Legislative reform will be required to give Australia’s public sector salary watchdog meaningful influence over university executives’ pay, a constitutional lawyer-cum-vice-chancellor has suggested.

George Williams, vice-chancellor of Western Sydney University, said the Commonwealth Remuneration Tribunal should be given the job of making “arm’s length” determinations of the salaries of “people like myself”, either directly or through “appropriate banding” of pay.

“If they can’t do that, which they probably can’t at the moment…it may well need some legislative change,” Williams told ����Vlog.

Education minister Jason Clare has promised to establish a “remuneration framework” for vice-chancellors in collaboration with the Remuneration Tribunal, state and territory governments and stakeholders including the Universities Chancellors Council (UCC).

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The idea came from the Senate Education and Employment Committee, which said the tribunal should help devise a “framework of classification structures and remuneration ranges” for senior university executives’ pay. Institutional councils would retain responsibility for setting salaries within the specified ranges.

The UCC had earlier proposed an “advisory framework” where the tribunal provided universities’ governing bodies with “independent, nationally consistent advice” on remuneration settings.

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While the tribunal has had longstanding scrutiny powers over university executive pay, the only institution it appears to have advised is the Australian National University. Its 1973 legislation provides for it to inquire into higher education executives’ salary rates “from time to time” and report its findings to the minister for the public service, but it said this function had been overridden by regulatory changes to universities.

Williams said the tribunal needed more than a “watching brief”. He said executive salaries, while a relatively minor contributor to universities’ budgetary problems, had become symbolic of the sector’s social licence problems.

People are struck by the “stark” income contrast between university leaders and casual academics, not to mention students battling poverty. “Whether unis like it or not, for many people, it is emblematic of concerns they have about the sector. [It represents] what they see has gone wrong in universities.”

Williams said the substantially lower salaries garnered by overseas university chiefs undermined claims that Australian institutions needed to pay top dollar for vice-chancellors. He scoffed at the argument that the sector’s reliance on international education revenue justified corporate-style pay.

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“We’re public sector bodies delivering public good,” he said. “That shouldn’t be altered by income source. The mission is what it is. [It] has to drive decision-making in line with those values.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com