Larry Williams Drive

I’d like to know how you feel about the firefighters and their strike because I’ve gone from soft support a few weeks ago to very hard support today. What’s tipped me over the edge is this kerfuffle around board pay. Frankly, it’s one of the most tone-deaf things I’ve seen in a very long time. The board are set to receive pay rises of up to 79 percent. Meanwhile, firefighters have been fighting - and now striking - for 18 months just to get pay increases. Most of them sit somewhere above the minimum wage but below the living wage, which is not a lot of money to pay people who literally go into burning buildings. If these board pay increases go ahead as planned, the board chair will be paid more than any frontline firefighter on the base salary. One of those people is out there fighting fires and risking their life, the other is running the organisation - and running it badly. That last point matters. If Fire and Emergency New Zealand had a strong track record we could point to, a pay rise of this scale might