You are not going to believe what Wellington’s mayor is doing right now.

Mr Andy Foster is in Queenstown for a leadership conference. But not just any leadership conference. A very expensive, very exclusive leadership conference. One that is costing the ratepayers of his city $30,000 for seven days, so that’s $4300 a day.

You know why it’s so expensive? Because it’s at the very nice Millbrook golf resort with its 27 hole championship golf course, award winning day spa, 25m lap pool, outdoor hot pools and sauna.

As I said, it’s exclusive, this course can only take 25 participants at a time and those participants will presumably have the undivided attention of the programme director, three to five executive coaches and the three to five lifestyle coaches on offer.

Now, do you know where Andy Foster should have been this week?

He should’ve been in Wellington, the city he runs with the rest of the city councillors deliberating on the draft annual plan for that city.

And just like it sounds, the draft annual plan is the blueprint for all of the things that will happen in Wellington for the next year, the first full year of his mayoralty his first chance to start enacting the things he promised during the campaign.

So, without putting too fine a point on it, reasonably important.

Local body politicians are a constant source of amazement to me.

They never stop finding ways to prove to us that, however incompetent we might already think they collectively are, they are even more incompetent than that.

If local body politicians ever wonder why we ratepayers around this country object to rates rises, they only need to look at this example.

Because this is just another example of politicians wasting our hard-earned rates.

It’s possible Andy Foster does need this course.

Because, he clearly does lack some leadership skills, as evidenced by the fact that he isn’t LEADING crucial process this week.

But, if didn’t have the necessary leadership skills to be a mayor, he shouldn’t have run for mayor.

And then wasted money that some ratepayers struggle to scrape together on a week-long trip those ratepayers could never themselves afford.