Meet Glyn Davis, the public servant you’ve never heard of who earns more than $1million – 66 per cent more than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is paid

The Australian Civil Service has its first million-dollar man after Anthony Albanese’s Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary Glyn Davis received a huge pay rise.

Mr. Davis, who recently wrote a book about having a moral responsibility to the less fortunate, scored a $34,202 raise, bringing his salary to $1,011,402 — a figure 66 percent higher than the new pre-tax salary of Anthony Albanese from $607,500.

It is not just Mr. Davis, 64, who earns more than Mr. Albanese. At least six other officials are also joining the exclusive million-dollar-a-year club.

Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy will get a pay increase from $33,347 to $986,117, while the secretaries of departments such as Attorney General, Defense, Education, Treasury and Interior will get a pay increase from $32,492 to $960,832.

Before working for Mr Albanese, Mr Davis was CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, Australia’s largest charitable foundation, and is a former chairman of Opera Australia.

In Mr Davis’s 2021 book, On Life’s Lottery, he wrote: ‘We like to think of Australia as the land of the ‘fair go’, a land of choice and equal opportunity.

‘But behind the facade of meritocracy lies an uncomfortable truth: a large part of your life is already determined by the lottery of where you are born and who you are born to.

‘Entrenched intergenerational poverty, like the wealth of the wealthy, can be passed on from parent to child.’

After attending high school at Catholic Marist Brothers College in the southern Sydney suburb of Kogarah, Mr Davis studied political science at UNSW and completed his PhD at the Australian National University, where his thesis was on the political independence of the ABC .

He was vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne and professor of political science for almost fourteen years.

Mr Davis, who is married to Victoria Governor Margaret Gardner, has also previously worked for other Labor governments at both federal and state level.

He served as Public Sector Equities Commissioner under Prime Ministers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating from 1990 to 1993, and as Director General of the Office of the Cabinet under Queensland Premier Wayne Goss from 1995 to 1996.

Mr Davis later served as director general of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet under Peter Beattie from 1998 to 2002.

The Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Secretary Glyn Davis (pictured) – the highest paid civil servant – will receive an additional $34,202, taking him to $1,011,402 a year

The salaries of secretaries of federal departments, which are determined by the Remuneration Tribunal, range from about $800,000 to just over $1,000,000.

By comparison, the average pay for ASX 200 CEOs rose 15 per cent to $1.14 million in the 2022-2023 financial year, and that was before the often highly lucrative bonuses were added.

To get the most capable people running federal government departments, some of which have thousands of employees, the public service must offer salaries that are at least close to what candidates in the private sector could earn.

Kirstin Ferguson, former vice-chairman of the ABC, said senior civil servants had “heavy responsibilities”.

“We must do everything we can to attract, hire and retain the best possible leaders and focus on the value they provide,” she wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald.

“To achieve that, we must pay our civil servants and CEOs commensurate with the heavy responsibilities they bear.”

But while the CEO of a commercial enterprise can be judged by a company’s sales figures or share price, there is no comparable investor feedback for those running government departments.

It’s only when a department becomes embroiled in a scandal that most people even find out who the head is, such as when Kathryn Campbell resigned from her $900,000-a-year job following the fallout from the robodebt royal commission.

Ms Campbell, who as secretary of the Department of Human Services oversaw the rollout of the illegal income averaging scheme, was sacked from her advisory role at the defense just three days after Commissioner Catherine Holmes’ report on the matter was submitted.

In its statement on the latest pay increases, the Remuneration Tribunal said the increases it has “awarded to roles in its jurisdiction over the past decade have been modest”.

Anthony Albanese’s (pictured) new pre-tax salary is $607,500, far less than the $1 million his department head earns

‘Including the current decision, the cumulative total of pay increases awarded by the tribunal since 2015 is 18.25 percent.

‘In contrast, wage increases overall in the public and private sectors have been equated to 24.4 percent.’

The tribunal did not increase salaries of politicians and civil servants during the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, which followed four consecutive years of 2 percent increases.

The new pay increase was intended to enable “competitive and fair” salaries that are “appropriate to the responsibilities and experience” required in public office, and to attract “people of calibre”, the tribunal said.