I debated long and hard about the use of commenting on either K Hearle ‘Warmer is better' or D Hardie ‘Drought is a fact of life' (The Weekend Sun, December 15).What tipped the balance was the fact that New Zealand has already been through a period when a group of people became less well-off; New Zealand did not cover itself with glory.

I was unemployed during the 90s in Christchurch, looking for work but unable to find any. Op eds by Bob Jones and Alan Duff and co, preaching that if you weren't employed, it was because you chose not to be, didn't exactly help. I fumed reading employers' newspaper complaints about kids being uninterested in working for them – hire the parents, then the kids'll know about working. Team players, huh? More like professional whingers.

Now we'll have the NZ cow-cocky plunged from having regular rain to more-or-less regular drought. Emergency measures won't be emergency measures the fifth straight year. I wish I could be gullible enough to believe the NZ public won't put the boot in. I've survived the NZ public putting the boot in, and it ain't pretty.

W Parish, Bellevue.