Albanese's huge new salary is exposed
This is thanks to a Remuneration Tribunal ruling putting executive salary increases in line with inflation, which will see backbench MP pay rise from $233,660 to $239,268. Albanese's pay is rising from $607,516 to $622,097, which is more generous than Donald Trump 's base pay of $609,400 in Australian dollars.
Australia's Prime Minister also gets more than his UK counterpart Keir Starmer on $360,282 and Canada 's PM Mark Carney on $469,600. Treasurer Jim Chalmers will see his salary rise from $438,111 to $448,625. Foreign Minister Penny Wong 's pay will be equal as Leader of Government in the Senate.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley's salary will jump to $442,646. This is higher than Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke's $418,719 salary as Leader of the House. But it's lower than Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles on $490,499 as the holder of the Defense portfolio. An Australian needs to earn $408,974 to be among the top 0.8 percent of income earners, based on tax office data, and Cabinet ministers are certainly among that elite.
Australia's most powerful ministers typically earn four times the average, full-time salary of $102,742 and ten times the full-time minimum wage of $49,300. The Remuneration Tribunal argued its 2.4 percent increase for MPs was appropriate. 'The tribunal notes the domestic economy is continuing to stabilize following a period of elevated inflation and that many Australians continue to experience financial challenges,' it said. 'In the current economic context, the tribunal considers an increase of 2.4 percent appropriate.'
'This adjustment reflects a measured approach, balancing the need for restraint given economic conditions with the recognition of the upward pressure on household costs.' The 2.4 percent increase for MPs was lower than the Fair Work Commission's annual wage review, which awarded a 3.5 percent increase to the 2.9 million Australians either on the minimum wage or an award. The tribunal, an independent body, said it had a longstanding policy of 'modest' increases in pay for politicians and bureaucrats.
Since 2016, pay levels for Australia's most senior public servants has risen by 18.7 percent, which it argued was more moderate than the 25.6 percent increase in the wage price index for the same period. Former Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm, a libertarian campaigning for smaller government, said Australia's high pay for politicians produced careerists without life experience outside politics. 'It turns politics in Australia into a career, a well-paid career,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'I don't think taxpayers get good value for money but the big thing is that many of the incumbents in those roles can't do as well outside of politics so they have an additional incentive to hold on to their jobs, hold on to their positions in order not to lose the benefits. But Warren Snowdon, a former federal Labor minister who was in Parliament for 33 years, said politicians work hard and deserve the money. 'I won't comment on the money but I think it's a fallacy they don't work hard,' he told Daily Mail Australia. 'I don't know of one member of Parliament that doesn't work hard.
'In my own case, I was in the Parliament for almost 33 years and for most of that time, I was at home, on average, eight nights a month, if you exclude the Christmas period. 'I had to travel inside the electorate which was 1.3 million square kilometers, very diverse communities; you can't be seeing yourself as someone who's an absent member.' But Mr Leyonhjelm, who was in the Senate for five years, said too many politicians were addicted to the pay and the perks. 'I subscribe to the latter view that you're not in it for the money, it's not a career and you should have a life before you go into politics, you should have a life after you come out of politics so that you don't lose touch with what you're there for and the people you represent,' he said.
'You can get into a philosophical argument here - is politics a profession, a calling or should it be people who spend a few years serving the public and go back to a normal life?' 'We should treat a political role as a temporary position no matter who you are.' While Australia's most senior politicians are well paid by international standards, their remuneration packages are only a small fraction of what Australia's top bureaucrats get. 'It's high by international standards, it's low by bureaucratic standards,' Mr Leyonhjelm said. 'So then the argument becomes - "Should the Prime Minister be paid more or less than the bureaucrats who are basically at his bidding?"'
Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Michele Bullock is on a total remuneration of $1.057 million from a base salary of $811,108. But corporate chief executives are paid considerably more than Cabinet ministers or departmental bosses. Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn is on $8.977 million with bonuses, on top of his base salary of $2.5 million. Thousands of Aussies have still called for politician's pay to be based on performance. 'Imagine if they got paid on performance,' one said. 'Results based remuneration is the most appropriate form of remuneration for politician,' another added. 'It should be performance based - a huge deduction is warranted,' a third declared.
