Advocate, March 2021

Advocate VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MAR 2021 ◆ ISSN 1329-7295

WHERE’S THE VACCINE FOR INSECURE WORK? JOIN THE CONVERSATION TO PLAN OUR SHARED SOLUTIONS IN OUR WORKPLACES AND IN PARLIAMENT. NTEU NATIONAL PRESIDENT DR. ALISON BARNES LABOR SENATOR TONY SHELDON GREENS SENATOR DR. MEHREEN FARUQI

JOIN THE CONVERSATION 19 MARCH 2021 – 2PM AEST RSVP nteu.org.au/vaccine4insecurework

IR Omnibus Bill will worsen insecure employment

Academic freedom & (free?) speech

Our changing workforce landscape

Workload & pay justice at La Trobe

Crowd-sourcing research for better uni governance

A&TSI employment targets

Gearing up for the next bargaining round

Campaign to #SaveUVetStaff

COVID-19

INTERNATIONAL

Course cuts: Student choice under Job Ready Graduates

Fiji’s deportation of USP VC

2020: The year the Government abandoned universities

Turkish students fight for democracy

The art of protesting in a pandemic

Biden and the student loan crisis

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In this edition 2

Confronting 2021 in a COVID world Dr Alison Barnes, National President

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Healing the scars of 2020 Matthew McGowan, General Secretary

NEWS 4

IR Omnibus Bill will worsen insecure employment

Free Sean Turnell!

5

Where’s the vaccine for insecure work?

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Newcastle management’s 'act in haste, repent at leisure' costs them $6m

7

U-Vet members campaign to protect jobs

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An independent and peaceful Australia

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Fighting for workload and pay justice at La Trobe's School of Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health

WERTE! 10 Staffing data 2020 & expectations for the future 11 Campaigning on A&TSI employment targets COLUMNS 12 Underpinning change in universities Jeannie Rea, NTEU Immediate Past President

13 2021: A CAPA homecoming Errol Phuah, CAPA President

COVID-19 14 Course cuts: Student choice in the Job Ready Graduates era Last year’s decline in international student numbers coupled with the Federal Government’s refusal to grant universities access to JobKeeper set the scene for heavy austerity measures across Australian universities.

16 2020: The year the Government abandoned universities COVID-19 and the Government’s higher education policy response exposed a Morrisonled abandonment of public universities and policies that slashed public funding and increased student fees.

18 The art of protesting in a pandemic When it comes to engaging in activism, perhaps the largest challenges in a pandemic lie in organising people face-to-face to take action.

Cover image: Maskwearing participants in the 2021 Invasion Day in Melbourne. Matt Hrkac

GOVERNANCE 20 Crowd-sourcing research for better uni governance Australia's tertiary sector is in crisis. Far from being sudden and unexpected, this is a crisis that has been a long time in the making. As many of us are painfully aware, the COVID pandemic has exposed deep structural flaws in how the sector has been governed for decades.

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EMPLOYMENT 22 The changing university workforce landscape The very significant changes to the university workforce landscape have little if anything to do with improving the quality of teaching, research and community service.

ACADEMIC FREEDOM 24 Academic freedom and (free?) speech

7

After two reviews into academic freedom, the Government is seeking to change its definition in law. Yet NTEU believes that the only way to guarantee individual rights is through strong clauses within Enterprise Agreements.

INTERNATIONAL 26 Fiji's deportation of the USP VC is a shameful act The shocking deportation of the University of the South Pacific Vice-Chancellor Professor Pal Ahluwalia, and his wife, Sandra Price, is a highly shameful event — in not just the history of the institution, but also in the history of Fiji and the region.

16

28 Turkish students fight for autonomy and democracy Millennial and Gen Z students at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University are writing history, not only by resisting heavy-handed police violence, mass detentions, and arrests for defending democratic rights in Turkey, but also for showing how to do it in style.

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30 Can Biden's plan for 'Education Beyond High School' solve the student loan crisis?

In the race for the US Presidency, Joe Biden put forward an ambitious higher education policy platform, but does it go far enough?

32 Education unions defend & promote academic freedom around the world Academic freedom is in a dire state globally, according to the recent International Further and Higher Education and Research Conference.

