Wednesday 31 May 2023 | Written by Supplied | Published in Letters to the Editor, Opinion
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.