For my next trick...

By crikey that Tim's a cunning man. Prior to the election in November a number of the candidates wanted his head on a plate and a number of those got voted in. If the pre-election chatter made him nervous then he must have been crapping himself when the results came in. Or perhaps he just coolly surveyed his opponents with a contemptuous eye in the comfort of knowing his contract of employment would be twice the shield against any puny arrows than might be shot his way.

Rename Their LegAssy

"Death and taxes and childbirth! There is never a convenient time for any of them!", cried Scarlett O' Hara in Gone With the Wind. How very true, and it's perhaps a thought shared by our incumbent council: people are always going to complain about taxes, so we may as well raise them (and introduce an extra one for good measure). And voilà. Or maybe it's not their reasoning at all; there may never be a convenient time for taxpayers, but there is certainly more of a convenience scale for politicians. As a general rule, tax raising measures tend to become more inconvenient as the politician approaches an election.

How convenient, then, that our members have decided to raise taxes early on in their term, when there is still three and a half years left for the electorate to forget all about it (and as the election of Member Edwards Sr shows, we the electorate here have a very short memory). Now, far be it from me to accuse them of timing the tax hike with re-election in mind, I don't think they're that cold and calcula... Well, let's just say they didn't time it with re-election in mind.