On Tuesday, the House of Representatives standing committee on economics will hold its first hearing on the performance of the big four banks and it is a fair bet that the pay of the executives who appear before the committee will be a topic of discussion.

In March, the insurance arm of the Commonwealth Bank was revealed in a joint sitting to have conducted unethical practices so bad that it gave impetus to the ALP’s call for a royal commission into the banks. It was a year in which the bank’s share price fell from $85.55 in June 2015 to $74.37 at the end of June this year.

So not a great year.

But not to worry. Ian Narev, the bank’s chief executive, still had a pay rise of 54%.

Narev didn’t get an increase in his “base” cash pay – that $2.625m was the same as last year. It was through bonuses that he came good.

The biggest bonus was not for his performance in the past year – at $1.431m, his “short-term” cash bonus of 2015-16 was slightly down on the $1.59m he received last year. No, the big money came via “deferred equity awards” worth $6.597m, which were based on performance from 2011 to 2015.

All up, the 12 CBA executives received a total of $52.36m – up 30% from the $40.1m they received last year.

Not bad, given the wages of workers in Australia increased by a record low 2.1% in the same period.

But maybe we are being unfair. CEO and executive pay is pretty byzantine in its combination of base cash pay and cash and equity awards. If we look at the total accrual pay, Narev only had a 5.4% pay rise – up $450,000 from $8.31m to $8.77m.

It’s worth noting his pay raise alone would place him in the top 1% of wage earners in Australia.

The total base pay rise for all CBA executives was 13.9% – nearly seven times more than the average Australian worker.

And while this might just be dismissed as envy, it highlights – as the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors has found – that while the base cash pay of CEOs is not rising markedly, they are instead getting large “bonuses,” which are close to automatic.

Their report on the CEO pay of the ASX100 companies found that the average and median base pay for CEOs had actually fallen since the global financial crisis. But that was not due to some hairshirt pay cuts. The head of the ACSI, Louise Davidson, instead notes that it is due to “boards taking the opportunity to pay the replacements of departing CEOs less”.

She also noted that 2015 had the highest level of bonuses for CEOs in the ASX100 since 2008, concluding that “it’s clear that bonuses are the new normal”.

But just what gets a CEO a bonus is less clear. Most would assume it is the share price or profit. But increasingly, “non-financial” objectives are becoming the determinant.

Some of these objectives are measurable – such as customer satisfaction – but others are pretty softly defined and weakly measured. Worse, most come under what people would consider to be the CEO’s actual job description.

For example, among the short-term incentives for CBA executives are categories such as “talent and leadership”, “safety”, “diversity”, “engagement” and “culture”.

The CBA annual report noted one measure against these criteria was that the executive group had “successfully implemented a global human resource management system across offshore locations”.

Well one would hope so, given that would surely be the job of the human resource executives ...

Underlying this however is that CEO pay, as Julie Walker noted this week, has risen so greatly over the past two decades that it now bears no relation to the pay of the average worker.

In 2015, the average ASX100 CEO pay of $4.99m was 83 times the average annual earnings of $59,628. The difference is so disparate that comparison has almost become ludicrous – but it remains worthwhile.

Were public companies required to publish a ratio of their CEO pay to the median pay of workers in their companies, it would provide strong information on growth of executive pay over time.

Who knows, it might shame company boards into withholding bonuses – though perhaps only if shame were included as a non-financial objective.

The concern that CEO bonuses would encourage risky behaviour remains an issue.

The new governor of the RBA, Dr Philip Lowe, told the House economics committee last week that he would focus on ensuring “the remuneration structures within financial institutions promote behaviour that benefits not just the institution but its client”.

But the reliance on non-financial objectives highlights that while workers have seen their pay rises diminish because of low inflation and slack economic growth, CEOs have found a way around such financial matters that affect the rest of us.