Since being discarded by voters and relegated to the backbench by new Coalition leader Peter Dutton, Scott Morrison has suffered a catastrophic financial setback.
Insiders predict that he will soon leave politics for a high-paying career in large business, or maybe become a preacher on the lucrative Christian speech circuit in the United States.
Mr Morrison’s annual PM remuneration of $549,250 was lowered substantially overnight, from $45,750 per month to $26,692 per month after tax.
Instead, he’ll have to make do with a conventional MP’s wage of $2,717 per week after taxes on his new $211,250 annual compensation.
That still works out to $107 per hour, compared to the federal minimum wage of $20.33, but his girls’ private school tuition will eat up a fifth of that.
He also lost access to the all-expenses-paid lifestyle that comes with being Prime Minister, as well as official residences and personnel at Sydney’s Kirribilli House and Canberra’s The Lodge.
As Prime Minister, he could spend up to $2 million per year on expenses, including staff costs, amassing a total of about $600,000 between April and June 2021.
Bridget Archer, a backbench Liberal MP, claimed over $35,000 per month in total for office, travel, and staff expenses during the same time period.
The Australian Prime Minister earns one of the highest salaries in the world, ranking seventh among world leaders and around ten times the country’s median earnings.
Mr Morrison confessed earlier this year that he had no idea how much milk or fast antigen testing cost, but he’s about to get a crash course in living costs.
He’ll now have to deal with the hard realities of increasing inflation and rising interest rates as a result of his spectacular shift of fortunes.
Despite the large salary he has received since succeeding Malcolm Turnbull as Prime Minister in the 2018 Liberal leadership coup, the ex-PM still has a mortgage.
Mr Morrison said he is still paying off their Port Hacking family property in Sydney’s south in his most recent entry in the register of MPs’ interests.
With a loan from the Commonwealth Bank, he and his wife Jenny purchased the three-bedroom property in 2009 for $920,000, which is now valued at almost $ 3 million.
School tuition for Abbey, 14, and Lily, 12, will take up a significant portion of his backbench pay.
Their prestigious Baptist school charges over $36,000 each year for both of them (although he does get a 10% discount for having two children enrolled), which is roughly a fifth of his annual take-home salary.
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