Controversial: the pay rise issued by Barry O'Farrell (right) to acting premier Andrew Stoner. Photo: Jon Reid
It's a fairly safe bet Andrew Stoner hasn't been spending much time contemplating ways to spend his new pay rise.
As revealed recently, the Deputy Premier will be given an extra $1000 a week when he is acting in the Premier's job. It doesn't exactly represent a fortune, given that last year Stoner spent only 4½ weeks in the job.
Yet the news was met with widespread outrage, condemned as inexplicably greedy and prompted demands for the decision to be reversed.
The reason, of course, was that it contradicted everything the O'Farrell government has been telling us since it was elected almost two years ago about the dire state of NSW finances.
The Premier, Barry O'Farrell, the Treasurer, Mike Baird and the Finance Minister, Greg Pearce, have all drilled the need to ''live within our means'' in NSW, to justify the 2.5 per cent cap they imposed on public sector wage rises and across-the-board budget cuts.
With a stroke of his pen to approve Stoner's new pay arrangements, O'Farrell managed to undermine the message he and his colleagues had been carefully constructing for months.
The ensuring furore has almost guaranteed that next time O'Farrell announces a trade mission, the pay rise question will be bowled up to Stoner at his first media conference.
As Deputy Premier, Stoner already earns a tidy annual salary of $290,357. The fallout is a high price to pay for such a modest gain. So why did O'Farrell agree to it?
The official defence is that if Stoner is doing the Premier's job, he deserves to be paid accordingly. According to the Public Service Commission, the convention is in place for senior public service jobs in NSW and all those covered by an award.
And besides, it was argued, a similar situation is in place at the federal level where the deputy prime minister is paid the prime minister's salary when ''acting up''.
This is true, but surely the proper test is not what's done federally, but in other states. On this score, O'Farrell's argument bites the dust very quickly, for no other Australian state has the same arrangement.
Perhaps this explains why the rest of the government has not exactly been lining up to endorse the increase.
During the debate in the upper house about whether or not to rescind the regulation that created it, only Duncan Gay - Stoner's National Party colleague and leader of the house in the Legislative Council - was brave enough to step up. Tellingly, not a single other Coalition MP followed suit.
So here's a suggestion for Stoner and O'Farrell: take a leaf out of Clover Moore's book.
Before O'Farrell's ''get Clover'' legislation forced her to choose between being the state MP for Sydney and the city's lord mayor, the veteran independent voluntarily placed her lord mayoral salary into a trust to be distributed to charities. The decision was designed to nullify attacks questioning her desire to simultaneously hold down her job at State Parliament and run the Town Hall.
The tactic worked by shooting down any suggestion she was doing the job for the money. Moore might have done herself out of a decent salary, but she probably gained a lot more respect.
If Stoner acted to do the same - and quickly - it would achieve three things: acknowledge the community's disgust; allow him to regain some dignity in the matter; and deliver a positive outcome from an episode that will otherwise be a petty embarrassment for the O'Farrell government.
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