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Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Rattled Reeves was ‘in a bad place' on night before Commons tears
Rachel Reeves's week from hell ended with her crying on the Government front bench on Wednesday afternoon, but the cracks had been evident for some time. Three about-turns on welfare policy, a rising public spending bill she will have to pay in the autumn, and a mysterious crisis in her private life have come together to create a personal and political disaster for the Chancellor. As a born-again fiscal hawk, Ms Reeves has been battling for weeks to keep the Government's welfare plans together, while Labour rebels and Downing Street have torn them apart. Last Thursday, she was at a visit to a JCB factory when she learned that Sir Keir Starmer had performed his first policy reversal, junking up to £2.5 billion of the savings she had hoped to make from the benefits bill. But within hours of the concession, with the Government facing down a rebellion of more than 100 MPs, it became clear that it would not be enough. Ms Reeves, who as a moderate does not command support among rebellious Left-wingers, was dispatched as part of a ministerial team to convince MPs to vote for the softer plans. Those involved in the intense lobbying effort say the talks took an emotional toll on everyone involved. On Saturday, reports emerged that Ms Reeves had spent much of the day in tears after negotiations with colleagues and fights with intransigent backbenchers. The reports were denied by the Treasury. The following day, another newspaper published a story claiming that Ms Reeves had made Marie Tidball, disability campaigner MP, sob by threatening her on a phone call. That report was also denied. But by Monday, Labour MPs were openly on the warpath about the welfare changes and were blaming the Prime Minister and his Chancellor for refusing to engage with their concerns. 'The policy needs tweaking, but this could have been handled a hell of a lot better,' admitted one minister, grimly. Ms Reeves and her concerns about the Budget were blamed for the dispute, with a large chunk of the rebel caucus calling for her to break her fiscal rules or introduce a radical wealth tax. Sir Keir was being pulled in opposite directions by his Chancellor and his MPs, with both threatening dire consequences if he went the wrong way. Ms Reeves, in return, has made the case that any reversal on welfare would make the Government's financial position even more precarious. In the end, it was the rebels who won the battle for Sir Keir's heart. On Tuesday morning, as the Government was preparing for a humiliating second policy reversal, Ms Reeves appeared before MPs for a routine session of Treasury questions. 'She was in a bad place,' recalled one MP who was in the chamber at the time. 'She's not very good in the Commons and is not a confident performer anyway, but she was just not on her game. She wasn't taking criticism very well, and got quite rattled a number of times.' The tense exchange with Labour backbenchers and opposition MPs bubbled into a row with the Speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, who complained that the Chancellor was taking too long to answer questions. Sir Lindsay began coughing during her answers – a warning to stop rambling – before interrupting her: 'Order!' Ms Reeves snapped back: 'Oh, all right! Fine.' As the cameras panned away, one MP in the chamber recalled: 'She sat down in a massive huff and rolled her eyes at him, which he did not appreciate whatsoever.' The exchange barely registered in Westminster on a day of high drama, but did prompt a raised eyebrow from the political sketch-writer Quentin Letts, who tweeted: 'Rare for any MP, let alone a Cabinet minister, to behave thus to a Speaker. Feeling under pressure?' Behind the scenes, the Chancellor was indeed under significant strain. Walking around the Palace of Westminster on Tuesday evening, as the Government performed yet another expensive about-turn from the despatch box, Ms Reeves was left to contemplate how to raise another £5 billion in the Budget and keep her job. She returned to her office briefly at one stage in the debate, looking glum, and waited for the final vote at 7.20pm before travelling back to her Downing Street flat. With policy debate and political backbiting happening around her, it has since emerged that Ms Reeves was also dealing with 'personal matters' that made her week even more difficult. Downing