Can you guess who the best paid Federal Government employee is? It is not the prime minister or a senior bureaucrat, but Australia Post chief executive Ahmed Fahour at a whopping $4.6m.
Fahour is in fact paid almost 10 times the $507,000 Tony Abbott pockets each year, despite the company planning to sack or redeploy 1900 workers and make its first ever full-year loss.
The massive salary could have been even higher, but Fahour had his $2.85m bonus paid to the Islamic Museum of Australia, an institution founded by his brother.
In a concession to the hundreds of workers losing their jobs, he will forgo this year’s $2m bonus entirely, paying about 0.4 per cent of AusPost’s $500m mail losses.
This still does not sit well with one anonymous worker who on Facebook wrote: “It's like telling the homeless that you're empathising with them by turning down your electric blanket”.
[Related: More Australia Post news]
In an expansive profile in the Sydney Morning Herald’s Good Weekend magazine, Fahour addresses his substantial salary, management style, and the challenge ahead for the monopoly mail carrier.
The whole piece is well worth reading, telling the tale of his rise through the corporate ranks and years as head of NAB, and contains numerous anecdotes and self-aggrandising quotes to help understand the man.
Only two years ago Fahour paid a reported $20m for Invergowrie, a historic bluestone house in Hawthorn. In the garage is a Maserati he rarely drives.
He believes not only is he suitably compensated, Australia is getting him at a bargain rate, being that it is far less than the $34m he made in four years at NAB, plus a $13.5m signing bonus.
The same goes for 20 Post executives paid more than $500,000, four of them earning more than $1.2m, he says in the profile.
“The team and I knew that we could stay in the commercial world and earn a lot more money somewhere else if we wanted to,” he says.
“But we chose to be here because we're doing something we think is very important.”
The high spending is not confined to salaries. In 2012 Fahour took 78 people to the London Olympics, at a cost of $2.5m including airfares, hotel rooms, Olympics tickets and meals.
While Fahour at a Senate committee hearing insisted the guests were important Post customers, outgoing PIAA chief executive Bill Healey was scathing.
“That was absolutely scandalous,” he told the magazine. “There is no justification for Australia Post to be engaged in that level of corporate hospitality.”
Healey, who has long been a critic of how Fahour runs Post’s mail operations, is also quoted attacking the company’s persistent raising of mail prices and plans to cut services and extend delivery times.
"It's like the head of McDonald's criticising beef burgers," he says. To whether offering a worse service at a higher price will improve its bottom line: “It becomes this vicious spiral.”
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