RBA Governor, Phil Lowe, has taken aim at the exorbitant pay of Australia’s executives, which comes at a time when Australian households are suffering seven years of stagnant real disposable incomes:
From The AFR:
Reserve Bank of Australia governor Philip Lowe has criticised the business community for extraordinary high salaries saying people should be happy to deliver value to a company without $20 million pay…
“As a regular Australian, it disturbs me. Some people who are paid extraordinarily high amounts of money and working Australians have relatively low wages and getting small wage increases, I think it’s an issue for the society,” he said…
“We should go back to wage increases that start with a three,” he said, “They should be increasing at 3.5 per cent.”
Lowe’s claim that he is “a regular Australian” is laughable given he was paid more than $1 million in 2017-18:
This makes Lowe one of the very top paid central bankers in the world, with a salary that is almost four times that of the US Federal Reserve chair.
In fact, there were 41 ‘fat cats’ at the RBA paid more than $200,000 in 2017-18, with 19 of those paid more than $400,000.
As we also know, Phil Lowe is a die hard supporter of Australia’s mass immigration program, which is has flooded the labour market with cheap foreign workers, eroded domestic workers’ bargaining power, and placed downward pressure on wages. Indeed it has completely restructured the economy to produce cheap labour “bullshit jobs” instead of higher value-adding jobs in tradable sectors.
The wages of “regular Australians” will not rebound until the wide open visa system is closed.