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DELEGATES 33 Patrick Hampton, UNDA 34 Brian Pulling, UniSA MY UNION 35 Gearing up for the next bargaining round

28

36 Dr Rod Crewther 37 Dr Olga Lorenzo 38 Professopr Margot Prior Hansen 39 New NTEU staff

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

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◆ EDITORIAL

ADVOCATE

ISSN 1329-7295

All text & images ©NTEU 2021 unless otherwise stated

Publisher Matthew McGowan Editor Alison Barnes Production Manager Paul Clifton Editorial Assistance Anastasia Kotaidis,

Helena Spyrou Published by National Tertiary Education Union ABN 38 579 396 344

PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia Feedback & advertising advocate@nteu.org.au

READ ONLINE AT NTEU.ORG.AU/ADVOCATE

NTEU NATIONAL EXECUTIVE National President Alison Barnes General Secretary Matthew McGowan National Assistant Secretary Gabe Gooding Vice-President (Academic) Andrew Bonnell Vice-President (General Staff) Cathy Rojas Acting A&TSI Policy Committee Chair

Sharlene Leroy-Dyer National Executive: Steve Adams, Nikola Balnave, Damien Cahill, Vince Caughley, Cathy Day, Andrea LamontMills, Michael McNally, Virginia Mansel Lees, Cathy Moore, Rajeev Sharma, Melissa Slee, Ron Slee, Michael Thomson, Perpetua Turner, Nick Warner

Advocate is available online free as a PDF and an e-book at nteu.org.au/advocate NTEU members may opt for ‘soft delivery’ of Advocate (email notification rather than printed version) at nteu.org.au/soft_delivery The plastic bags used for postage of Advocate to home addresses are 100% biodegradable.

In accordance with NTEU policy to reduce our impact on the natural environment, Advocate is printed using vegetable based inks with alcohol free printing initiatives on FSC certified paper under ISO 14001 Environmental Certification.

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Dr Alison Barnes, National President k abarnes@nteu.org.au

D @alisonbarnes25

Confronting 2021 in a COVID world Welcome to the first edition of Advocate for 2021. This year has started in much the same vein as 2020 finished.

The sector is still suffering from funding shortfalls, mainly related to the continued absence of large numbers of international students and the refusal of the Federal Government to allow universities to qualify for JobKeeper payments.

Moreover, the funding changes flowing from the Jobs Ready Graduate legislation will be felt within this calendar year.

The Government is, however, not solely responsible for job losses and hardship.

University managements should be held accountable for their decisions: operating a business model reliant on ripping off a workforce they’ve chosen to casualise and to prioritise capital works over investment in staff and, by extension, students.

Campuses are resuming face-to-face teaching and related activities, but may be hampered by periodic restrictions as state governments cope with COVID outbreaks.

Hope for 2021

As with most other aspects of Australian society, things are unlikely to return to a pre-COVID ‘normal’ until most of the population has been fully vaccinated, which may not be completed this year.

This year we must focus on building our workplace structures and our delegate networks. We need to grow our workplace strength by asking our friends and colleagues to stand with us and join the Union.

Jobs and revenue devastated in 2020 Peak body Universities Australia estimates the overall operating revenues of Australian universities fell by $1.8 billion in 2020. It predicts a further $2 billion fall in 2021.

Despite 2020's pervasive gloom, last year also demonstrated the resilience generated by standing together.

We want to tell the stories of the people whose jobs were and are affected by COVID and its flow-on effects, as well as the wider stories of the impacts on the culture and fabric of universities and on society more broadly.

The result has been that more than 17,300 jobs were lost in the sector last year, a figure which is unlikely to include all of the casual and fixed-term positions that have gone from around Australia.

We need to make the community aware of the crisis tertiary education faces and the damaging implications for future generations of students. We need to build the case for higher education so that the broader community stands with us.

Many of those who have lost their jobs face the prospect of losing not only income but a vocation they have invested in. They face all of the stress and upheaval associated with uncertainty.

Watch out for information from your Branch or State Division about when and how you can get involved, but start talking now to your colleagues who aren’t in the Union!

The Morrison Government carries much of the responsibility for these job losses.

But for its repeated changing of the rules to prevent public universities accessing JobKeeper, many of these jobs could have been saved.

Stay safe, and best wishes for 2021. ◆

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

Alison Barnes, National President

FROM THE GENERAL SECRETARY ◆

Matthew McGowan, General Secretary k mmcgowan@nteu.org.au

D @NTEUNational

Healing the scars of 2020 We start 2021 facing a different world and a remarkably different context for the work of the Union.

In January 2020, the gig economy was largely taken for granted. Universities were, on the whole, financially robust. We worked from the office and our days were framed by the morning and afternoon peak hours.

