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Building the Cook Islands

Thursday 24 October 2013 | Published in Smoke Signals

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A smoke signaller writes in response to yesterday’s letter to the editor ‘We are the Grey Power of today’: “To your letter writer Cook Islands New Zealand Pensioner, every time someone writes about a ‘sacrificial journey’ to New Zealand and Australia to pay taxes there to rescue the Cook Islands it makes me ask, really? To put it in perspective, unless you successfully marched with banners down Lambton Quay to the Inland Revenue head office in Wellington to demand that ALL your taxes be paid to the Cook Islands while you worked there (which of course they would have ignored, by law), then your contribution is as a New Zealand taxpayer collectively sending say $15 million of much appreciated aid to the Cooks a year, or about $3.30 per person in NZ.

A smoke signaller writes in response to yesterday’s letter to the editor ‘We are the Grey Power of today’: “To your letter writer Cook Islands New Zealand Pensioner, every time someone writes about a ‘sacrificial journey’ to New Zealand and Australia to pay taxes there to rescue the Cook Islands it makes me ask, really? To put it in perspective, unless you successfully marched with banners down Lambton Quay to the Inland Revenue head office in Wellington to demand that ALL your taxes be paid to the Cook Islands while you worked there (which of course they would have ignored, by law), then your contribution is as a New Zealand taxpayer collectively sending say $15 million of much appreciated aid to the Cooks a year, or about $3.30 per person in NZ.


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