Oh the joys of politics

and the envy of those who are not going to get that very generous "pension".

The man who has been the Treasurer is retiring. He has been in politics for the past forty years. It is a long time, a very long time. I have a vague memory of him being elected to his Upper House seat...and there he has stayed.  He has had more than a few problems to deal with in his time. One of the biggest was the collapse of the state's bank- something which occurred while he was in opposition but he and his colleagues had to deal with after the election. There have been other issues too. The last two years have been hard with Covid19 issues hitting so many areas.

But now the knives are out because he is going to get a "very generous" pension. Any yes, it does sound good. It is more money than I will ever see. 

He gets his pension under a very old state government scheme. It was compulsory at the time. It is the same scheme the Senior Cat was required to pay into. It was devised by someone the Senior Cat and I both knew for many years. At the time it seemed fair and reasonable. State based public servants had to pay a percentage of their salary into the scheme. The government matched this and, over the years, it was topped up to cover inflation. You paid tax on it then - and you pay tax on it now. 

This is the scheme that almost covers the cost of the care the Senior Cat is receiving. We still need to dip into his savings to cover everything. Strictly speaking he should not be paying more than 85% of his income on his care but there are ways around that - and they are used almost everywhere.  He gets none of the "perks" of the pension. He pays tax on all this instead. All this stops on the day of his death. If my mother was still alive she would get two thirds of his payment - and still be required to pay tax on it.

There are still many others being paid under the old scheme. It was clearly unsustainable and it was dropped some time ago. For some, like our former Treasurer, it seems generous. Many would say what the Senior Cat gets is also generous. In doing so they forget that some of these people have worked extraordinarily hard in roles that are not simple 9-5 roles. The Senior Cat was sometimes in the school office at 7am. He would leave at around 6pm and then go back for an 8pm meeting on more than one night a week. He was also expected to be a social worker, a marriage guidance counsellor, a financial adviser, a lay preacher and much more. If there was school sport being played on a Saturday he was expected to be there - and available to the parents.  Any good school principal would have been doing the same sort of thing. 

Those of them who did country service were also expected to live in sub-standard housing supplied by the government - for which they paid rent. They did not have the opportunity to buy their own homes until they returned to the city. They used their own cars for work purposes - and received no allowance for doing this even when they had to travel hundreds of kilometres.

Yes, that scheme has changed now but that was the scheme at the time. It is not quite as generous as it appears to be at first glance. I also knew some senior members of the education service who died soon after retirement. If they were married then yes their partners were paid two thirds but payment to those who were not married or widowed ceased immediately and the funds returned to the government coffers. If the retiring Treasurer died tomorrow his widow would get that two thirds...and like many a politician's partner I suspect she would have earned it.

If we want better politicians we need to pay them more than peanuts.