Your view: Invercargill's CBD, Bluff pool, national standards, oysters, ILT

OPINION: Click here to find out how to submit a letter for publication.

City overdue for big makeover
It's interesting to read a snippet of Mark Blumsky's findings with regard to our inner city in Saturday's The Southland Times.

I am looking forward with interest to Mr Blumsky's presentation of his findings on Tuesday afternoon.

I sincerely hope Mr Blumsky's report includes the very real risk Invercargill faces of losing its city's heart.

Our CBD is under increasing pressure of being abandoned altogether.

With the "split" of our city's shopping precinct, never before has it been more urgent for council planners to be "alert and forward thinking".

If our "oil exploration population explosion" happens, as our mayor is repeatedly telling us it will, are we as a city yet again going to be "caught short" when a developer buys up our limited inner-city land and creates a shopping complex-mall, yet again away from the CBD.

I strongly believe we should have been having regular meetings and updates with our business leaders and retailers to gain knowledge of any change in national or international trends relating to markets and shopping, and possible problems that could affect business in the city.

As I understand, to date no such meetings have regularly occurred.

Let's get our city's business leaders, our retailers and our planners together and start making what we have really work.

Perhaps it's time to revisit the covered-mall concept for Esk St. It may be fiscally prohibitive, but unless we make the opportunities to open up discussion we won't know. What is very evident, is we are well overdue for more than "a lick of paint".

We need to now move our city forward in step with the rest of the country, and create a pride, and an excitement that we as a community can once again feel living in Invercargill.

Don't leave us looking like "we used to care".
Suzanne Prentice, Invercargill

Pulling together for pool
Pauline McIntosh says Bluff is lucky to have its baths. Luck has nothing to do with it.

As one of those people who fundraised for the pool, I know that it was done by sheer hard work and a lot of people who all pulled together as one.

There were people who said it couldn't be done, but we did it.

And as for the service centre, it is a vital and necessary part of the community.

It is always a pleasure to go into the centre and be greeted by the wonderful and happy staff. They always have a smile.

I suggest Pauline McIntosh takes up knitting instead of stirring up trouble. Or why not come down here to live and see what a wonderful little town we have?
Barbara Moore Carter, Bluff

Standards rush foolish

I was very concerned with the information being presented by the [education] minister regarding national standards in Saturday's paper.

Parents have been badly misled since the initial implementation of the standards and children will suffer the consequences of the unprofessional process that is being followed.

The initial claim from the minister was that the standards will help bring up the tail of underachievement, what is now being delivered has no direct relationship to the curriculum and confuses the information already being collected through more robust and proven assessment systems.

The standards are now aligned to NCEA Level 2 and the yearly expectations developed from this have been arbitrarily decided with no reference to research or developmental progressions.

The standards are a farce, and are not world leading as the minister claims – in fact, our once- excellent reputation as education innovators has been lost and the international community of educators is confused about why we would go down this failed path.

Teachers and parents asked overwhelmingly for a proper trial, with more than 1000 school communities asking for this.

The minister rejected these concerns, and those expressed in an open letter from our most-respected educationalists, so now all our schools and children are experiencing a trial. The Government made these farcical standards a legal requirement and many principals and teachers have now been confronted with the moral and professional dilemma of choosing between what is best for their children and communities or following a system that has already been shown to be flawed.

NCEA took nine years to properly embed, our national curriculum took around five years and to rush through these standards in a matter of months and inflict them on all our children is foolhardy in the extreme.
Dave Kennedy, Invercargill

Oyster story shallow
Feature writer Mark Wilson wouldn't be the first scribe in history to blow a story.

His illustrated item, "Oysters from elsewhere" (May 29), about the 11th annual San Francisco Oyster Festival, made scant reference to the origins of the product in question.

He only allowed that he sampled the "locally sourced Drake Bay (sic) oysters". (It's Drake's Bay).

"They seemed a bit watery and didn't have the real taste of the sea like the Bluff oysters," he lamented.

He was more focused on the alcoholic offerings, the paucity of portaloos and assorted frivolities.

Had Wilson made the 48km road journey from San Francisco to the home of the Drake's Bay Oyster Company, we might have learned something worthwhile.

We might have learned the bay is named after Sir Francis Drake, who is believed to have careened the Golden Hinde there in 1579, and that oysters have been farmed commercially at its headwaters for about 60 years. The farm is the only one of its kind in California.

This is especially important, given that the Foveaux Strait wild oyster fishery has been plundered to near extinction.

There's no reason our endangered oyster can't be sustainably mass-produced, just as they do at Drake's Bay.

That's what Wilson should have written about.
Brent Procter, Bluff
(Mark Wilson's brief was to write about the experience of the festival itself. This he did. Editor)

ILT benefits
Nick Gormack should come up here if he wants to see why the Invercargill Licensing Trust should continue to be so successful.

We have seven times the population.

Compare the facilities funded by the ILT to those of private enterprise here.
Lou Harrison-Smith, Christchurch

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