Whether you are in business, sports or any other endeavour, there is always a quest to attract “the best and brightest” into your team.

We are all used to the concept of paying for performance and rewarding achievement. However, this concept becomes less clear when it comes to paying our politicians.

There is no reason why paying for performance and rewarding achievement cannot be somewhat applied to the way we currently pay our Members of Parliament.

MPs are elected and then Ministers and chairs of committee are appointed and it is their election and subsequent appointments that sets the rates of pay. In business we set salaries based on the expectations at the beginning of the relationship, often liked to key performance indicators, and ultimately that relationship can be terminated, within the law, if it the person does not met those performance standards.

That’s not too dissimilar to an election cycle. However, due to the role of party politics, especially MPs in Upper  House seats, means that even poorly performing  politicians don’t necessarily face the kind of termination that one would face in business.

We need our MPs to live up to a reasonable standard, even though at that moment, there seems to be a lot of disappointment in the community about the performance of some of them. We must recognise that we need to attract the highest quality candidates that we reasonably can to political office.

While seeking political office should never be motivated by money alone, equally the level of financial reward should not be a barrier to attracting outstanding people who would like to serve. However, at present, this is the case with the gap in remuneration between the private and parliamentary sectors simply being too wide.

The Premier’s proposal that politicians who have entered Parliament recent years should be afforded the same very generous superannuation scheme as he and others have, is certainly one way of recognising that we ask a lot from our politicians.

However, the problem with the superannuation proposal is that it’s not a level playing field – other South Australians simply cannot access those very generous tax treatments in 2015. As anyone trying to prepare for retirement via a self-managed superannuation fund will attest, there have been fewer and fewer opportunities for tax effective contributions over recent years.

A more appropriate and fairer approach would be paying politicians more and have those politicians face the same tax regime as everybody else. Perhaps it would be worth considering that the politicians who have not been the beneficiaries of a generous superannuation scheme should be given a higher level of salary? In the business world rates of pay and associated benefits are up for negotiation with the candidate and, perhaps, instead of just applying the former superannuation system again, a negotiation on different salary rates for those on the new superannuation system should be considered.

I’ve been around politicians for many years and there is a massive jump in work load, responsibility and risk from a backbencher to a front bench role. There is a strong argument that senior politicians like the Premier, Ministers, and Leader of the Opposition should be properly paid for the kind of roles that they perform, the huge hours they put in, the time with family that they forgo, and ultimately the political risks we are asking them to take.

Currently we have many State public sector CEOs paid much more that the Premier or their responsible Minister.

A job well done should be job rewarded and there needs to be a review of the whole remuneration package for South Australian Members of Parliament so that South Australia attracts the best and brightest to North Terrace.