Street and Treasury sources were tight-lipped about what problems the Chancellor was facing, but she arrived in Parliament again on Wednesday for Prime Minister's Questions (PMQs) without having spoken to Sir Keir. Arriving at the entrance to the chamber, behind the Speaker's chair, she bumped into Sir Lindsay, who was still furious about their tiff the previous day. The dam breaks In a heated conversation lasting no more than a couple of minutes, he admonished the Chancellor about her conduct and pointed out that the online post about it had received 60,000 views. It was at that point, bystanders attest, that the dam broke. Ms Reeves 'burst into tears' moments before she would appear on camera at PMQs. As 12 o'clock neared, she looked visibly upset to colleagues filtering into the Commons. Walking quickly to her place behind Sir Keir, Ms Reeves accidentally sat on Bridget Phillipson's lap, causing a 'bit of a kerfuffle', according to one observer. 'She was very, very emotional,' said one MP, who watched the Chancellor enter the room. 'It was hard to watch. From the beginning, she was wiping away tears.' Chris Ward, the Labour MP who acts as Sir Keir's parliamentary aide, was quickly brushed off when he reached across from the bench behind to check on her welfare. That moment, captured on the Commons TV cameras and shared quickly online, has since become one of the defining political images of Ms Reeves. 'Something very strange going on' The markets immediately clocked that something was wrong, spiking gilt yields and tanking the value of the pound. All attention was diverted from Sir Keir and Kemi Badenoch and towards the Cabinet minister quietly sobbing on the front bench. Those close to Ms Reeves insist that her tears were not caused by the week's politics. Wild rumours of an early-morning bust-up in Downing Street between the Prime Minister and Chancellor were swiftly and aggressively denied by all involved, even those alleged to have spread them. There has been no attempt to explain further why Ms Reeves was so visibly upset, despite attempts by the Conservatives to force a more fulsome response. 'There is something very strange going on, and 'personal matter' doesn't really clear it,' Mrs Badenoch's spokesman said. Instead, the rest of the Chancellor's afternoon was hidden from public view, first in her Commons office and then in Downing Street, where she worked for the remainder of the day. The last sighting of her was at 12.30, when PMQs ended and she reached for support from her sister Ellie – the Labour Party's chairman. 'She grabbed Ellie and dashed off to the office,' an MP recalled. 'She was rushing. She clearly just wanted to get the hell out.'
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
Starmer's Britain is just one blunder away from an IMF bailout
A tearful, broken Chancellor; a selfish, buck-passing Prime Minister who cannot even pluck up the courage to sack her; fanatical MPs determined to veto even the most modest of spending cuts: welcome to Labour Britain, a failing, unserious, ungovernable country. Sir Keir Starmer is our Potemkin PM, a widely despised figurehead. Rachel Reeves remains, for now, our Chancellor in name only, her raison d'etre obliterated, her final mission to serve as Starmer's human shield. Morgan McSweeney, Starmer's chief of staff, is finished. The real power lies with an economically illiterate, fiscally irresponsible mob on the Labour backbenches, and their Cabinet allies, Angela Rayner and Ed Miliband. The Parliamentary party is now little more than a mismatched coalition at war with itself; factionalism rules, guaranteeing stasis and drift. It has taken just a year for this farce of a Government to run out of other people's money, as all Left-wing administrations eventually do, yet it is now unclear who has the authority to grasp a situation that threatens to spiral out of control. Britain in 2025 feels ominously like a gigantic ponzi scheme on the brink of exposure, taking down everything and everybody with it: no wonder many young, ambitious people are dashing for the exits while they still can. Starmer will eventually sack Reeves, or she will quit in disgust, but whoever replaces her will either be a creature of the party's tax-loving, anti-capitalist, spendthrift Left, or suffer her sorry fate. Her successor won't be allowed to make any cuts, just hike taxes on the rich and successful, further crippling the economy. The next Chancellor will be under immense pressure to loosen the fiscal rules, and