Not just here, in Australia.
The profusion of senior executive service personnel, the 2790 bureaucrats in Canberra who typically earn between $200,000 and $360,000 a year, is even starker. Their number remained broadly flat between 1984 and 2001, but since then their ranks have almost doubled. Entire suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne are paying tax to support these jobs.
Causation runs the other way too. The public service has become so large and top-heavy with overpaid bureaucrats that private salaries are being driven up to giddy heights. The private sector has to offer more money because it cannot guarantee security. Ultimately, this makes consumer prices higher and profits lower. Remuneration in the public sector has lost its moral compass too. As the latest taxation statistics show, 90 per cent of taxpayers have taxable incomes of less than $100,000 a year. If any of these people refused to pay tax because they judged that having 118 people earning more than $280,000 in the departments of climate change and sustainability, for instance, was absurd, they would go to prison. However offensive some pay packets in the corporate world might be, shareholders could still sell their shares.
There are way too many well paid troughing hippies in Australia. Hopefully Abbott will close these departments. Climate change and sustainability staff don’t need to be paid close to $300,000.
