Not that sack, Mickey, the other one!

Back in July LawsWatch first created the character of SantacLaws, so we'll be sending the bill over to Mr Maslin and the Chron, who appropriated the concept without paying royalties on Wednesday to headline "Santa Laws" above a story detailing the Mayor's donations to various projects.

Any hope that this might have been a story in the tradition of recent efforts by Sean Hoskins - i.e. doing something other than taking everything said by the Diva at face value - was lost by the end of the first line, which reads "He's too lean for Santa’s red suit, but Mayor Michael Laws is positively Christmas". We're beginning to suspect the Watcher who got somewhat over-heated by our picture of Mayorman in full-body lycra a few days ago may be moonlighting as a Chron reporter.

It mentions he's paid $71,000 gross and pays tax at 38 cents in the dollar - the Mayoral appointment being secondary employment for the Diva in both the literal and taxable sense of the word.

It then goes on to list a variety of things he's spent his money on, including:

• $10,000 on the Mayoral Mile
• $3,200 on the Stayz/YMCA Salsa Spectacular
• $2,500 to the Storm Relief Fund
• $1,000 on the Bridge-to-Bridge Swim
• $500 each to the Red Eye Mural and the Reclaim Wanganui Vigil

That's $17,700 of specifics. He's also commissioned art for public viewing, and paid his own Mayoral entertainment expenses, which are usually a cost to Council above the Mayor's salary. These sorts of expenses include hosting of the post Referendumb ’05 knees-up.

Somewhat strangely he also funds or part-funds two staff in his office, one no doubt being the Spin Fairy. No other Mayor has found the level of Council support provided to the Mayor to be inadequate, but then again no other Mayor has used the position solely as a means to direct the spotlight on himself. That's also reflected in his having paid for the establishment and maintenance of the mayoral website, which is entirely self-promotional, offers no open forum, and yet is unquestioningly classed as a charitable donation by the Chron. By that reckoning, Paris Hilton's makeup bill makes the grade.

He's also made charitable donations to deserving persons in the community. LawsWatch is aware of some of these, and they unequtionably meet the criteria of a genuine charitable donation with no spin-off for the Mayor. And to his credit, he gives this portion of his money with no fanfare.

The salary the Diva receives is unarguably his to do with as he wishes. That he gives even a portion of it away to genuinely charitable causes such as flood relief and individuals in need is commendable. That a great deal of it goes to community activites such as the Mayoral Mile that just happen to place him at their Centre and provide publicity opportunities... well, it wouldn't be the Diva if he didn't seek the spotlight, even if he has to pay for the bulb.

That some of it subsidises staff whose only function is to massage his ego, respond to his whims and manufacture spin is a much greyer area. It's his money, after all. If he wants to hire belly dancers to keep him entertained and feed him grapes and dates while fanning him with ostrich feathers, that's entirely his business. But when he hires people whose job it is to obfuscate, spin, manufacture obsequious press releases to be published verbatim 100% of the time in the RCP and all too often in the Chron - and when that interferes with people's right to know the truth about what's going on at Council - that's when the mist starts thickening.

All in all, though, $71,000 is a relatively small amount in the overall scheme of things. What's of far greater concern is that while giving some of that with one hand, with the other he's taking away - siphoning off $200,000 of community contracts funding to his Wanganui Inc slush fund where it will be discussed (What bloody discussion? We're talking the likes of Ron Janes and Rangi Wills here- Ed.) behind firmly closed doors and given to his favourite "events".

At the same time this is happening he is also allocating more ratepayers money to buy favour with people like the lawn bowlers, where he turned up at the season opening with family in tow and held a $5,000 lolly scramble for the oldies - all helping to build, in their eyes at least, his position as Art Czar and arbiter of what's acceptable (which seems in many case to be populist kitsch).

Also of much greater import is the fact he uses the donation of his salary as a platform to position himself as somehow better than those councillors (in Wanganui and beyond) and other Mayors who take the salary and don't give most of it away. Membership on Council should be unpaid, he says.

It wasn't so long ago that membership of Parliament or a council was purely a club for the wealthy. The gentry would meet to discuss the disposition of public assets while the working classes toiled and paid taxes to create those assets. People then woke up to the idea that this wasn't all that representative a system - sometimes the waking up involved a revolution, even - and things were changed so that representatives were paid a fair wage for the time spent reading mountains of material, familiarising themselves with the issues, and then turning up to meetings to debate them.

It's fair to suggest that those wages have gone beyond what's reasonable - especially when talking of national rather than local politicians. It's fair to suggest that some of the people we elect don't do the required amount of study and preparation for meetings (and the Diva himself has been caught out a few times). But for someone who's paid an inordinate amount of money for mouthing off on the wireless and updating an uninterested readership on the state of his testicles to suggest that we don't pay our representatives is simply disingenuous. And incidentally, Mickey, while you're in Santa mode, we're not at all interested in the state of your sack.

Whether it's a wage earner who gives up some of their income to attend a 2 pm or 4 pm Council meeting, or a stay-at-home mum who has to hire a babysitter so she can attend, or a business person who has to get in extra staff or close the doors so they can turn up, representing the people in elected office has a monetary cost for most.

If Councillors weren't paid, that would narrow the field of people willing to stand to those with nothing better to do, and those with independent wealth. Somehow, we don't recall reading that plan in the now-vanished diVision democracy policy.