Jacqui Lambie (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That these bills be now read a second time.

I table an explanatory memorandum and seek leave to have the second reading speech incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech es read as follows—

REMUNERATION TRIBUNAL AMENDMENT (THERE FOR PUBLIC SERVICE, NOT PROFIT) BILL 2025

This Bill will put an end to the culture of obsceneentitlement at the top of the Commonwealth bureaucracy.

It isn't just our university vice chancellors who are wallowing like pigs in gravy.

It might surprise most Australians that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is not the highest paid person in the Australian Government.

In fact he's not the highest paid by a large margin.

Many top bureaucrats rake in much more pay than the Prime Minister.

The head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet gets over $1 million a year and the Secretaries of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence and Home Affairs are not far behind at $960,000.

In fact there's only two departmental heads earning less than $900,000.

These are extremely generous salaries and entitlements by international standards.

United States Government Department Secretaries,

who head up much larger agencies with much bigger budgets,

under US law get less than half those salaries. They are limited to US $250,000 or around $403,000 Australian dollars.

The newly appointed Secretary of Defence will run a department with a larger annual budget than the entire Australian Government, but he'll get less than half the salary of our Defence department secretary.

These ridiculously generous salaries and entitlements are set by the Remuneration Tribunal, a secretive outfit that does most of its work behind closed doors—with little transparency or public scrutiny.

By and large our departmental secretaries have got those top jobs by climbing the public service ladder and then bobbing their heads and adjusting their views to suit the government of the day.

And once they're at the top of the greasy bureaucratic pole,

they're very far removed from the daily lives of the vast majority of Australians.

There's no cost-of-living crisis for them.

Instead it's huge salaries, government cars and taxpayer funded air travel, always at the front of the plane with access to the Qantas Chairman's Lounge.

How can any of them appreciate the struggles of the average Aussie family when they are rolling in taxpayer funded cash.

Less than 1% of Australians earn more than $350,000 a year and they're all members of that 1% club.

And this is the generation of top bureaucrats that delivered us Robodebt.

It's this top level of bureaucrats that has treated welfare recipients like criminals while ignoring concerns from public servants—some of them in Tasmania—who told their bosses they thought Robodebt was illegal.

It's this top layer of bureaucrats who have overseen the shocking treatment of veterans.

These are the people who don't care when billions of dollars are wasted on failed defence programs and dud IT projects.

It's these top level bureaucrats who turned a blind eye while the big 4 consulting firms scammed hundreds of millions, indeed billions, from federal agencies while service delivery for ordinary Australians went down the toilet.

And it's these fat cats who expect on retirement to take up lucrative roles in those very same consulting companies or else direct government contracts handed out by their former colleagues.

They've been feathering their own nests for far too long.

This Bill seeks to put the brakes on this disgraceful abuse of entitlement.

The Bill will end the excessive renumeration paid to departmental Secretaries and other public office holders by amending the Remuneration Tribunal Act 1973 to require the Tribunal to determine secretaries' remuneration within a statutory limit of $430,000.

Any variation from that limit will be a direct political responsibility of the government of the day and will be subject to parliamentary disallowance.

Departmental secretaries have important responsibilities, and their pay should be appropriate to ensure those positions are competitively filled by competent and talented people, but the present levels of pay at the top of the public service trees just don't pass the pub test.

The Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet shouldn't be earning more than twice the salary of the Deputy Prime Minister, $479,003.

Other Department secretaries and agency heads should not earn more than the Federal Treasurer, $438,113.

I'm still fuming that someone like Kathryn Campbell, the Robodebt queen, got a nearly million-dollar gig after the she presided over that tragic disaster.

I'll happily acknowledge $430,000 is an arbitrary figure, but it's reasonable and proportionate remuneration and we need to focus debate on what the bureaucrats should be paid.

The amendments proposed by the bill will also apply to other holders of public offices including the Chief of the Defence Force, the Deputy Chief of the Defence Force and the chiefs of the Australian Army, Royal Australian Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force.

Public service should be just that, serving the public, not a pathway to profit.

A commitment to the public good, duty and sacrifice are values that should be at the core of the Australian Government.

These aren't values supported by the culture if obscene entitlement is allowed to continue to infect the top ranks of our public administration.

Our top bureaucrats should be properly paid, but not at levels that corrupt their judgment and ethics, and which put them far beyond the lives of the people they are meant to humbly serve.

They've been flying high with a bloated sense of entitlement and power for far too long. It's time we bring them closer to ground level.

This bill will do that.

TERTIARY EDUCATION LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (THERE FOR EDUCATION, NOT PROFIT) BILL 2025

This Bill seeks to put an end to the culture of obsceneentitlement that is like a cancer at the top of Australia's universities.

Australia's university vice chancellors are among the highest paid in the world.

