The bonuses for police officers will surely be followed by claims of other public sector trade unions and the government will have no argument for turning them down, said Virant, the public administration minister in the 2004-2008 term who is responsible for the sector in the shadow cabinet of the Democrats (SDS).

But Government Secretary General Helena Kamnar, who was tasked with helping Prime Minister Borut Pahor lead the Public Administration Ministry after the previous minister stepped down, said that the police bonuses issue was exaggerated.

Speaking at a separate press conference, Kamnar stressed that all the bonuses announced at end of June were already present in different pieces of legislation bar one, which officers had been promised already when assuming the duties for which the bonuses are envisaged.

Kamnar further said the bonuses will need to be made equal in all comparable professions as she sees no reason for one group getting a higher bonus for the same thing as the other.

The cabinet adopted on 30 June a bill on police work which is to raise bonuses for police officers, claiming the bonuses would only bring police officers on a par with customs officers and the military, only to be challenged by the latter two groups to say where the police were underprivileged.

According to Virant, the current uniform public sector pay system has allowed the current government to control the growth of expenditure for pay in the time of economic crisis and has been labelled as an improvement and achievement even by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

He noted that between 1995 and 2001 pay grew by 18.2% in the private sector and by 29.5% in the public sector, which means that the state would be paying around EUR 1bn more for salaries at the start of the crisis unless the current system had been introduced, and that the current cabinet would be forced to make cuts.

Kamnar agreed that the single public sector pay system was certainly worth keeping, but added that it should be loosened where this is possible without damage to the whole and to an extent that will allow keeping the system under control.

Virant said that, when the crisis is over, some adjustments will still need to be made to the system, adding that more management flexibility should be introduced with more stress on performance-based pay.

He stressed that the legislation allowed this, but the problem was that all the money was used for fixed pay. He sees a solution in gradually reserving 10% of the increasing pay mass for variable parts.

The government secretary general also said that the pay system in the public administration needs no loosing up except for the introduction of more flexibility in rewarding efficiency and punishing bad work.

Virant further said that both the previous and the current cabinet managed to reduce the number of people working in the public administration, but failed to constrain the number in to entire public sector.

Goals for the reduction of the sector should be set for each part and each minister should be responsible for reaching them, Virant said.

Kamnar however noted that the first step would be defining which public services citizens are entitled to free of charge and which should require a contribution. Standards and norms should then be defined to recognise how much a service costs and how many employees are needed, she said.

The former minister is sceptic about the prime minister being able to successfully head the Public Administration Ministry after the departure of Irma Pavlinic Krebs. "Firstly, he will have no time and he already has endless trouble running the government."

Furthermore, the prime minister's claims that the current system envisages a large number of bonuses show that Pahor lacks the knowledge and understanding necessary for running the ministry, Virant pointed out.