Credit card bill hurt? Rate hikes hitting the mortgage payments? Tired of endless waits on hold or in your local branch?
Fret not. It’s all for a cause. Not yours, of course. Our big banks. Why, they’re so grown up, it’s like bonus season on Wall Street. Makes you proud to be an Aussie.
Sure, wage increases for bank workers hover around 1-2 per cent. Yes, 5000 jobs have been off-shored. True, dividends are down 20 per cent. But spare a thought for Cameron Clyne, CEO of NAB. He only made $14,246 a day last year. A pygmy among the seven or eight figure giants - if you don’t include smaller banks like ME.
Yes, it’s annual report season at the banks. That time to forget about personal data being shipped abroad to follow Australian jobs. Or taxpayers underwriting banks’ risk. Or a sales-and-bonus culture tanking the world’s economy.
Take Commonwealth’s Ralph Norris. His bank admitted its botch-up in getting people into Storm Financial. That wasn’t just bad. It was world-class bad. Well worth $767,500 a month.
Or Gail Kelly, over at Westpac, who earned $10.62 million.
Her executive team clocked raises of 36% in fixed pay. They offered employees 2%. That is, to those workers judged lucky come appraisal time.
Back in the day, we’d have to rent an American movie to see that kind of greed. Now we don’t even have to leave home.
And then there’s Mike Smith of ANZ.
True, he did offer workers a 3.5% raise. That’s almost as much as inflation. Well, those workers whose jobs weren’t sent off-shore.
And he did take a $2.02 million pay cut last year.
But still raked in $10.94 million. $911,677 a month. $210,384 a week. $29,972 a day. $1,249 an hour.
We know you want to know. So we figured it out for you.
Every minute of the last year—at work, at dinner, asleep, on the beach, wherever—Mike Smith earned $20.81.
It makes you all sentimental, really. Our banks, and their CEO salaries, growing up right before our eyes. All courtesy of us.
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