Fat cat salaries. Public service chiefs in a world of their own
The salaries of our best-paid Federal public employees are determined without regard to private sector salaries, comparable positions in State bureaucracies, or payments paid by other countries. What is fraud?
The scam is the Government Pay Tribunal, whose members determine the salaries of senior bureaucrats in an apparent loophole.
Just over 0.5 per cent of earners in Australia are paid more than a million dollars a year, and this includes several Federal Department Secretaries, with the rest not far from seven figures.
At the ‘public service, not for profit’ Senate Inquiry into secretary pay, Senator Lambie asked the Pay Tribunal whether private sector positions were being used as comparable positions.
The answer was ‘No’.
He also asked whether other Australian public sector positions had been used as comparable positions. Again the answer was no. If they had bothered to check, they would have found that the state’s civil service leaders are paid much less.
Lambie then asked whether overseas public sector positions were used as comparable positions. The answer was “No” again. If they had bothered to check, they would have found that overseas civil service leaders receive much, much less.
It was revealed that the Fee Tribunal wrote millions of dollars’ worth of checks paid by the public without doing the necessary due diligence. It’s also not right to worry about performance:
Source: Senate
Members of the Pay Tribunal need to be removed, new members who are in touch with society’s expectations need to be recruited and a new look at these inflated civil service salaries needs to be taken.
Fat Cat bureaucrats. Rem Court out of sight, out of sight
Rex Patrick is a former South Australian Senator and formerly a submariner in the armed forces. Known as an anti-corruption and transparency warrior, Rex is also known as “Transparency Warrior“
