"APRA haven't shown us that they really understand the issue. They will make a bad problem even worse unless they address the issue of director discretion. Unless they understand that bank boards have been unable to say no to the demands of their executives for outsized bonuses, they really shouldn't be involved in the discussion." (Both Paatsch and Lawrence have praise for Macquarie Group's handsome pay practices where its chief executive, Shemara Wikramanayake, got a $17 million pay packet because the majority of that amount is locked up in company shares for seven years.) Paatsch points to a level of hysteria in the banking and wider business community about the increasing protests against executive bonuses from institutional investors. "I had one director tell me that this whole thing was Salem. 'We are living in Salem', he said," Paatsch quips. Proxy advisers faced their own reckoning in 2017 when ASIC launched an investigation into the practices and conflicts of the big four proxy advisory groups.