Hi Folks,
The Tax office has plucked its new customer service chief from the wreckage of one Australia's highest profile
corporate train crashes of recent years - the Masters Home Improvement hardware chain.
Former Masters Director Melinda Smith, who departed Masters at the end of December, was chief operating officer
of the doomed hardware chain from 2009 to 2012 and was promoted to director in July 2013.
She is to be paid $470,000 a year or $9,000 a week and I imagine 13% superannuation.
That wage equates to more a fortnight than the average pensioner get to live on for a whole year. Is that really
morally fair and equitable?. We are talking about taxpayer funds here.
Now the big question arises.
If this woman is to be paid this incredible salary the what are the wages paid to those above her in the
hierarchy. The commissioners and assistant commissioners and the departmental heads?
If running a business that ploughed itself into the ground is the criteria for $470k a year then please let
me and my peers on the gravy train.
I believe in a fair days pay for a fair days work by $9,000 a week, really?

Someone who could make Masters profitable would be worth that much.

She clearly wasn't!

it seems being a failure in the real world will make you a success in the public service. Look at all the 'successful'public servants and academics who contributed to the wind farm debacle in SA.

runner, what precisely do you mean by "the wind farm debacle in SA"?

Of course not. In fact, this sheila should be paying back that and more for her incompetence. Employing the dope defies sense.

Surely little Princess Masters would be on a bloated obscene public service pension not superannuation? Either way the tax man concentrates on aged, invalid and unemployed not the big end of town?
Glencore claimed 9 per cent interest payable to their Swiss parent Co. but overnight Keating decided pensioners are "deemed" to earn 3 per cent interest but Glencore decide what they pay. They should be thrown out in the street with no pensions for allowing this to happen, the dogs!
Glencore could have been made to pay the right amount of tax but those dogs in the ATO would not work in an iron lung.

I wonder what secrets she knows about the people who made the appointment

I speculate if readers had any royal blood running in their vanes belonging to any European country royalty, royalty blood relatives could easily obtain a high salary income under some idea that higher education actually made a difference how well companies and/or government ran.

Also… companies pay high wages so upper management wouldn’t steal company assets.

Another idea is that outrageous salaries make good distracting media stories, people who need to be angry at something, like to read.

Media transparency regular story embarrassments, adds one more story few people can doubt feeling good about being angry at, that such stories are invented for the sake of easy to understand judgements.

Why is it so many pick on ceo's yet ignore the likes of sports stars earning tens of millions per year, or movie stars earning up to $60 million for ONE MOVIE.

I do however find it hard to endorse someone who has resided over such a train wreck.

rehctub,
At least sports stars and movie stars do earn their paychecks as per their contracts.
They well may not deserve the gross totals but unlike the CEOs its not down to the 'boys club' or the bedroom.
I am still trying to come to terms with a weekly paycheck of $9,000

Well, I think you'll find that people in the "upper crust" (whether deserved or not) enjoy and go to great lengths to maintain this financial distortion/inequity as it allows them to limit and control who gets to "play the game."

Another example would be the 2 tiered medical system. Simply, people with money do not wish to be triaged and have to wait in line based on medical need, but rather they want to waive a fist full of dollars under some money grubbers nose in order that they receive preferential treatment.

I could go on .. but the problem rests on a population who continues to vote for 2 parties who far from availing themselves of ample opportunities to correct these inequities, they do rather exist to preserve the status quo.

So herein, "we" are as a house divided against itself.

Biological heating in the ocean: for comment.

Siliggy where are you?

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0967064507002044
and:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924796304000211

I heard a brilliant statement about whats wrong with democracy and capitalism
in the world today whilst watching a utube video on the subject.

It was that:-

Power has shifted from the political to the economic where there is no democracy.