The money could be used to repair the damage that has been caused to our infrastructure over the years that these people have been living on the hog at the expense of the rest of us. We could get a really good public hospital system going, good public schools, a justice system that is just (wouldn’t that be a novelty!)
well resourced public transport, all the things that make a society work for all of us, not just the privileged few.

Lets watch the piggies scream as their trough gets taken from them.

Shareholders determining the pay of executives is a futile and unweildly system, with no logical means of mediation between the two parties should they disagree. A simple and effective solution could be to cap executive renumeration to a multiple of the average employee wage in their company.

Tethering the leaders to their workers will create incentives to keep the organisation lean, to retain the most productive employees, and to pay them well.

What a good idea, and they could be obliged to go to Centrelink, explain why they are having trouble living on $500,000 a year and then be treated with the same suspicion that they might be thieves that the unemployed have come to expect from that wonderful institution.

That of itself is an object lesson in the real limitation of political control as a a regulatory mechanism. Nothing I’ve read so far (including that self-serving bombast from the Prime Minister in February’s “Monthly”) provides any ground for confidence that governments should have a direct hand in setting executive remuneration.

The way to foreclose on executive greed is through the tax system. You’d have to make that bottom-of-the-harbour safe too. No Houdini excape clauses permitted. But if we agree as a community that obscene levels of private sector remuneration should be limited, then we can also agree that the mechanism to give effect to this policy is already in place.

Why not tax earnings above a set level (we could call it the Obscenity Threshold) at 99.99999 cents in the dollar? If we wanted to be really radical, we could declare performance bonuses to be unearned income (they mostly are, as the record now clearly shows) and mandate that they be credited to approved and untouchable superannuation accounts.

Hawk and Keating during their previous Labor government interference decided these funds were a source of revenue when they introduced a tax on the interest generated by these locked up super funds.
Then followed the banks etc. who then charged an administration fee to the owner of the fund ( you and I ) to extract the government tax.
What both Hawk and Keating, with their short sighted labor government failed to do was set a reasonable fund limit to superannuation, before it became eligible for the government rip off.
This limit could then have been locked away and guaranteed by the Australian government, thus protecting the common people and their retirement finds from this sort of global melt down.
Who knows? when I eventually retire ( maybe some time in my seventies, should I live that long) someone may step into my job.

I may retire one day from work, but not from voting.

Higher taxes punish the innocent as well as the guilty. If I discover a pollution free energy maker tomorrow and reap the rewards why should I be punished simply because a bunch of crooks in the financial sector created a Ponzi? We have fraud laws for that - they just need to be enforced. We don’t need more regulation when the regulators don’t enforce what we already have..

Not everyone earning a lot of money is a crook. I send this email from Hong Kong with its glorious 15% flat rate of tax.

I was born, raised and educated in Australia (and paid a shedload of tax there too) but am so glad not to live there with asinine “debates” like this one going on.

Some people are capable of earning a lot of money. Some are not. Get over it.

The answer you seek lies in two directions. One is pursuing people who commit fraud, not punishing those that can earn a lot of money.

The second: my income is linked to my performance. The government needs to think about how to allow shareholders to require the same of the executives who work for them as the owners of the business.

I do and we have just had a baby. My wife earns under $50k

“We” get - no family tax benefit (A or B), no baby bonus, no stimulus (1 or 2), no paid maternity leave, only an internationally uncompetitive tax rate. Oh yes, I also pay child support but this is treated as if it were paid from pre-tax rather than post tax dollars (double it please).

My wife is especially miffed that after 22 years of paying tax, she is not only told by the people’s republic she is financially dependant on me (roll over Greer) she will probably return to work just in time to pay tax for everyone else to get maternity leave.

Meantime my ex wife who despite being perfectly able bodied, has chosen not to work for lifestyle reasons, is rolling in all of the above benefits. Her and my son is 17.

Meantime Rudd wants to whack up Medicare to pay for everyone’s teeth (the tooth tax) and also is thinking about means testing pensions so that those that save are penalised and those that can’t be bothered benefit.

Do we really want a society stripped bare of any incentive? If we do, let me know and I’ll stop travelling 4-5 days a week in order to earn that extra cent and give up. Any time you like, Kevin. Any time you like.

Any why isn’t Medicare, pensions and the tooth tax funded by an increment to GST so everyone pays, not just those that can be bothered getting out of bed each morning? After all, we all have teeth or do we want only those with a job to have them? Or is the objective to punish those that earn an income and destroy all incentive?

Then there are modest lifestyles and greedy scrooges like McDuck with the sheer size of attached philanthropy clearly demarcating the two.