Fast forward twelve months and so many things have changed. The nature of work has changed for many in the community and may never return to what was considered normal.

Casualisation & precarity There is a significant community discussion about returning to office work, and the issue of casualisation and precarious work practices has dominated social and political debates.

Casual work and its impact on individuals and communities, the economy and the nation, is at the core of the discussion about how we handled the pandemic, and how we recover.

The employment contract is a social as well as legal construct. The nature of employment regulation between an employer and an individual affects more than the two entities involved. The aggregate of our employment conditions impact on the functioning of the society we live in.

The Victorian Premier, Daniel Andrews, has made many comments about the impact of insecure work on our economy.

Mr Andrews claimed that 'insecure work is no good'.

'I think we’ve … seen a structural weakness in our economy that has been very graphically exposed,' he said.

As two-thirds of university Enterprise Agreements expire this year, the Union will be looking to address this weeping sore in our economy. But we cannot assume an easy path.

In their recent paper Does the COVID-19 emergency create an opportunity to reform the Australian University workforce?, Elizabeth Bare, Janet Beard, Ian Marshman and Teresa Tjia spell out their proscriptions for the future of work in our universities.

Sadly, some elements of the paper are shockingly familiar, but others take the narrative to a further extreme.

The answer, apparently is to: create greater flexibility in our workforce; reduce redundancy pay; remove 'prescriptive academic workloads clauses'; and increase the use of fixed term employment.

It should be possible for us to sit down collectively and imagine the nature of work we face in the next decade and beyond, and to then talk about the path to getting there.

The scars of 2020 But the problems are deep. Most significant is the lack of trust, which was on show in spades during 2020. Many current and now former staff suffer deep scars resulting from the way in which the cuts and job losses were handled. And when I say job losses, I mean careers destroyed, people and families left with no income, despair in those losing their livelihood, and those left behind to pick up the pieces.

At each university the discussions about our bargaining agenda have already started. While many are still feeling the impact of job cuts, we have an opportunity to make our voices heard loud and clear.

These are not a prescription for valued and harmonious industrial environments, nor are they a prescription for healthy and safe work. Worse still, they propose a permanent embedding of casual employment in a 'career pathway' for casual academics. This would result in an entire academic career existing within precarious employment, from entry into academia as a level A academic to 'Casual Professor'.

However, there are genuine issues that we should discuss as a university community. It should be possible for the Union and the sector to discuss the future of work and the issues we face, as professional staff and academic staff enter new and different realities.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

In the end, we will do what we must to improve working lives on campus. At each university the discussions about our bargaining agenda have already started. While many are still feeling the impact of job cuts, we have an opportunity to make our voices heard loud and clear.

Staff have sacrificed and suffered through the pandemic to keep our institutions functioning and vibrant. Now they have a right to expect management to deal with the problems management has created. Problems such as excessive workloads, work intensification, casualisation and academic freedom.

These issues will dominate 2021 and beyond, and the future of the higher education system demands that we collectively stand up and demand better. ◆ Matthew McGowan, General Secretary

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◆ NEWS

Morrison's IR Omnibus Bill will worsen insecure employment The Morrison Government’s proposed changes to Australia’s industrial relations system via the ‘Omnibus’ Bill introduced to Parliament in December 2020 is likely to make insecure employment worse, not better.

The Bill includes the following changes:

ALP’s initiatives

• To enable employers to simply deem a worker as a casual, regardless of the nature of the work performed.

ALP Leader Anthony Albanese sharpened the debate when he announced on 10 February that a future ALP government will address some of the worst aspects of insecure work. The commitments include:

• While the Bill proposes a nominally improved conversion to ongoing employment clause, it is not automatic and any employer can refuse an application on, as yet to be defined, 'reasonable grounds', with no right of appeal or access to the Fair Work Commission (FWC).

Free Sean Turnell!

Dr Sean Turnell, an active member of NTEU and a well-respected economist at Macquarie University, has been detained by the Myanmar military.

No reason has been given for his arbitrary detention. NTEU joins with Sean’s wife, Ha Vu, his family, friends and colleagues in calling for Sean’s immediate release and return to his family in Australia On 4 March, the NTEU National Executive noted with the strongest possible concern the detention of Professor Turnell.

Sean was advising the Myanmar Government on economic policy, using his expertise to help bring investment and job opportunities to the country, to help Myanmar integrate with other economies in the region and the world, and to help lift people out of poverty. ◆

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fate. It’s unclear at this point how many support the Bill in its present form, or whether the Government will further amend the Bill to get their support. The ACTU and unions continue to lobby the Senators to oppose the Bill.

