Documents published by a parliamentary committee show the chief executive of Australia Post, Ahmed Fahour, earned a whopping $4.4m salary plus a $1.2m bonus in the last financial year.
So how does Fahour’s total pay compare with other chief executives and average Australian workers?
The most comprehensive survey of Australian remuneration I could find was the AFR’s salary survey in 2015, which ranks the 300 highest-paid CEOs of ASX-listed companies.
Fahour’s total pay of $5.6m in the financial year ending June 2016 would put him 43rd on that list, keeping in mind there is a year difference between the two. He’s a fair way behind the highest-paid boss, Ken MacKenzie of Amcor, who took home $20.92m although that figure was inflated by the payout of long-term incentives. No 2 on the list was Macquarie Bank’s Nicholas Moore, who earned $16.5m.
Other countries such as the US and the UK require companies to disclose the pay of CEOs as a ratio of the average or median pay of all company employees. While we don’t have the average pay for an Australia Post worker, we can compare Fahour’s pay to average earnings figures by industry from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Compared with the average Australian salary by industry, Fahour’s pay varies between 43 times as much as employees in the mining industry, to 163 times as much as employees in the accommodation and food services sector:
The ratio for Fahour’s own industry – transport, postal and warehousing – is 73.5 times the average earnings.
Other articles have estimated Fahour’s pay is 119 times as much as a postal worker on a salary of $47,000.
Another survey of CEO pay by the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors has tracked the average fixed CEO pay (this being their basic salary, so payment without equity, profit share and other remuneration) for ASX100 companies over time.
Based on these figures, there has been a flattening and then decline in CEO pay since the global financial crisis, which means the ratio of CEO pay to average salary has likewise declined:
