While the real wages and salaries of Victorians continues to languish in the gutter:
Victoria’s politicians have awarded themselves a big pay rise, with more to come. From the Herald-Sun:
STATE politicians secretly pocketed a 5.3 per cent pay rise last year, worth more than $8400 to backbenchers and almost $19,000 to Premier Daniel Andrews.
The Sunday Herald Sun can exclusively reveal the whopping increase, which means the minimum salary for a politician is now $168,526…
While pollies take home that extra money, Victoria’s lowest-paid workers were last year awarded a rise of 3.3 per cent — taking the minimum weekly wage to $694.90 before tax, compared to $3240 a week given to the lowest-paid state politician.
The MPs’ windfall — amid soaring living costs for Victorians — comes as politicians prepare to again change the law on pay and entitlements and create an independent remuneration tribunal. That is likely to see their base salaries increase yet again, in return for scrapping murky entitlements that have been rorted…
The Sunday Herald Sun discovered the recent pay increase as a result of changes to Australian Bureau of Statistics wage data in 2016. We obtained basic salaries and expense allowance information on Parliament’s intranet.
Andrews Government spokesman Chris Piper said: “The current pay and entitlements system is something we inherited from the former Liberal Government.”
“We’re changing it so MPs don’t set their own salaries ever again and they’re more accountable for the entitlements they receive”.
To state the obvious, the is a very bad look when wages growth is running near record lows.
