Roll up, roll up for the latest Wellington City Council circus. The Council has voted on extending its diluted (half-arsed) ‘living wage’ to external contractors.
The ‘living wage’ is the Council’s bluntest tool to help those on low incomes – it targets a select few, while Wellington’s working poor have just been clobbered with a 5% rates hike to pay for it.
Council CEO Kevin Lavery took the unusual step of making a formal statement. He told councillors his job was to tell them ‘not what you want to hear, but what you need to hear’ – explaining his job was to ‘find a way to implement council’s will in a legal way’, and setting wages for external contractors ran a ‘serious risk of losing a legal challenge’. Lavery finished by saying ‘I would have a problem directing my employees to do something that is potentially unlawful’.
It was a remarkable intervention, and to any sane head it spelt D-A-N-G-E-R.
And then the madness kicked off – it is really worth the…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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