Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, million-dollar homes, says my fellow senator. It is a serious matter. I have brought before the Senate, on behalf of the Greens, at least four times in the last six months—although this has been a Greens policy matter expressed in the Senate since 2005, at least—the need to cap some of the more extreme so-called salaries. I do not think they are salaries; I think they are the purloining of public money—by the heads of some companies only, because most CEOs, like most people in the private sector and like most people in the public sector, are good-hearted and civic-minded people. But some cannot help but be engaged in a decision-making process which benefits them. I do not need to explain to the Senate that, no less than in the public sector, when money—tens of millions of dollars—gets taken out of the private sector and put into the hands of CEOs, it does not come out of thin air; it comes out of the pockets of ordinary Australians. It either comes out of forgone profits which should go to the shareholders of those companies, or it comes out of the goods and services rendered by those companies, in added costs, higher costs and higher prices, passed on to the person in the street, the average householder. There is no magic about that. It is simply unfair that some CEOs are taking home salaries hundreds of times above those that the workers at the lower income end, who work just as hard in those corporations, get to take home.

We are proposing that, where corporations or banks are facilitated by this use of $2 billion of public money and the potential $26 billion loan guarantee that comes with it, the CEO packages should be limited to $1 million, taking into account all entities, all ways of payment. I would be very confident that if we went out to the street and asked, ‘Do you think that any CEO in Australia would be doing very well indeed on a million dollars a year, or three times the Prime Minister’s income?’ people would say, ‘Yes, that’s a maximum.’

There are those who feel that, with reports of severance payments of over $80 million to one CEO in Australia last year and ongoing payments of $10 million, $20 million or $30 million to certain CEOs going into this year, we have all become a little bit blase about it, but a reality check is required here. People are in Struggle Street in Australia due to the recession. People are having a hard time of it. A lot of small businesses are running very close to the line if not imploding. Bankruptcies are up. It is not that people are working less; they are working harder, but they are having a very, very tough time of it. We have seen hundreds of thousands of people added to the unemployment queues, not least in my home state of Tasmania, in just the last few months. I, for one, with my fellow Greens, am not about to say, ‘No strings attached,’ to the captains of industry, with this money coming out of the public purse at such a time.

I can guarantee that, if the Greens were given $2 billion to invest in small business in this country or to invest in local government, we would get a huge jobs dividend. We did with the stimulus package. In the $500 million that we got through reducing the one-off payments to taxpayers from $950 to $900 through the good services of the government, we were able to create a package which was job rich, with more than double the job creativity of the stimulus package itself—and so we could do with this.

The proposed amendment is a serious one. We are not in the business here of putting forward an amendment like that and saying, ‘But we’re quite happy for it to be knocked down.’ I want to hear a serious response from the government. That does not mean fobbing it off or putting it off to some other time or place for discussion. Now is the time to discuss CEO salaries. Now is the time to act on it. I put that to the Prime Minister. We are not about to just pass this legislation without some dinkum response from the government on these amendments.