Government announces potential big pay rises for themselves!

The Government announced:

This Government is ensuring that excessive MPs’ pay increases are stopped and a fairer system is used in future, Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says.

Actually they are doing the exact opposite. They are repealing a law that restricted MP pay increases to the change in the median wage.

“In 2015, MPs took control of the way that their pay increases were calculated by replacing the Remuneration Authority’s independence with their own preferred formula. The changes were a failure, with this formula generating higher pay increases than the system used prior to 2015.

“We will repeal this formula and restore the independence of the Remuneration Authority to calculate increases in a fair and transparent manner. This means MPs’ pay will be calculated using the same process for reviewing the remuneration of other key public office holders.”

This is wonderful double speak. It means that they may now get massive pay increases rather than ones restricted to the median wage movement.

Under the law passed by National MPs would get a mere 2.1% pay rise in 2019 – as that is how much the median public sector wage has gone up. Under Jacinda’s law, they could get a lot more.

The best predictor of the future is the present. How much did the PM’s salary increase when Labour was last in office?

It went from $222,400 to $393,000 – an increase of $170,600. That is a 76.7% increase over nine years.

The median public sector increase was 45.6%. So the increase would have been around $70,000 less over nine years.

So who knew when Jacinda called 2018 the year of delivery, she meant the year of delivering huge pay increases to herself and her colleagues.