Page 3173 - Week 10 - Tuesday, 17 October 2006
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executive officers, given the critical role that the judicial arm of government plays in maintaining social harmony and respect for the law. I would like to think that this bill represents, to some degree, a countervailing mark of respect for the calibre and importance of the ACT Supreme Court and Federal Court judges. Indeed, it is very difficult to imagine a more responsible and difficult job than that of an appeals court judge.
Whilst it is a sad fact of life that the ACT government has to compete directly with the commonwealth government to attract and retain highly competent public servants, it is also a fact that we have to offer judges a salary package that is benchmarked to some degree against what they could earn at the bar or in private practice. The outrageous fees commanded by top barristers and equity partners of major law firms exert a constant inflationary pressure on judicial salaries. Writing in the Age in 2004, Lucinda Schmidt said:
For the most profitable law firms, less than $700,000 is seen as unacceptable for a full equity partner. For a handful of the top firms, a goal of $1-1.5 million is felt to be realistic. And for those firms that are struggling, or funding a big expansion, paying a mere $400,000 can be a disaster.
If $400,000 is thought of as disastrous in terms of being insufficient to attract real talent, imagine how Supreme Court judges earning less than that, far less, must feel when they compare their earning capacity with that of their peers.
We have seen a seemingly endless escalation of executive salaries at the expense of the proportion of surplus labour value that workers share. That has occurred under the Howard government but also under the Keating and Hawke governments. We can expect that to be exacerbated by the AWA-led attack on collective bargaining. This bill, after all, embodies technical and, I believe, uncontroversial amendments. Consequently, I will be supporting it.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for Planning) (5.11), in reply: I thank members for their support of this legislation. As members have indicated, this bill will put beyond doubt any future possibility that ACT judges might be subject to double taxation or discrimination between the remuneration and entitlements of an ACT judge and an identical officeholder in the commonwealth judiciary. Both ACT and commonwealth legislation give ACT judges a statutory entitlement to the same remuneration entitlements and allowances, including pension entitlements, as judges of the Federal Court.
The government is moving these amendments as a consequence of the commonwealth’s superannuation surcharge scheme for judges being placed in two pieces of commonwealth legislation. This has raised the theoretical possibility that ACT judges could be subject to double taxation because of problems arising from the legislation. There is also some uncertainty about the application of the surcharge tax to the President of the ACT Court of Appeal, who should not be subject to a superannuation surcharge because he was appointed before the surcharge tax was introduced in December 1997.
Therefore, these amendments to the Supreme Court Act 1933 will remove uncertainty in relation to an ACT judge’s entitlements under the Judicial Pensions Act 1968 and
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