• If a casual employee successfully challenges their employment status and a court rules that they are owed entitlements because of the regular, ongoing nature of the work, the casual loading already paid to the employee can be deducted from the employer’s liability.

• The Bill would introduce 'part-time flexibility' into the awards covering the retail, food and accommodation industries, allowing part-time employees to work extra shifts at ordinary rates, without any overtime pay. ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has argued that this is simply casual employment, and will inevitably reduce take-home pay.

The original Bill included a provision to allow employers to offer pay deals that do not meet the 'Better Off Overall Test' (BOOT) for two years, if the FWC considered it appropriate, especially in a COVID context. The BOOT test stipulates that any agreement must be better than the existing award conditions. The end result would be significant numbers of workers suffering pay cuts.

The Government has now dropped this provision after strong opposition from unions, the ALP and Greens, and even the One Nation senators.

Passage in Senate uncertain At the time of writing, there is no clear timetable for the Bill’s consideration by the Senate, where ultimately the five crossbench Senators will decide its

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

• To legislate for portable annual and sick leave entitlements for insecurely employed staff.

• To place a cap on fixed-term contracts.

• To ensure labour hire workers be paid the same as ongoing co-workers.

• To create a fair test based on the nature of the work to determine whether a worker can be classified as a casual.

These initiatives could potentially have a significant impact on the prevalence of insecure employment in higher education, where 65% of the workforce is now employed either casually or on a fixedterm contract.

Online seminar There will be an opportunity to engage directly with some key politicians around these issues, with an online seminar, 'Where’s the vaccine for insecure work?', being organised for 19 March (see p.5).

Tony Sheldon, ALP Senator for NSW and Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Job Security, and Dr Mehreen Faruqi, Greens Senator for NSW and the Greens’ Education spokesperson, will be the guest speakers, along with NTEU National President, Dr Alison Barnes.

Sign the petition The ACTU is running a petition to the Morrison Government, 'You can’t heal the economy by hurting workers', calling on the Government to drop the Bill. So far it has over 80,000 signatures.

The petition can be found at nteu.info/ omnibuspetition. ◆ Michael Evans, National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

NEWS ◆

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

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◆ NEWS

Newcastle management’s 'act in haste, repent at leisure' costs them $6m A decision by the University of Newcastle (UON) to force all staff to take 5 days’ annual leave in April 2020 has been overturned, with a recommendation management recredit all staff at a cost of around $6 million.

COVID-19 forced leave On 31 March 2020, University of Newcastle (UON) Vice-Chancellor Alex Zelinsky announced all staff would be directed to take 5 days’ annual leave from 20–24 April 2020. An exemption process was instituted, but the only criteria for being granted one was if work was essential to the University’s operations.

Australian workers benefit from a range of core entitlements which exist only because the union movement has collectively fought for them over generations.

In 1856, it was the 8-hour workday. In 1885 compensation for injuries in the workplace, in 1947 the 40-hour week, which became 38 in 1983. In 1951 long service leave, in 1971 unfair dismissal laws were introduced, in 1972 equal pay for women and in 1973 a minimum wage for all.

And, let’s not forget paid sick leave that was so critical through the first year of the pandemic.

It was only in 1941 that one week of annual leave became universal for Australian workers. This was followed by two weeks in 1945, three weeks in 1963, and four weeks in 1974. As recent attacks on penalty rates demonstrate, these entitlements cannot be taken for granted. They must be vigorously defended.

NTEU disputes management's actions On 9 April 2020, the NTEU disputed the UON management direction that all staff take annual leave as being contrary to the provisions of the University’s Enterprise Agreements and the Fair Work Act 2009.

The dispute related to four different categories of staff: 1. Academic staff 2. Professional staff

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3. Teachers

No ability to direct staff

4. Staff for whom the direction would create a negative leave balance.

Disturbingly, and embarrassingly, the Chief People and Culture Officer and the Associate Director, Employee Relations and Work, Health and Safety admitted that they had not considered the Agreements or the Fair Work Act, they had sought no internal or external advice on the legality of the direction, they did no research of their own and did not provide any advice to the Vice-Chancellor on the legality of the direction. It was not until after the direction had been effected that they considered the legality of the direction, well after we had served our dispute.

After months of negotiation and several proposed settlements that management walked away from, NTEU sought arbitration. Management was initially represented by the Australian Higher Education Industry Association (AHEIA) but engaged counsel shortly before the hearing in November 2020.

