While top bureaucrats are now earning one million a year, the tribunal that decides who gets what is doing its best to keep its decisions secret. Rex Patrick reports.
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, only two departmental heads earn less than $900,000.
These are extremely generous salaries and entitlements by international standards.
US Government Department Secretaries, who head up much larger agencies with much bigger budgets, get less than half those salaries. They are limited to US$250,000, around $400,000.
Department of War
The Secretary of War runs a department with a larger annual budget than the entire Australian Government, but he’s getting 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.
Remuneration Tribunal
In a recent Senate submission on Senator Lambie’s Bill to cap the secretaries’ pay, the Tribunal offered no justification for the outrageous salaries set. The long and short of their pleading with the Committee looking into the Bill was … for over 50 years we have provided independent determinations of remuneration for officials and pollies – leave us be!
The Tribunal consists of three part-time members appointed by the Governor-General for five years each. The current members of the Tribunal are Holly Kramer (President), Heather Zampatti and Stephen Conry.
Kramer is on $148,932 per annum. She shares her time on the Tribunal with her other jobs on the board of the ANZ bank and Fonterra, and is the Chair of the McKinnon Foundation. She has some other jobs, too.
Zampatti and Conry are both on $50,780 per annum. Zampatti is the Chair of the Silvertown Foundation and Evion Group. She’s also a member of, amongst other things, the ASIC Financial Services Consultative Committee and the Financial Sector Advisory Council.
Conry is Chairman of private investment company Langdon Capital and Chairman of the Games Independent Infrastructure and Coordination Authority for the 2032 Brisbane Olympics.
There are no nurses, teachers, tradies, or aged care workers on the Tribunal.
Transparency que?
The Tribunal included in their Senate submissions on the Lambie Bill a statement saying,
“the setting of remuneration for public offices is rightly a matter of public interest. The transparency and accountability afforded by an independent Tribunal promotes understanding, trust and confidence in the remuneration system”.
It’s a statement hard to reconcile with a response to a recent request for information by MWM on how they set the new family travel rules for pollies.
Source: FOI
There was nothing released on the Tribunal’s actual deliberations.
MWM would normally appeal this sort of mad redaction, but we are in two minds for the reason set out below.
Pollies’ family travel
When the Anika Wells travel scandal broke in early December (in the interests of fairness, other travel scandals followed shortly afterwards). After “a bit” of media pressure, Prime Minister Albanese announced he was proposing new travel changes to the Remuneration Tribunal.
The MWM FOI reveals that the PM didn’t do the proposing directly. In fact, the Special Minister for State, Senator Don Farrell, and the Finance Minister, Senator Katy Gallagher, wrote to the Remuneration Tribunal on 22 December 2025 setting out the Government’s desires.
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Open in new tab And what we got back from the Remuneration Tribunal on 20 January 2026 was … well … those desires.
So we might not bother appealing the false secrecy. All it’s likely going to say under all the redactions is “yes sir and madam Senators, we’ll do exactly as you ask”. How’s that for independence?
What we can take away from all of this is that
we have a non-independent independent tribunal that is also non-transparently transparent.
It’s also completely out of touch, and to the extent that it spends its days just advancing all pollies’ and public servants’ salaries by CPI, and rubber-stamping requests from ministers, it’s hardly giving us value-for-money, even for their part-time salaries.
SNAFU.
Forget “the rules”, pollies should get their snouts out of the travel trough
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the "Transparency Warrior."