Fed: Shareholders must rein in corporate excess: Abbott

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Fed: Shareholders must rein in corporate excess: Abbott

CANBERRA, Feb 13 AAP - It was up to shareholders and not governments to ensure massivegolden handshakes, like a $33 million payout to a bank executive, were stopped, federalWorkplace Relations Minister Tony Abbott said today.

Shareholders had been too passive on the issue, Mr Abbott said.

The Commonwealth Bank revealed yesterday it paid $32.75 million to a senior executive,long-time chief executive of its Colonial First State Funds Management business, ChrisCuffe, who resigned earlier this year.

Mr Abbott, who today introduced a bill seeking tougher restrictions on award wage risesand aimed at protecting low-paid jobs, said he could understand millions of Australiansfeeling let down and ripped off by this act.

"It's high time that the shareholders of Australia exercised much greater scrutinyover their executives," he told reporters.

"I don't think this sends a good signal.

"Modern capitalism gets a bad name when these sorts of decisions seem to be happening regularly."

Mr Abbott said he did not, generally speaking, believe in heavy-handed government interference.

"We don't believe that the government should be regularly interfering in things whichare quite appropriately regulated by others.

"Shareholders have every capacity to control these things and they should control them.

"For too long, shareholders have been too passive in the face of high-handed executiveactions. This seems like one of these actions."

Under the new bill, the Australian Industrial Relations Commission would be forcedto assess whether low-paid workers would lose their jobs before allowing minimum awardwages to rise.

"This government is very keen to help people who aren't able to help themselves," Mr Abbott said.

"That's why we're very keen to try to do the right thing by low-paid workers.

"Under this government, basic award earnings have gone up by some six per cent in realterms whereas they fell by three per cent under the life of the previous government.

"But if we're talking about executives, we're talking about people who are more thancapable of looking after themselves, and as we've seen today, they're more than capableof helping themselves to money which really should belong to the company, really shouldbelong to the shareholders."

AAP dep/sb/pw/de

KEYWORD: CBA COLONIAL ABBOTT