Congratulations on featuring outstanding colourised images from the early 20th century (“Portraits of another world”, August 5) in the same issue as the last article in your brilliant Hardship & Hope series.
The place-based initiatives that Rebecca Macfie has now highlighted nationally surely show the model for achieving long-overdue social improvement. Now Aotearoa must find the cross-party political will to drive policies that consolidate mutual respect and balance between central government and local innovation.
It is encouraging that Sir Colin Maiden’s recently published book Is New Zealand a Fortunate Country? also endorses this pathway forward.
Ann Dunphy (Auckland)
NOT IN OUR DAIRY YARD
Our family has farmed in mid-Canterbury since 1983 and I became aware of Mike Joy (“Against the flow”, August 5) after reading an article he wrote a while ago. I wrote to him disputing his opinions then and haven’t changed my mind since, and it seems neither has he. He wrote of dairy farms pouring pollution into Canterbury rivers, naming at least one river that I know for a fact has no dairy farms next to it. We do irrigate
