Queensland independent tribunal on politicians' pay calls for final public submissions Queensland's premier says a new five point plan will finally sort out the 'mess' of state MP pay rises. The federal opposition ordered the Queensland government to fix its pollie pay rise mess, a state MP says. MORE than 450 people have had a say on what Queensland politicians should be paid, but the man in charge of the independent remuneration tribunal wants to hear from more. Chairman Professor Tim Brailsford said a public submissions process was not a requirement of the tribunal, it was just something it wanted to do to help gauge community expectations. Newman flags backflip on pay rises Set up in the wake of the State Government pay rise debacle in July, the tribunal must report back to Parliament by October 15 on the size of an increase for members of parliament. Prof Brailsford said he was yet to go through the submissions in detail, but a "quick scan" had revealed many were ill-informed. "Some of the responses are very short and emotive, and basically go to comments along the lines of 'sack the government' which are not particularly helpful to our exercise," he said. It does appear people are making comments without reading the discussion paper. He said it appeared some still believed the 42 per cent pay rise approved by State Cabinet in July had gone through - whereas that had now been rescinded by Parliament. "Part of the difficulty is trying to ascertain exactly what the community expectations are around salary," Prof Brailsford said. There's obviously been a lot of emotion about the events of post-July 1 around the pay increase that was not. Others on the tribunal include long-serving company director and union executive Dave Harrison and vice-chairwoman of the National Disability Services committee Joanne Jessop. Prof Brailsford said the three met weekly, and were in communication by phone or email every other day, in order to make a determination. We're tried to look at what is the role of an MP. There is of course, no job description as you'd normally get in an employee-employer relationship and it's arguable if there is an employer for an MP," he said. So we've looked at the roles an MP performs, we're trying to then ascertain work values associated with those roles and we're looking at various forms of comparative benchmarks. Although the October 15 deadline for a pay rise decision is set in stone, Prof Brailsford said the tribunal would take longer to tackle the question of allowances. "There is a massive complexity around allowances that MPs are entitled to, and we see that our work is such that those allowances are going to take some time to clean up," he said. He described his own attitude to the question of politicians' pay rises as "open-minded." "It's something that I haven't paid great attention to in the past, and I've got an open mind as we speak," Prof Brailsford said. Submissions can still be made until 5pm tomorrow at the remuneration tribunal website.