Responding to a groundswell of public anger the Queensland government hurriedly shelved its planned pay rise for its swollen army of public servants. After all, a guaranteed annual pay rise well above the inflation rate, plus a generous cash bonus, was just too much for ordinary taxpayers struggling through the sharpest and most devastating economic downturn in living memory. Workers whose jobs have shut down overnight, businesses who in all probability will never re-open, are rightfully outraged at public servants lining their own pockets with extraordinary largesse.
The Victorian government has no such qualms. Even as it imposes a Stage 4 lockdown on ordinary Victorians, the Andrews government is voting itself a truly eye-watering river of gold.
Not only are Victorian politicians getting an across the board 3.5 percent raise, government MPs are trousering an astonishing 12 percent pay rise. Socialist-left premier Daniel Andrews is giving himself a raise of $47 000. His salary is set to exceed both the U.S. president’s and the U.K. prime minister’s. Even humble backbenchers are getting a $20 000 pay rise, to $182 400.
That’s just salary. None of that even begins to cover generous “allowances” and “entitlements”.
This Versailles-level of privilege is bringing into sharp focus the extraordinary culture of entitlement amongst Australia’s taxpayer-funded elites.
“We will get through this together … it’s no longer about entitlement, it’s about need,” Scott Morrison said on Thursday, in one of his almost daily briefings to the nation on the coronavirus crisis. These are fine sentiments, but they clearly defy reality. Public sector workers are not suffering nearly to the same extent as those in the private sector, who ultimately pay their wages.
[…]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.
Of course, whenever anyone criticises eye-watering public servant pay packets, the troughers whine about nurses and teachers, but that’s frankly a load of self-serving bullshit. The truth is that the public service is stuffed to the gunwales with clipboard warriors doing “bullshit jobs”.
Asked on Thursday whether senior federal public servants and senior MPs might experience a pay cut as a way of sharing the burden, the Prime Minister said: “We’ve put the freezes in place.”
Forgoing a 2 per cent July increase on already enormous salaries is a scene from a Monty Python skit. The 3240-strong Senior Executive Service, for instance, will be keeping their $238,000-to-$453,000 salaries, not to mention the thousands of officials in federal and state regulators who earn at least as much.
Whatever the merits of the range of the extraordinary impositions on personal freedoms and future taxpayers, state and federal public servants, and the politicians who oversee them, should share some of the pain, especially since it’s government that has caused the economic collapse.
How about public service fat-cats taking a pay cut?
During the Depression, the Scullin government cut public sector pay by 20 per cent.
A uniform cut would seem draconian, causing real pain for the 100,000-odd junior federal public servants, for instance (who earn less than $100,000), and perhaps also for the 42,000 executives overseeing them (who earn between $130,000 and $175,000).
“Real pain”? Cry me a river. It might actually bring them in line with average wages in Australia. Public servants earn at least 10 percent more than their equivalents in the private sector. So a pay cut of at least that much is not so much a “sacrifice” as the kind of “fairness” overwhelmingly left-leaning public servants like to witter about.
The pay of taxpayer-funded political staff, around 1700 strong across states and federal government, is also gobsmacking, where advisers in their late 20s often earn $180,000-plus.
Other measures might include the cessation of indexing parliamentary and public servant defined benefit pensions, which might be means-tested, making lucrative board and advisory roles a bit less so.
[…]this process is about to ricochet through universities, whose swollen ranks of highly paid administrators and quasi-academics won’t be so affordable without billions in revenue from Chinese students. Vice-chancellors may struggle to keep their $1m pay cheques.
“Bureaucracy is a construction by which a person is conveniently separated from the consequences of their actions,” Nassim Nicholas Taleb says.
As Australia’s governments and their armies of overpaid public servants impose more and more economic pain on ordinary Australians, they’re making damn sure that they’re comfortably protected from the consequences of their own actions.
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