Top SES 3 earners revealed, prompting questions from Greens senator Barbara Pocock about APS pay policy

Fourteen of the arrangements remain in place for officials at the highest level of seniority below agency heads. The list, released in response to a Senate estimates question on notice, includes bureaucrats such as chief medical officer Paul Kelly, Home Affairs associate secretary Stephanie Foster and Defence associate secretary Matt Yannopoulos.

Until July, it included former AUKUS adviser Kathryn Campbell, who resigned from the $892,630 per year role following the release of the robodebt royal commission report.

Agency heads decide on salaries for SES 3 officials, but cannot pay them above a notional amount of $488,600 without the approval of the Public Service Commissioner. The amount is set at 65 per cent of the lowest salary point for secretaries, and includes super and benefits.

Senator Pocock called for more "justification and transparency" around these decisions, given the policy was the same one used to "parachute" Ms Campbell into the lucrative adviser role.

"While I'm happy that the standard operating procedure for hiring senior public servants is through the usual recruitment process, I am concerned about the exceptions to this rule," the Greens spokesperson for the public service said.

"How can we know that we have the best person for the job and that they are worth the money being paid when there is no competitive process and appointments are not transparent?"

The Public Service Commission also revealed agency heads had approved the direct transfer of 16 SES band 3s, without a recruitment round, between June 2022 and May 2023.

"While it might be desirable to move senior public servants between departments from time to time, there is great danger in entrenching hiring practices that are open to abuse," Senator Pocock said.

"We need to see more justification and transparency around these decisions.

"When I questioned the government in estimates, both Senator Gallagher and the APS Commissioner Dr de Brouwer told me that correct processes were followed when Kathryn Campbell was given a golden parachute into her role at Defence.

"For me, appointing a senior public servant into a new Department in a million-dollar role that didn't previously exist, on the basis of a single letter to the Commissioner, and all within an eight-day timeframe, doesn't really stack up. It doesn't pass the pub test."

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Ms Campbell's nearly $900,000 package was tied to her former salary as secretary of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The list of officials provided by the commission does not include any other former secretaries.

The salaries of some of the bureaucrats have already been published in annual reports from the 2022 financial year. At the top end, Office of the Special Investigator director of investigations Ross Barnett was receiving total remuneration of $624,117, while Defence associate secretary Matt Yannopoulos was earning $491,724.

The Australian Public Service Commission did not comment when asked whether the number of officials earning above the threshold was fair and reasonable. The approvals were made in line with policy.

The pay approvals were made between January 2020 and June 2023, a period spanning the terms of both former Commissioner Peter Woolcott and current Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer.

Former Public Service commissioner Andrew Podger said the practice was "understandable" in some cases given pay disparities which exist across the service.

"It will take some time to achieve uniformity of APS pay and conditions, and disparities are greatest at SES levels.

"So the APSC's approval to allow some deputy secretaries to receive more than the notional pay level is understandable."

But Mr Podger called for the Public Service Commission and the Remuneration Tribunal, which decides secretary salaries, to review APS pay rates "drawing on appropriate market comparisons and evidence about attraction and retention" of skilled workers.

"The market comparisons for secretaries' remuneration by the [Remuneration] Tribunal a decade ago were, in my view, inappropriate and led to excessive pay increases.

"It may be that those have encouraged some agencies to overpay deputies. And there are way too many deputies."

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