Letter: ‘If Tahiti can pay a living wage, so can we’

Mr Editor, Monday’s Cook Islands News carried a story concerning minimum wage in Vanuatu. What caught this reader’s eye was the details of Cook Islands latest minimum wage at US$5.45 and French Polynesia at US$9.11.

Now our cousins in Tahiti have a much bigger population and bigger economy but their tourism sector is not so different from ours. Visitors can pay NZ$800 a night in both countries.
Tahiti gets drip feeds from Paris. Cook Islands gets drip feeds from Aotearoa New Zealand and many other countries, where we are not shame-faced to hold our palms out.
If Tahiti can pay a living wage, so can we. If Cook Islands government can’t afford to pay public servants twice what they are now getting, sack the half that don’t give value for money and government will be even on pay and on production.
The sacked shirkers will no doubt quickly learn to give a fair day of work for a fair day of pay, get private sector jobs and slowly but surely, they will replace the expats.
And then we’ll have a tourism industry staffed by Cook Islanders.