It's the afternoon of Thursday, January 5, and the nation's top business leaders have likely already made more money this year than the average Australian will make all year long.
Based on statistics from previous years, the average earnings for 2017 of the chief executives of Australia's 100 biggest listed companies would have passed $81,000 by mid-morning on Thursday, a Fairfax Media analysis reveals.
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How shareholders can rein in CEO salaries
The two strikes rule, introduced in 2011, allows shareholders at an AGM to hold a company board accountable for the pay of their top executives.
The analysis uses the latest statistics from the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI), released late last year, which put the average take-home pay for an ASX100 chief executive at $5.54 million a year (about $15,000 a day) in the 2015 financial year.
The figure factors in bonuses and shares and works out at 68 times higher than the $81,000 pay packet that the Australian Bureau of Statistics says is an average full-time adult worker's yearly earnings at the moment.
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Statistics show that the large disparity between CEO and average Australians earnings has slightly shrunk in recent years, down from a peak of 95 times in 2007.
The still-substantial gulf between chief executive pay and what average workers earn has become a hot topic around the world.
The equation used by Fairfax Media is similar to that employed by the British think tank the High Pay Centre to declare January 4 "Fat Cat Wednesday" based on the salaries of that country's top 100 listed companies.
NAB chairman and former federal treasury secretary Ken Henry last year said a growing number of powerful figures in business and politics believed "enough is enough".
"There's an increasingly large proportion of people including decision makers in government, and in organisations like ours, sitting on boards like this, who are coming to the view that enough is enough," Dr Henry said.
In 2011, the so-called "two-strikes rule" was introduced to make boards accountable for CEO pay. Under this rule, if a company receives a "no" vote against its remuneration report of more than 25 per cent two years in a row, shareholders can move for the entire board of the company to stand for re-election.
Large executive salaries in Australia are regularly justified by the need to attract and retain world-class talent.
At an event in Melbourne this week, prominent business leaders maintained that CEO pay packets were not out of control.
I think it's far more in control now than what it was five years ago.
Westpac chairman Lindsay Maxsted
"Far from it," Westpac chairman Lindsay Maxsted said. "I think it's far more in control now than what it was five years ago. The two-strikes rule and other things which have been introduced have certainly focused the minds of boards on remuneration."
Medibank chief executive Craig Drummond said he believed in "pay for performance".
"If shareholders do well, then executives should do well," he said. "If shareholders don't do well, then executives need to be aligned with shareholder outcomes."
One particular focus for the debate in this country recently has been the use of so-called "soft targets", such as diversity or customer satisfaction targets, in CEO pay structures.
Patricia Cross, a Macquarie Group director, defended the use of soft targets in determining executive pay.
"I think that soft targets are actually hard targets," she said.
"I think a lot of the targets are so-called soft are actually the more important governance targets that underpin the long-term value creation in companies."
According to the ACSI's report, CEO pay in ASX200 companies, the top-paid chief executives were Westfield Corp's Peter and Steven Lowy, who earned a combined $24.75 million.
The pair were followed by Andrew Bassat, of Seek Ltd, who earned $19.39 million, and Scentre Group's Peter Allen, earning $17.86 million.