pay peanuts get monkeys

Currently we have 150 members in the House of Representatives, and 76 in the Senate. It is very important that we retain two separate houses as a 'check and balance', however do we really need this many politicians? If we cut the number of federal politicians in half – the lower house would have 75, and the Senate 38: the saving on current base salaries would be around 16 million dollars annually. For the remainder, we move to the following:

It is difficult to put precise figures on the cost, however my 'back of a napkin' calculations bring it in at an additional cost (from the original salary position, prior to the savings being accounted for) of around 14 to 18 million dollars annually. However even if it costs more than our current salary bill for politicians, I would argue that it's value for money. Quite outside of the raft of savings on perks (the lifetime gold pass particularly!) these salaries provide a far more competitive reason for the extraordinary people we seek to run the country to move from the private sector to politics.

The back benchers, the entry level if you like, receive a modest increase. Whilst this entry level salary should be fair and reasonable, and I think it is, we want the extraordinary people to aspire higher, and to be rewarded competitively for doing so.

Yes these salaries are significant. Yes they are many times more than the average salary. Yes they are a large increase from the current level. But if the CEO's running many private sector businesses in this country can command salaries in the high 6-figures, or over a million dollars, we should be prepared to pay the person in charge of our country somewhere in the $900,000 range if we expect to attract extraordinary people.

And does anybody seriously think we need 226 federal politicians, in addition to state government and local government (that's a whole other discussion!). Will the job of running the country be adversely affected by halving the numbers in the upper and lower houses? Mmmm I don't think so either.

Let's pay more and attract better, extraordinary people to a career in politics. But let's have less of them. We have too many, and too many of the ones we have are duds.

Sadly though, it will never happen, it would be political suicide of any politician to dare raise it.

But I bet they agree with the principle. Except the duds. They know they'd have pre-selection rescinded in a heartbeat.