical isolation, with much inhospitable terrain, doesn’t easily allow us to grow, spread, build or move around. A four-million strong annual tide of international tourists helps bring in money to our clean and green land. But that solution generates another problem: the inconveniently huge carbon cost of moving so many people across the world to get to our paradise.

I’m not sure if we can cap that by growing 270,000sq km of trees on all of our hilly land. At that point, I am out of ideas.

Barbara Callaghan 
(Auckland)

IN PRAISE OF HEALTH WORKERS

Thank you for your insightful reflection on the proposed “partial pay freeze for the public sector” (, May 22). As someone whose life has twice been saved in Wellington Hospital, and who has received supportive care on several other occasions, I am extremely grateful for the professional, courteous and attentive care I have received from doctors, nurses and staff