Unfortunately if you want good management you have to pay them and given you're competing with what the rest of the world pay you have to make sure you're competitive.I agree with David and Sin. We must get the balance right and give those with a work ethic an incentive to get ahead. A simple incentive would be for industries that are finding is hard to get employees that the tax free thresholds get increased. And that if you work for example picking fruit as a weekend job or while you are holidays from your main job you can claim the tax free threshold again. This rewards workers that are having a real go.
There should also be large tax incentives to those that employ large numbers of Australian’s.
Another thing I would like to see is any employee CEO, CFO or otherwise if they get paid more than 10 times what they pay their lowest full time workers they pay tax at 50% marginal tax rate. No one should be worth more than 10 times another employee. I have seen so many times in my career when revenue is flat managers on all levels have huge pressure to cut costs so that dividends can maintained to shareholders. This to go only advanced the top few in an organisation who have share options.
Lets reward the work ethic.
That said there's some Australian companies that are really pulling the p**s in terms of what they are paying senior management. The previous CEO at Australia Post is a good example of someone who wasn't worth a tenth of what he was being paid. Now his successor, who is trying to clean up the mess, is on a whole lot less money.