The ANZ board have escaped the heavy critique of its operations and management seen in other post-royal commission bank AGMs, but in the final analysis, shareholders did deliver the expected first strike against remuneration report, with more than a third of shareholders (34 per cent) voting against its adoption before the meeting.After seeing how shareholders savaged the boards and CEOs at the AGMs of NAB and Westpac, the first outing for ANZ's top brass since the royal commission finished its final round of hearings always promised to be tough work for chairman David Gonski and CEO Shayne Elliott.Ilana Atlas, chair of ANZ's human resources committee, spelt out the subtext and the rationale underlying this year's remuneration report:  "Given the issues that our industry and our bank has faced in the last year, it is right there is significant focus on how we pay our most senior executives."She said that the committee "had deliberated for many hours" on the subject and have been working to align executive pay with community expectations - for example over the past three years the committee has been "re-setting" the salaries for the executive team lower with each new appointment."What we pay our disclosed executives has reduced by 40 per cent over that period, not because we value our executives less but to demonstrate that we listen," Atlas told the meeting.When assessing the various pay outcomes for the CEO and management team, the board considered:•    the group's performance this year against short and medium term strategic goals;•    whether appropriate weight to be given to the failures highlighted by the royal commission and the impact this had on customers, reputation, and financial performance;•    the tenure of the CEO and the executive team, given that the majority are new to their roles; and •    the importance of sending a strong signal internally and externally about accountability.With this in mind, the board decided to:•    reduce the group's incentive pool by A$124 million - or around 22 per cent down on last year; to reduce the variable pay of a group executives, including the CEO; •    apply a 20 per cent reduction to board these four 2019; and •    apply a downward adjustment to the un-vested equity held by former members of the executive committee to reflect that many of the issues that of impacted performance this year related to previous years.ANZ was also seeking shareholder vote on granting performance rights to CEO Shayne Elliott. "Looking back, the performance rights awarded in November 2014 were tested in November last year. As the relative hurdles were not met, these lapsed - the fifth year in a row in which performance rights provided no benefit to executives," Atlas said.The performance rights awarded in November 2015 were tested last month and have partially vested.This was as this related to ANZ's total shareholder return, compared to its financial services comparator group over the three-year period. It resulted in the testing of 22 per cent of Elliott's long term incentive. The remaining 78 per cent