OPINION: Despite what Joe Hockey says it’s an endless age of entitlement for politicians and public office holders TERRY SWEETMAN THE COURIER-MAIL MARCH 07, 2014 12:00AM The perks are good for politicians and some public servants. The perks are good for politicians and some public servants. Source: Supplied THE Australian Parliament might be too boring for Clive Palmer but this week it did manage to give the nod to a procedural Bill to increase the Governor-General’s salary from $394,000 to $425,000.
General Peter Cosgrove, the incoming tenant of Yarralumla, had asked the Government to reduce his salary by the amount of his military pension. The generosity of that gesture can’t be calculated without knowing just what his pension might be, but it was right and proper and in line with some former incumbents.
The G-G’s salary is informally linked to that of the Chief Justice of the High Court, which, with due respect, seems to undervalue one or other of the offices.
It probably depends on your opinion of the office of Governor-General and not the worthiness of the vice-regal office holder, but it seems to me a tidy little sum for a largely ceremonial role.
It is a gentle reminder that, although the Age of Entitlement is said to be going the way of the Age of the Dinosaur, some people are climbing the evolutionary tree.
We are routinely outraged by the salaries, lurks and perks (and till-tickling sins) of our politicians but there is a long list of those referred to as Holders of Full-Time Public Office (and part-timers) whose salaries and allowances are determined by the Remuneration Tribunal but whose good fortune largely goes unnoticed.
These are people recruited from private enterprise, nurtured in the public service and, in the case of part-time board members, sometimes plucked from the tree of political plums.
Top of the list of salaries is that of the chair of the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority, which oversees most of our financial institutions and whose total gig was set late last year at $819,200.
Next is the solicitor-general with $716,200 and so it goes on down through a list of officers you’ve never heard of until you hit “classifier, Classification Board” on a very humble $128,000, though he or she could aspire to the station of “senior classifier” on $179,200.
In between are such worthies as the chiefs of the armed services ($512,000), various tribunal and commission bosses and other odds and sods.
And a lot of these will receive handsome pay rises on July 1 with, for example, the aforementioned service chiefs looking forward to $537,000.
The Remuneration Tribunal helpfully lists some incremental salary levels over the years, with the total package of the Commissioner of the Australian Federal Police’s growing from $604,160 in July last year, to $634,880 in January and $665,600 in July.
For the same period the full pay packet of the boss of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation will have grown from $552,960 to $614,000. Whatever else the tribunal might take into account, it doesn’t seem a salary freeze is among them. Queensland politicians to get $105-a-day meal allowance
For strangers to Canberra, the pecking order seems perplexing.
Why, you might ask, should the Australian Public Service Commissioner ($665,600 in July) be more valuable than our head spy? Or why not?
If you fancy a little faux colonial gig, the administrator of the Christmas and Cocos Islands has a total package of $205,570.
Given the refugee hassles in that part of the world, you might be better off settling for administrator of tranquil Norfolk Island on a slightly lower $204,800. But the truly wonderful thing about all these jobs is that if the office holder is a member of any one of an alphabet soup of superannuation schemes – Commonwealth, Public Sector or Military – the employer’s (that’s us) contribution is 15.4 per cent of the base salary.
Most of us are stuck on 9 per cent, peek over the horizon at 12 per cent and only dream of 15 per cent, the figure Paul Keating, architect of the national superannuation scheme, envisaged all along.
The extra 0.4 per cent enjoyed by these office holders seems calculated to rub our noses in our misfortune.
If ever you wondered about the “them” and “us” of government affection, look at the superannuation injustices in its own conditions of employment.
The tribunal pay packet list represents the price of excellence in a competitive world and recompense for responsibilities of which most of us would never dream. However, does such expertise and broad shoulders justify salaries up to 10 times that of the average full-time worker?
If it is reasonable to ask that of captains of industry, why not the brigadiers of bureaucracy?
At a time when our belts are being tightened for us, when entitlement is reserved for the favoured, when disability pensioners are viewed as bad-back bludgers, the unemployed as conniving drones and we are routinely lectured about national penury, we should pay more attention to these lists that are hidden in public view
