Ethics in politics? Moral people attracted to politics? Increase the rewards, say some?
Patently, increasing the financial rewards, will simply attract more of the type that patently put their own pecuniary rewards ahead of party politics; and party politics ahead of bipartisan support for the national interest.
In times of hardship as is evidenced in the retail, services and manufacturing sides of the economy, genuinely ethical people would take a very substantial pay-cut to led by example. Moreover, they'd likely grandfather some of the quite grossly exorbitant rewards currently handed out to past politicians.
Politicians ought to be limited to no more than two full terms in the senate, four in the house of Reps and three in state legislatures. This is the only way we can eventually get rid of the party hacks, that are simply adorning our parliaments. We need to get back to a time when ordinary folks, with lots of real world and business experience populated our parliaments.
Perhaps some form of mandatory pre pre-selection integrity testing, would not go amiss?
We have several space age lie detection methodologies available to us, thermal imaging, voice stress detectors, computer assisted facial recognition; and, ought to oblige intending candidates to front up to an in depth, virtually undetectable, non invasive, space age polygraph assisted inquiry, that ought to inform us beyond reasonable doubt, as to their current morality and ethical standards.
We will no longer need to keep the bar stewards honest, if we simply eliminate them as contenders, before they ever get into politics?
However, we don't need to know about their sexual preferences and or peccadilloes, or invade their personal space/privacy?
Some of our very best Leaders have had their all too human flaws and shortcomings? Rhrosty.

Jez Rhrosty, are you sane?

Under your proposed regime Labor wouldn't be able to field any candidates in any election.

Paying them more & more over the years has only resulted in the incompetence we have witnessed. Moe pay is only justified if the electorate feels they're better off. Politicians' pay should be set via referendum.

"Moe pay is only justified if the electorate feels they're better off. Politicians' pay should be set via referendum."

I wonder if some other process could be used that reflected how the community was travelling. There has been a bunch of work done over the years on measures of community well being which might be useful to form the basis of performance bonuses. Set the base pay lower and at the end of a term use a wide range of measures to determine the size of the pool for bonuses for pollies who've served during that term.

An individual pollies share of the bonus pool could be adjusted based on what happened to their proportion of the primary vote over that period.

Some of the measures would be outside the pollies control as are many of the measures used by other employers. If there is a GFC and things are tight then pollies might join many others in having less in their pockets.

Measures might include some soft figures around sense of well being but would also include hard figures, rates of bankruptcy, rates of employment, length of hospital waiting lists, national debt maybe offset against an independent valuation of the nations assets (spending on infrastructure is not necessarily be bad if we get value for money but waste should not be rewarded).

It should not be all that difficult for those who specialise in that sort of thing to come up with meaningful measures, what would be difficult is getting pollies to ever vote to have their pay tied to performance.

R0bert

Here's a novel idea, People that embezzle money should not be allowed to remain as MPs.

http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2012/05/22/1226363/858475-120523-nicholson-cartoon.jpg

Labor trying to set up an ethics committee for parliamentarians while Thomson remains is like having the mafia control the police.