The public servants that have already received $1250 bonus

While some public servants have already received a $1250 sign-on bonus promised by the Palaszczuk Government last year, tens of thousands of other workers are still waiting. This is when they’re likely to see it hit their bank account.

QUEENSLAND taxpayers have forked out more than $133 million on tens of thousands of hefty $1250 sign-on bonuses that have been doled out to the state’s public servants.

The Courier-Mail can reveal about 107,000 government workers have been paid the one-off sign-on payments since the Palaszczuk Government unveiled the move last year.

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Another 13,000 workers are likely to receive the payments before the end of the month, which will cost the Government an extra $16.25 million, while another 94,000 more remain eligible pending agreements.

Among those who have already received the payments include teachers and nurses, as well as a core group of public servants.

Treasurer Jackie Trad said any use of sign-on bonuses depended on the “circumstances that parties find themselves in” when negotiating enterprise bargaining arrangements.

“It’s one of the options,” she said.

“Sign-on bonuses have been used previously. This isn’t the first time they’ve been used.”

LNP treasury spokesman Tim Mander said public servants would not be “bought off that easily” and insisted that the bonuses would do nothing to protect jobs across the state.

“The LNP is calling on Jackie Trad to announce an economic stimulus package for the whole state which includes freezing car registration, power and water bills for households and businesses,” he said.

The Government announced the sign-on bonuses last year – claiming the move was about driving economic growth, and also promised that the new agreements would come with productivity improvement clauses.

Ms Trad said that just like the Federal Government, the State expected to see a measure of economic activity when cash payments were made to any worker.

They had also tried to maintain public service pay increases at 2.5 per cent at a time when Brisbane’s most recent inflation rate was recorded at 2 per cent.

Senior officers and executives were exempt from the $1250 bonus.

The Courier-Mail understands that the Government believed that the pay rise called for by the unions would have cost the Budget bottom line more than the total cost of the $1250 payments.

It also would have meant that any future pay increases would have been pegged to the new level of pay, costing taxpayers more over time.