The Minister for Finance and Employee Relations Damien Tudehope has admitted that he was aware that executives at iCare were about to get a pay rise, but sensationally says it’s not a pay rise, but simply a ‘recalibration of a wage package’.

This is the same minister responsible for the wages negotiations of nurses, teachers,  paramedics, train drivers, and other front line workers in New South Wales who are forced to endure a wages cap which is effectively delivering a real wage cut.

This is the same Minister who has ignored to pleas of nurses and teachers marching on Macquarie street for better wages, yet when it comes to executives, waves through massive payrises.

In the Legislative Council Question Time today, Mr Tudehope said:

TUDEHOPE: The iCare chair came and saw me and advised me that he was making that decision. I knew, of course I knew, I meet with the Chair of the iCare on a reasonably regular basis, he told me.

TUDEHOPE: And secondly, those opposite continue to characterise this as a pay rise. Not even the chair of iCare characterises this as a pay rise, but as a recalibration, recalibration of a wage package.

This comes as reports today revealed that Dominic Perrottet’s scandal plagued insurer iCare is giving more than a hundred of its top executives massive pay increases, including an additional $240,000 annually to its CEO.

Despite more than a hundred top executives at iCare walking away with an average salary increase of $29,784.19, Minister Tudehope has insisted, this is not a payrise, it’s a recalibration.

Daniel Mookhey, NSW Shadow Treasurer said:

“This is not a recalibration Minister, this is an absolute insult to the hard working men and women who keep our state running.”

“You can call it what you want but after 12 years, this Government has lost touch with reality.

“At the same time Tudehope and Perrottet okay iCare’s top executives getting massive increases in pay, frontline workers are being told to accept a real wage cut.

“I don’t understand how the Government can look a teacher, a paramedic, a hospital cleaner or a nurse in the face and say that your wages have to suffer in real terms but the iCare’s top executives can walk away with a 30% pay increase.

Here is a reminder of what iCare has managed to achieve so far:

• iCare underpaid 52,000 workers up to $80 million.

• iCare CEO is NSW’s highest paid public servant. 

• iCare is increasing employer premiums by 6% over the next two years. 

• iCare tried to introduce a ‘gap fee’ for injured workers needing to see a doctor in 2020.

• iCare racked up underwriting losses totalling $4.54 billion in the past three years, resulting in the loss of iCare’s $3.9 billion surplus. 

• Treasurer Dominic Perrottet had to rush approval of $4 billion emergency bailout of the iCare managed workers compensation fund which was protecting NSW’s police officers, paramedics, nurses and teachers, after it came within 23 minutes of plunging into a crisis in June last year.

• Senior Treasury officials said in internal emails that iCare had a ‘direct line’ to Treasurer Dominic Perrottet, and they could not rein in the scandal- plagued agency. 

• iCare last year was caught secretly paying a labour hire company $700,000 to hire a former US Republican Operative to work in Dominic Perotett’s ministerial office as Treasurer. 

• iCare was found to have awarded a $140 million IT contract in a seven-day tender, despite bidders warned the rushed process would lead to ruin. The project’s cost has since risen to $360 million and remain incomplete.

• iCare was busted for handing $18 million without tender to the IVE Group, the Liberal Party’s printer and a major donor led by a former President of the NSW Liberals. 

• iCare broke its own procurement rules to award at least $6 million of contracts to Korn Ferry, a recruitment firm closely linked to former NSW Liberal Party Minister and Party Treasurer. 

• A leaked report from last year shows that Treasurer Dominic Perrottet’s scandal-plagued agency iCare overpaid dodgy doctors hundreds of millions of dollars in duplicate and fraudulent payments.

• iCare handed $4 million in salary and bonuses to its eight top executives in FY 2019, despite the agency losing $873 million that year. 200 of its 1200 staff were also paid bonuses.

• iCare’s former CEO had to resign due to conflict-of-interest after it emerged that iCare handed his wife a $770,000 contract without tender. 

• The same CEO and another top executive took an undisclosed sponsored trip to Las Vegas paid for by a multi-million contractor to the agency. 

• iCare’s top executives took a total of 36 foreign trips in four years – ten times more than SIRA, their regulator. 

• iCare faced an ICAC referral for handing an $11 million marketing contract to a company secretly owned by a top executive at the agency. 

• Treasury in September 2019 secretly cancelled an external investigation into probity and governance at iCare after the former CEO complained. 

• The State Insurance Regulatory Authority (SIRA) made referrals about iCare to the Independent Commission Against Corruption for further investigation.

• The Auditor-General slammed iCare in a report last December for illegally using employer’s money to bankroll its lavish spending. 

• Former Supreme Court Justice Robert McDougal slammed iCare for ‘failure of governance, sloppy execution and difficulties in getting injured workers access to their entitled benefits’ in an April 2021 review. 

• An Upper House Inquiry slammed iCare’s Board for ‘comprehensively failing to properly govern the insurer’ in an unanimous report agreed to by all parties.  

• A damning independent review from 2019 found that in 46 percent of claims handled, iCare failed to follow the relevant law.

DANIEL MOOKHEY MLC 
NSW SHADOW TREASURER