borrow with even more abandon. Labour's experiment with technocratic social-democracy lasted exactly one year: whatever comes next will be much more explicitly socialist and destructive. Yet this is not merely the latest instalment in a Parliamentary theatre of the absurd, or even the human tragedy of a hubristic, over-promoted politician stabbed in the back by her party and cut adrift by her honourless leader. This is real life, and the situation is grave. Britain is nearing a point of maximal danger. The budget deficit is too high, and gilt yields have been rising. The economy is barely growing. Tax increases aren't yielding much. This is the moment when political crises typically metastasise into financial meltdowns, when the markets begin to treat us like a failed state, sell the currency and push up interest rates. Britain is one political blunder away from a run on the pound, an emergency Budget and a bailout by the IMF. It was striking how sterling slumped when it looked as if Reeves was about to be axed during PMQs: the markets don't love her, but they are terrified that her successor could be even worse. The tragedy of Reeves is that she has no friends, no defenders, but she actually understands the need to speak the language of business and to give the impression that she is trying to balance the books. I will never forgive her for slapping VAT on school fees, for lying about the Tory black hole, for attacking farmers so pitilessly, for wasting billions on useless pay rises for the public sector, for breaking her manifesto promise on National Insurance, for destroying the economy. But in a desperate world of least-awful options, she was nevertheless the last bulwark against neo-Corbynite madness. She was right to seek to cut welfare spending. The obscene increase in the number of people receiving the mobility section of enhanced personal independence payments (PIPs) is laid bare in a TaxPayers' Alliance analysis of the official statistics. The numbers exploded from 734,136 in January 2019 to 1,754,739 in April 2025, a 139 per cent increase driven by widespread, officially sanctioned abuse of our welfare state. The number of recipients claiming because of autism surged from 26,256 to 114,211, for anxiety and depression from 23,647 to 110,075; for ADHD from 4,233 to 37,339. Successful claims for acne, obesity, drug and alcohol misuse and even writers' cramp all jumped. Some thirteen people receive enhanced PIPs for 'factitious disorders' with deliberately falsified symptoms, including munchausen syndrome. The Left have no interest in tackling this. They are much more interested in what they see as the obvious solution: higher taxes. When not toasting Reeves's imminent political demise, they have been excitedly sharing 'Just raise tax', the cover article in the New Statesman magazine, in their WhatsApp groups. The piece argues that Starmer's 'tax lock' – a pledge not to raise National Insurance, income tax and VAT – was an 'act of cowardice'. The magazine's thesis is that Britain's 'malaise' is caused by a state that is too small. It posits that 'middle earners are not being taxed enough for the kind of state we want'. It argues that 'the basic rate of income tax has not risen – not once, not by a penny – for more than 50 years'. It wants to replace employee National Insurance with a 5p hike in income tax designed to hammer savers and pensioners. It calls for a 'land value tax'. Some of the suggestions to simplify tax on labour income make sense, but the Left will ignore those and simply see a new opportunity: massive rises in income tax at every level, and the confiscation of as much 'unearned' wealth (to use the despicable Marxist term) as possible. They have spent years dreaming of a crippling wealth tax on property, targeting especially Tories in London or the Home Counties; with the Starmer-Reeves project in tatters, now is their opportunity. Owners of large gardens would be ruined, pensioners would have to sell, the rich would flee and the housing market would crash. If homeowners were levied even one per cent of the value of their home, they would need to pay £5,000 a year for a modest flat in London, and £10,000, £15,000 or much more for a house. Starmer has behaved disgracefully, and failed to stand up for Reeves. If she really believes in fiscal probity, and realises that full-on socialism isn't the answer, she should stop covering for a Prime Minister who doesn't deserve it. She should resign, and let somebody else clean up his mess.
