The Government has some power to influence executive pay levels. But it can't do so alone. It needs help from company boards. Hitherto boards have been in the thrall of chief executives, seduced by the cult of the big chief, happy to be duchessed and co-opted.  

They have cravenly acquiesced to stupendous remuneration packages. Now, with the world awash with unemployed chief executives desperate for a gig in the sun, boards have the chance to show independence. To the inflated salary packages of old, they should just say no. 

Australia has no obvious hate-figure, no human symbol to define the public mood of distaste about corporate greed. In the US anger has furled around Richard Fuld, the chief executive of Lehman Brothers, paid more than $60 million last year months before his company collapsed. No one in Australia has thrown himself a $4.5 million party, as did Stephen Schwarzman, the chairman of the private equity firm Blackstone Group. The February event came to epitomise excess. 

Even so Australian executive salaries have skyrocketed beyond the realms of decency, fairness or necessity. Earnings growth for the top chief executives - and their underlings - has far outstripped that enjoyed by ordinary workers. And for no good reason. There is no empirical evidence to show a company's performance is enhanced when its chief executive earns 100 times the average wage of its employees, rather than say, 50 times. In fact, if anything, such evidence that exists suggests the opposite. 

Yet this is what has occurred. The chief executives of Australia's top 50 companies enjoyed an annual real increase in remuneration (cash and shares) of 12.4 per cent between 1990 and 2005. For ordinary workers, the real annual wage increase was just 1.4 per cent. By the end of the period the bosses were earning 100 times more than average workers, shows research by Alessandra Capezio, now at the Australian National University, and her PhD supervisor, the associate professor John Shields, of the University of Sydney. 

The Keepers Of Capitalism Marx Never Saw Coming