Federal Parliamentary staffers have been offered the highest pay rise allowed by law including new travel allowances of up to 40-thousand dollars a year. The pay offer is expected to be strongly supported by most staff, but some liberal staffers say it's too much in the context of cost-of-living pressures.
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00:00They're being offered a slightly above core inflation, 11.2% over three years, and quite
00:11a large raft of additional allowances and payments, everything from additional travel
00:18allowance to money for staff that speak foreign languages, for instance.
00:23There are also additional cultural leave entitlements, as well as a one-off payment
00:32upon acceptance of this offer, which is from the government to roughly 2,000 staff.
00:40That payment, we understand, will be around about $1,000 and comes on top of all the other
00:46conditions and benefits.
00:48Now the government's view on this is, and that's a view obviously echoed by many of
00:53the staff that work for these ministers, senators and MPs, and that's who we're talking
00:59about here.
01:00It's senior ministerial staff and electoral staff and everyone in between who work for
01:05ministers.
01:06Their argument is this reflects the government's broader industrial relations agenda and need
01:12to support things like parental leave.
01:15It has not gone down well with a number of the coalition staffers who've been telling
01:20us this is a really bad look when the rest of the community is doing it very tough with
01:25cost of living pressures.
01:27They also say a lot of these things used to routinely come up in these enterprise agreements
01:32when negotiations were underway with the former government and they got knocked back.
01:37One of them said they came for everything but the kitchen sink and they left with everything
01:41including the kitchen sink.