Fat cats even better fed

While most of us were tucking into leftover Christmas pudding, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was tucking into taxpayers’ pockets.

With evident thoughtfulness about the timing, it slipped out a staff circular to quietly confess that it was using the departure of one deputy secretary to promote four.  A DFAT deputy secretary gets around $310,000 in salary but naturally that paltry sum isn’t enough.  They need a little extra in allowances.  How much? Together with generous superannuation, the average SES Band 3 in the Australian Public Service gets the use of a luxury motor vehicle or cash in lieu, parking, personal benefits, other supplementary payments, performance bonus, retention bonus, productivity bonus, sign on bonus, group or whole of agency performance bonus and allowances, additional duties/responsibilities allowances, qualifications and/or skills based allowances, expense allowances, geographic allowances and disability allowances, making the average total remuneration and allowances for SES Band 3 $414,295 and the maximum $1,235,783.

DFAT needs highly competent senior staff who should be appropriately remunerated but does it need so many?  When former Governor-General Sir Paul Hasluck joined the then department of External Affairs in 1941, it occupied only 10 rooms on one floor of the old Admin building.  Now there are over 2,600 officers in Canberra, 3,300 overseas and over 6,200 in total.

The DFAT circular, which concludes that if more positions become available more people will be promoted, seems testimony to an uncharacteristic lack of ambition.   If four people can replace one, why not five or fifty?  In the spirit of the age, shouldn’t all become dep secs?  Robert Menzies once warned that the day could come when “we shall all be civil servants, all presumably, since we are equal, heads of department.”  Perhaps not.  But we seem to be paying for ever more people to fulfil that ambition.