Senior Commonwealth public servants have been awarded a pay rise of up to 19 per cent.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has urged unions to show wage restraint when bargaining for pay rises, but he has now approved a significant salary increase for department secretaries.
Under the former Coalition government, the secretaries received performance pay bonuses.
A governance expert from the Australian National University, Professor Richard Mulgan, says the Labor Government appears to be filling in that gap.
"They're extremely generous and I don't think they'd have been justified at that level if it wasn't also a mechanism of removing the performance pay aspect to it," he said.
