Letters to Editor 24 April
At the Movies - The Map Reader
I am the writer/director of the film The Map Reader. The review written by Maria Polglase (GBW 3/4) has just come to my attention. I wanted to thank her for it. Of the reviews to date I have seen of the film, this one is my favourite.
Harold Brodie
Tourism rate
Most of the tourist businesses in the Bay will have received the advice of a targeted tourist rate from the TDC. This TDC letter includes the wording “the cost of destination marketing being funded by the tourism industry who are the more direct beneficiaries”. This is a myth.
It is well documented that tourism is the greatest earner of foreign exchange. It employs 10% of the national workforce. It generates $900 million in GST. (Alas, only $50 million spent on tourism marketing, the balance put in the consolidated fund.) The taxpayer already pays for international marketing of New Zealand through the New Zealand Tourism Board.
The tourist businesses in Golden Bay and the Nelson/Tasman District collectively spend millions of dollars marketing their products and promoting this region. The real beneficiaries of this tourism marketing are every person who has a job here. Every small business such as the electricians, plumbers, builders and all tradespeople who service everything from cars to washing machines. The marketing of the tourist operators does so much for all of the above. They keep them employed. Shouldn’t they contribute also?
This is a classic tax on the few, who do so much for so many.
Reg Turner
We would just like to remind everyone concerned with the targeted tourism rate that the final date for submissions is Monday 27 April 2009. Please get your submission in to TDC.
Dianne and Harry Holmwood
Council effluent and outdoor discharges
When council wanted to connect Motupipi area to the Takaka sewerage scheme, there was great opposition and one of the reasons was that the Takaka plant was already struggling to cope with town’s waste waters. Council went ahead anyway, at a cost of over $2,700 in experiences plus a large increase in rates for the residents and ratepayers of Motupipi.
Now I have received a 40-page plique asking consent for a new project for the Takaka sewerage. This document is made up of technical information that I find very hard to understand. I am confused and have little trust. Are these are the same people who proposed a Takaka water scheme telling us that there were concerns about bacterial levels in the water, and two years later we find out that Takaka has the purest water in new zealand?
What can Takaka residents do to stop this crazy increase in rates? Can’t we be governed from here?
Giuliana Morani
Skeet
The name Skeet, as we pronounce it today, was first recorded in the Domesday Book, written about 1080 AD. The genitive form was ‘Schett’ and ‘Scheit’. Later in the 13th century, ‘Skeet’ was used as a family name in the Norfolk and Suffolk counties in England.
According to the 7 November 1857 edition of The Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, a Mr William Skeet led a party that recovered the first gold “up the upper Takaka”. On 20 November 1857, the paper reported that “Mr Askew purchased two ounces of Mr Skeet’s Upper Takaka gold.” The Upper Takaka was the third locality in New Zealand to have government-sanctioned regulations for gold mining after Collingwood in February 1857 and Anatoki in October 1857. By 21 March 1860 Mr Skeet was farming in the Takaka valley and probably doing a bit of gold digging.
Mac Harwood