Telegraph
2 hours ago
- Telegraph
You may not cry for Reeves, but there is worse to come
Be careful what you wish for. Few chancellors are ever popular, either within their own party or among voters. Theirs is the thankless task of repeatedly having to say no to whatever the latest spending or tax-cutting demand might be. But in all my years as a financial journalist I can think of none quite so unpopular as the current incumbent, Rachel Reeves. This feat has moreover been achieved in double-quick time. In just one year, she has managed to alienate just about everyone, from backbench MPs to pensioners, savers and welfare recipients, and from non-doms and millionaires to the tens of thousands of small businesses up and down the land struggling with higher taxes and punishing minimum wage increases. Few any longer give her much chance of survival amid the litany of broken promises and policy about-turns. Physically, she looks wrecked, with a tear visibly rolling down her cheek during Prime Minister's Questions on Wednesday. Whatever your politics, it would require a heart of stone not to feel at least a degree of sympathy for this lonely and diminished figure. Regardless, the optics are terrible, even if, as Downing Street insists, it is a personal matter that afflicts her rather than the pressures of the job. Politics is a cruel and unforgiving business, and the position of chancellor is where the punishment is most acutely felt. Yet paradoxically, Reeves is perhaps the best hope the country has got of managing its way through the current quagmire of challenges without descent into devastating fiscal crisis. Already there are signs of confidence draining away after the latest failure to push through meaningful cuts in welfare spending, with bond yields again lurching noticeably higher. The barbarians are at her gates, and once toppled there is no telling what madnesses and delusions come next from a Labour Party which, despite its growing roster of missteps and appalling poll ratings, is absolutely secure in its majority and therefore its immediate grip on the levers of power. It's not quite right to say, as Norman Lamont once said of John Major, that Labour is in office but not in power. There is much ruin that can be visited on a nation by political paralysis. What's more, once Reeves goes, the floodgates will be open to the hotheads of Labour's rank and file calling for wealth taxes and an even larger state. Britain is just one step away from another fully blown bond market revolt, and Reeves is perhaps the last line of defence – a fiscal hawk who stands almost alone amid the clamour from her own ranks for ever higher spending and wealth-destroying taxation. She is the woman with her finger in the dyke in an ever more desperate attempt to hold back the deluge. This might seem an odd thing to argue given that, politically at least, Reeves only has herself to blame for the precariousness of her position. From the start, her policy mix has lacked cohesion and any discernable purpose, besides merely attempting to keep the debt markets at bay. It's not hard to see why Labour loyalists are seething. The case for the prosecution is long and damning. Her early down-payment on fiscal responsibility – abolition of the winter fuel allowance for all but the poorest pensioners – was unnecessary and politically inept, marking her out as a chancellor who is too beholden to the 'Treasury view', and perhaps even entirely captured by it. She also committed the cardinal sin of talking the economy down by declaring hers to be the worst economic inheritance since the Second World War and warning of a largely made up £22bn 'black hole' in the public finances. Even as a way of getting her excuses in early, this was disingenuous and counterproductive. She then proceeded to kill off a nascent pick-up in growth with a £40bn tax-raising budget, the proceeds of which were substantially consumed by inflation-busting pay awards to public sector workers. Despite numerous warnings that tapping non-doms for more taxation would lead to a mass exodus, and therefore risked costing more than it raised, she nevertheless blundered straight into it. A steep rise in employers' National Insurance contributions was the final straw, bringing one of the few bright spots in the UK economy – a booming jobs market – to a grinding halt. I could go on. But despite all this, Reeves should be commended for at least attempting to keep the lid on the public finances when all around she is being urged to open the spigots as wide as can be and to tax until the pips squeak to finance it. Unlike many of her backbenchers, she instinctively recognises that to tax the wealthy and the high achievers too much is to undermine growth, and therefore to tip already wafer-thin confidence in fiscal sustainability over the edge. By demanding £5bn of cuts in benefits to make her budgetary numbers add up, Reeves has been widely blamed for the debacle of welfare reform, but at root the fault has nothing to do with her. Rather, it is a Labourite inability to tolerate almost any form of cut to entitlement spending. No doubt it could have been done better, but in the end there is no way of sugar coating these things. To get the welfare budget under control requires either a reduction in eligibility for working age benefits or a cut in their generosity. Only then will the Government begin to remove the incentives that cause people to choose welfare dependence over work. No doubt it could have been done better. Many of us thought that the original proposals didn't go nearly far enough. But the Chancellor is perfectly entitled to demand that the budget be cut, and leave it to the relevant departments to work out how it might be done in a reasonably sensitive, politically acceptable manner. It's not Reeves's fault that they failed to deliver. The problem now facing the Government is that markets no longer believe ministers have the stomach for meaningful cuts, making counterproductive tax rises all but inevitable. Whatever her faults, Rachel Reeves has to her credit made fiscal responsibility her calling card. It may be a facade, but she's essential to the fragile confidence that sustains the Government's ability to borrow in bond markets. From the US to Germany, France and Japan, we are seeing record levels of debt issuance; it's an ever more competitive market in which the UK's position looks increasingly at risk. The last thing Britain needs is to be seen as the economy least capable of paying its debts. They can throw Reeves to the wolves if they want, but it is only likely to hasten the eventual reckoning. Looking at Labour's front-bench, and even further back into the hinterland of ministerial positions, it is depressingly hard to see credible alternatives.
