Now this isn't about the politics of envy, let's get that straight. It's about the politics of excess because that's the only way a salary package of four and a half million bucks a year, or eighty six and a half grand a week, can be seen.

Alright Fonterra's our biggest and only truly global company with a turnover in the past year of more than eighteen billion dollars. Not only is the boss on the pig's back, or maybe that should be the cow's back, but so too are more than twenty of his sidekicks whose pay packets are stuffed with more than a million bucks each year.

What makes Theo Spierings' pay packet look even more selfish is the fact that the dairy farmer owned company is laying off 750 staff at the moment as they work to reduce costs. Well they could start with their executives' salaries!

And Spierings $770,000 pay rise comes at a time when his company's owners, the cow cockies, are not only struggling to make ends meet, they're beating a path to their bankers' doors to supply them with their daily bread.

And the bankers, given their record profits this year, and with their bosses in the same pay league as Spierings, can afford to cough up the cash.

It's the inequity that has the politicians charged, with Labour's Damien O'Connor saying Fonterra's the worst example of this country's culture of corporate arrogance where the bosses demand ever-increasing salaries despite declining returns to shareholders.

It's an issue that's raised the hackles of politicians in the richest country on the planet, the United States. Barack Obama's been beating his gums about the obscene size of the pay packets of high flyers in his country, where in the mid-60s a corporate boss was taking home 30 times more than a typical worker and where a couple of years ago it'd grown to almost 300 times more.

And Obama's in a position to point the finger at excess, he has a right to be sanctimonious, when you consider the most powerful man in the world commands a salary which is just marginally more than what Teflon John Key gets paid.

As well-heeled Fonterra staff prepare to shift into their new international headquarters in Auckland early next year, they could reflect on what life would be like if they worked at the White House. The top pay rate there for the President's chief of staff, and his advisors, falls short of 200,000 American greenbacks.

Unbearable!