Who do you think gets paid more, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US or his Australian counterpart, the Chief of the Defence Force?
Before we get to the cash, let’s compare the jobs. The top gun in the US leads strategic planning and joint force operations and is principal military adviser to the President, Defence Secretary and National Security Council. The US has about 1.3 million active-duty personnel and 811,000 reserves, operates more than 750 bases in more than 80 countries and is backed by a $US1.4 trillion budget.
Australia’s most senior officer oversees military planning and operations and advises the Prime Minister, Defence Minister and the national security committee. The force he commands has about 58,000 active personnel and 21,000 reserves, and operates primarily in the Indo-Pacific on a budget of $58bn.
The US has 13,043 aircraft to our 327. It has 440 ships, including 11 aircraft carriers, and 70 submarines. We have 44 ships, zero aircraft carriers and six ageing submarines.
But rejoice! There is one metric where Team Australia thumps the Yanks and the rest of the world. In our dollars the
American defence boss gets $382,000 a year and, according to Defence’s latest annual report, Australia’s chief got $1,135,524 in 2023-24.Try to get your head around that. Try to mount a coherent argument as to why Australia should boast the highest paid military man in the world, one who gets to within a rounding error of earning three times the pay of his US counterpart.
Now let’s run the ruler over our federal public service chiefs.
Australia’s top mandarin, the secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet, was paid $1,086,846 in 2024. Here it’s hard to draw a straight comparison with the US because the structure of government is different, but let’s use the White House chief of staff as a measure.
That job involves handling the daily operations of the West Wing and overseeing the executive office of the President, which involves working with cabinet secretaries to run the government. And recall the President is Trump, which adds a degree of difficulty to the job that’s not covered by management textbooks written in this dimension. The pay for this impossible task is $294,813.
A rung down from the head of PM&C are the secretaries of Treasury, Defence, Health and Aged Care. They each take home $986,120 a year. The lowest paid of the 16 departmental heads gets a miserly $809,130. That is still more than $200,000 more than the Prime Minister ($607,471).
Search the globe and it turns out Australia has the highest paid senior bureaucrats in the world. The only serious contender for that title is Singapore.
Why on earth should this be the case?
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