ACT Chief Minister Kate Carnell has put a submission to the Remuneration Tribunal that the Chief Minister and other MLAs should not get a pay rise. There is some irony in the submission. Out of all the 17 MLAs she is about the only one who could cut the mustard in the private sector and get more outside the Assembly than she gets inside.
Pay for Assembly Members presents a conundrum. If you pay peanuts you might get monkeys. If you get monkeys, the public does not want to pay them cashews, arguing that they deserve only peanuts. On the other hand, the payment for MLAs and quality of MLAs may not correlate. Good-quality people may have made enough money outside politics not to worry much about pay; their central concerns being public service, power, influence and other non-monetary concerns. Other good-quality people may not be very affluent and still not worry much about pay, regarding the rewards of public service enough – a good example of that is Sir William Deane, who upon being made Governor-General insisted on a pay reduction for the office. Adding to the difficulty is the possibility that if you make the pay rate higher it will attract people for the sake of the money not for the sake of doing a good job.
The extent of the difficulty proves the need for the tribunal to maintain its independence. It may get submissions from the Government but should not adopt them as a matter of course.
In the case of the ACT, our MLAs are paid lower than everywhere in Australia but Tasmania, yet they reside in the place where income is highest in Australia. The quality of other state parliamentarians is not demonstrably better than ours. So a small pay rise should not be out of the question.