Rita Panahi: Bureaucrat bonuses don’t pass the pub test

The fat cats and public servants’ monster $100 million bonuses prove how abundantly clear that we are not all in this together.

The private sector has struggled with lockdown after lockdown. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Ian Currie

We are all in this together.

That’s what we were told at the start of this crisis and just about every day since.

But it’s always been a load of bollocks; those with skin in the game have seen their livelihoods destroyed while public servants making the decision to lockdown remained on full salaries with no fear of losing their jobs.

For the well paid upper echelons of the public service bureaucracy the past year has been pretty good.

While the private sector has struggled due to enforced restrictions with tens of thousands of small business owners watching on helplessly as their assets and savings are decimated, fat cat bureaucrats are pocketing big bonuses.

A Herald Sun investigation has revealed that public servants across 11 agencies and departments have been paid close to $100 million in bonuses over the 18 months to the end of 2020.

The federal government may have been urging restraint during the coronavirus crisis but its departments were spending up big rewarding themselves.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade gave itself a bonus of $14.3 million, which included an average incentives of $10,248 for 319 staff in the last six months of 2020.

For what possible reason do DFAT staff deserve a bonus during lockdown as the country was plunged into the worst recession experienced since the Great Depression.

Other agencies and departments that were beneficiaries of millions in bonuses include the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the Reserve Bank, Australia Post, NBN Co, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority and the CSIRO.

Australia’s senior public servants are the highest paid in the world, according to Labor senator Kimberley Kitching.

They’re doing pretty well at state level, too.

In Victoria the massive bureaucracy that has exploded under the Dan Andrews government has enjoyed healthy pay increases with the cost of executive pay tripling in just six years.

Taxpayers are forking out more than $320 million per annum just for the salaries of executives in state government departments, whose numbers have more than doubled since Andrews came to power.

No wonder so many people enjoyed the lockdown; it’s easy to be blasé about crippling, job-destroying restrictions when you’re sitting at home on a massive salary secure in the knowledge that your job will be there when restrictions lift.

For those under enormous financial stress wondering how they’ll pay their staff or their mortgage it is abundantly clear that we are not all in this together.