[Hagar (Doug)]

What are your thoughts on this. Lets keep it away from party politics and policies.

My thoughts: After having been involved in several EBA negotiations over my 40 years with the company I work for I find the thought of doubling pollies pay packet is almost offencive.
Yes some allowances/perks will be forfieted to get this pay rise but from what I have read so far it will still be quite a significant increase.

We live in communities and States where our emergency services are now struggling to even keep pace with inflation and the same said pollies are saying no to these guy's who provide us with a true service. This cannot be said for some pollies or their enterages. Most are being offered increases of around 2.5% while even with the reduction in perks an increase of approx 50% (Quick work out)is what is being requested by these greedy pollies.

The big win seems to be the increase in superanuation for them all. Currently perks are not included in the super calculations but an increase in base salary will lift super to new levels.

The other annoying thing that seems to be stated a lot in the media is the old saying, "Pay peanuts, get monkeys" As it stands now we are not paying peanuts if you compare salaries with working class Australia but we still get monkeys. Not really they are a very smart bunch who look after themselves very well.
An example of this was the superanuation tax which was payed on all company payed in super if you earned more than $70000 pa. The funny thing or should I say rude part of this legislation was that our pollies were exempt from paying this tax. Lots of other examples of this and Fringe benifit tax rules leave pollies perks free from tax of any kind.

To say that inreasing pollies salaries will intice better people to take on the roll is also quite untrue. Increasing salaries by ten fold would struggle to get industry giants to walk away from their high payed positions. In political circles it is more the position than the salary which entices them to the position.

Just my thoughts of course. Somewhat cinical but how I feel about the whole situation.

AGAIN, TRY AND KEEP IT AWAY FROM PARTY LEVEL POLITICS and we might get some interesting comments without the thread being closed very quickly.