In 2023, the remuneration of the Group of Eight vice chancellors, the self-proclaimed elite of our tertiary education section, averaged close to $1.3 million per annum in salaries and generous entitlements, often including luxurious residences.

More than a dozen vice chancellors are on million-dollar packages.

With few exceptions, other vice chancellors are pulling in between 800 and 950 thousand bucks a year.

This salary is much more than the Prime Minister's, the Deputy Prime Minister's or the Federal Treasurer.

And with vice chancellors' pay in the stratosphere, that sets the scale for a large number of other university bureaucrats.

It was recently revealed that 306 top university executives are paid more than state premiers or federal ministers.

These are of course executives administering what are public institutions, built up and paid for by generations of everyday Australians taxpayers.

Sadly, however, much of the public education and public service culture of our universities has been lost- because universities have become corporations and not learning institutions.

Over the past four decades, we have seen our universities transformed, from the nation-building institutions they once were, into voracious corporate entities.

Measuring their success in terms of international student numbers,

grand campus building programs, and extravagant pay and perks for their top executives.

The culture now, especially in the Group of Eight, is not that of public education in the national interest, but rather the institutionalised greed of investment banks and corporate law firms.

Recent research by the Australia Institute has shown there's no correlation between vice chancellor's pay and student satisfaction.

The Institute found: "…if anything those universities with higher paid vice-chancellors are more likely to have lower student satisfaction. Notably, the four universities with the highest student ratings of the quality of their educational experience, also pay their Vice-Chancellors less than the average across the sector, and the three universities paying their Vice-Chancellors the most, have very low levels of student satisfaction."

To add insult to injury, these huge salaries are being paid at the top of an industry that's engaged in massive wage theft from poorly paid staff who actually teach students.

And the circumstances of many Australian university students are also dismal.

While university education was free in 1985, university is now, for many, eye-wateringly expensive. We have undergraduate degree fees upwards of $50,000.

Average HECS debts have more than doubled in less than two decades.

Students are feeling the cost-of-living crisis acutely.

From 1985 to 2023—adjusted for inflation—income support for students grew by less than 20%, while average full-time earnings grew nearly 40%.

Meanwhile Group of 8 vice chancellor salaries grew a whopping 320%.

It's clear that the top university bureaucrats have blown away much of the social licence their institutions once enjoyed.

The Government knows this. They know that these obscene salaries are indefensible. They know all about the massive scale of wage theft. And they know about the decline in teaching standards and student satisfaction.

However, as with so many things, they're terrified about upsetting the vested interests.

Education Minister Jason Clare has said he'll fix things with a 'national expert governance council' to set guidelines for university executive salaries, but that's a bureaucratic cop out. It's another advisory body.

There's no mention of legislation or enforcement.

The Minister has also said vice chancellors' salaries ought to be in line with the top of the public service.

Well, that wouldn't be much of a change. The head of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet gets over $1 million a year, the secretaries of the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Defence and Home Affairs pull in $960,000.

In fact, all but two department heads get paid more than $900,000. Vice Chancellors are already in that cohort of salaries, so they needn't worry much if that's going to be the deal.

Instead, we need a big stick, that is federal law to significantly cut and cap the salaries of vice chancellors, and that's what this Bill aims to do.

The Bill would amend the Australian National University Act 1991 and the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011 to impose conditions on Australia's public universities so that the remuneration of vice chancellors would be below the remuneration of the Federal Treasurer; currently $438,113.

To be precise, the Bill will set a limit on vice chancellors' pay at $430,000 remuneration per annum.

This is a reasonable and proportionate remuneration benchmark that reflects the responsibilities of university chief executives within the broader context of the Australian public sector and democratic governance.

I'll happily acknowledge that's an arbitrary figure, but that's something we need to focus up debate on what these bureaucrats should be paid.

It's necessary because, (with the exception of the ANU), the governance frameworks for our public universities are in the hands of state governments and parliament; but they don't care about what vice chancellors are paid because it's not their money that's being spent.

It's the Commonwealth Government that pays, and its Australian taxpayers who are footing the bill.

The amendments provide a measure of flexibility in allowing the responsible Ministers to prescribe a remuneration amount for vice chancellors, but this must be by legislative instrument which must be tabled in both houses of the Australian Parliament and subject to disallowance.

As a consequence, the Australian Government will be politically accountable to the Parliament for any variation from the $430,000 per year limit and the Parliament will retain ultimate authority over the maximum remuneration available.

If a university doesn't comply with the limit, then they'll be subject to administrative sanctions from the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency in regard to their registration.

We need to have a rigorous Senate Committee inquiry and this Bill is intended to give such an inquiry a sharp focus on these obscene salaries. I look forward to seeing some of those fat cats squirm as they try to justify the unjustifiable.

Australia's vice chancellors fancy themselves flying in the stratosphere. We need to bring them closer to earth.

I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.