Nine News has reported that Australia’s highest ranked public servants are earning between $650,000 and $900,000 per year:
The tables below detail the pay of another cohort of highly paid public sector workers – the mandarins who head the government departments themselves:
There are other highly paid bureaucrats missing from this list, such as RBA governor Phil Lowe, who is paid over $1 million – almost four times that of the US Federal Reserve chair.
In fact, as shown above, there were 19 ‘fat cats’ at the RBA paid more than $400,000 in 2017-18.
The Australian’s Adam Creighton has questioned whether this is fair in light of the current economic depression facing Australia, and has demanded pay cuts for top brass bureaucrats:
The destruction of millions of jobs and businesses that is now well in train will expose the extraordinarily high pay and conditions of the nation’s top public servants, state and federal, that typically leave foreigners and members of the public speechless.
In NSW alone, just one state, more than 3200 senior executives, none of them “frontline” staff, are paid between $200,000 and $500,000 a year. Victorian Premier Dan Andrews’s salary is set to rise by $47,000 to $441,000 in July, while backbenchers’ base salaries are set to rise by almost $20,000 to $182,400.
Not much sharing of the burden there…
The largesse is even worse across Australia’s university quango, where vice chancellors typically earn between $1 million and $1.5 million (see here and here).
The hilarious thing is that universities are run as ‘charitable organisations’. Yet the degree-factories that they run, which rely on funneling as many international and domestic students as possible through cookie-cutter courses, are more akin to the very worst profit maximising corporations.
The Morrison Government should use the crisis as an excuse to take an axe to exorbitant executive pay, including that of MPs and Vice Chancellors.
The chance of this actually happening though is between 0 and naught.
