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Australia's top public servants have been given annual payrises of up to $17,000-a-year, as most of the rank-and-file of the federal bureaucracy still wait for their first general wage increase in four years. At the top of the pile, Martin Parkinson, boss of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet will be taking home a pay packet worth $878,000 a year after July 1. Treasury Secretary John Fraser's remuneration package will rise to $856,000 while further down the food chain, Foreign Affairs boss Frances Adamson and the yet-to-appointed new Defence Secretary will now each be paid $830,000. The Remuneration Tribunal which sets the wages for politicians, bureaucrats, judges and other Commonwealth officials, published its latest determination on Thursday evening, with good news for MPs ministers and Canberra mandarins. A secretary running a mid-tier department like Human Services, Industry or Attorney-General's would have been earning a salary package of about about $681,000 in 2013. After July, that figure will be more like $746,000, an increase of about 9 per cent, after the series of general and "catch-up" increases. But the Remuneration Tribunal did not take the "catch-ups", which were recommended by a review of departmental secretaries' salaries under the Labor government in 2010, into consideration in its latest decision. Public Service Commissioner John Lloyd, enforcer of the the Coalition's hardline industrial policy that has seen wages frozen for most public servants since 2013, will be $13,000-a-year better-off, his annual pay packet increased to nearly $693,000. Mr Lloyd's political boss, Michaelia Cash, who accused public servants of not living in the "real world", and her Parliamentary colleagues are also getting a pay rise on July 1, taking a typical minister's salary to just over $350,000. In its ruling on the pay rise, the tribunal noted that it had received a "notable increase in submissions" asking for pay raises "based at least in part on private sector remuneration" indicating that at least some public servants felt they weren't being paid enough. "A large number of Commonwealth agencies has negotiated increases of up to 2 per cent each year for their employees since the Bargaining Policy has been in place," the tribunal wrote. "Several agencies have agreements in place that are approaching a total of 6 per cent in wage adjustments over the period since 2013." But nearly 100,000 public servants, just under two-thirds of the APS workforce, have had nothing since 2013, and under the ban on back pay the best they can hope for now is 1 per cent per year between 2014 and 2020. That includes 21,000 public servants at Defence and Agriculture who recently voted to accept new enterprise bargaining agreements but have still not been paid their wage increases. But the tribunal decided in the end that the top public servants were not in it for the money. "Rather in the true sense of the phrase 'public service', office holders serve for the public good," it stated in its decision. "This means that in setting remuneration the tribunal has traditionally set rates below those of the private sector."

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