The arbitration commenced and Counsel for management informed the Commission that they no longer pressed the issue of academics and staff directed into a negative leave balance (to the extent of the negative balances). Arbitration was thus confined to professional staff and teachers on the questions of: 1. Did clause 57.9 of the University of Newcastle Professional Staff Enterprise Agreement 2018 and clause 77.9 of the University of Newcastle Academic Staff and Teachers Enterprise Agreement 2018 permit the University to direct professional and teaching staff to take the five days’ annual leave between 20-24 April 2020?

2. If the answer to question 1 is ‘yes’, was it reasonable within the meaning of section 93(3) of the Fair Work Act. Our position was that the answers were ‘no’ and ‘no’, the University’s position was the opposite.

The evidence of management was that they had not considered the provisions of the agreements before making the direction. The idea was floated for the first time on Sunday 29 March 2020, raised and decided in an Executive Committee meeting on 30 March, and then communicated to staff the next day, 31 March 2020.

Under cross-examination, serious questions were raised as to whether UON managers had colluded in the preparation of their evidence. Witnesses had no adequate answers, in our view, as to why some had helped prepare the statements of others, why some had read the statements of others and why some paragraphs were replicated verbatim in multiple statements.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

On 24 November 2020, the Fair Work Commission (FWC) found management could direct professional and teaching staff to take the five days’ annual leave but could not give such a direction under s 93(3) of the Act because of the absence of constraints in the clauses on the exercise of a direction to take annual leave meant that the clauses were not consistent with the Act, and therefore invalid and of no effect.

The effect of the decision is that UON management had no ability to direct staff to take annual leave unless the staff member has accrued 40 days of paid annual leave because it is a persuasive decision that is likely to be followed in any future dispute.

As concerns professional and teaching staff, it also meant the resolution of a separate dispute in the favour of staff and the NTEU as management was unable to direct a nine day close down over the Christmas period.

The decision recommended management recredit all staff five days annual leave, which management did at a cost of around $6 million.

Management has appealed the decision, which was heard by the Full Bench of the FWC on 26 February. The decision has been reserved but management has undertaken not to seek repayment if successful. ◆ Josh Gava, Senior Industrial Officer, NSW Division

NEWS ◆ Image: Name

U-Vet members campaign to protect jobs Staff at the University of Melbourne’s U-Vet Animal Hospital in Werribee have come together to campaign to save staff jobs and protect the service against harmful cuts.

Delegates and NTEU members penned an open letter outlining concerns about reduced opportunities for staff and students, extreme workloads, diminished clinical experiences and damage to reputation in both the local community as well as international accreditation as a training institution.

Despite reduced staffing in 2020, the hospital continued to serve a similar number of clients in the community as previous years. Clinical and professional staff have both reported high levels of stress related to workload, as well as reporting low confidence in the management of the service.

The site received an improvement notice in 2018-19 following high levels of work-

place injuries. These issues were later resolved, however further concerns were reported to the Branch more recently.

While a large proportion of University staff shifted to working from home while Victoria’s pandemic restrictions were in place, hospital staff continued to serve students and the wider community under intensely difficult circumstances, with regular COVID-19 testing and changes to rostering that moved staff in to work areas they were unused to or not trained in.

After members and delegates met to discuss their experiences and reactions to the proposed changes, the idea of an open letter was born, with staff, students and the community adding their names online before the document was submitted as part of the consultation process.

A physical copy of the letter has also gained a large number of signatures on site. Additionally, staff, students and the community have been encouraged to submit photos and testimonials to show how

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

much they value the service and want it to thrive. As well as a training institution, U-Vet is highly valued in both metropolitan Melbourne and across Victoria.

Beyond the campaign of NTEU members and staff, a change.org petition lamenting the loss of a 24 hour service attracted over 4500 signatures. In response to this, the campaign and attention from local media and government, management have already walked back the cuts to the 24 hour service, citing the change as a ‘temporary’ measure. It remains to be seen whether the promised service quality can be maintained if the staff cuts go ahead. ◆ Simon Linskill, Branch Organiser, University of Melbourne For further information on the campaign, including the open letter, testimonials and photos, the campaign website is: fvasunion.gitbook.io/u-vet-open-letter

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◆ NEWS

An independent and peaceful Australia The Independent and Peaceful Australia Network (IPAN) has established a national people’s Inquiry Exploring the Case for an Independent and Peaceful Australia: What are the costs and consequences of Australia’s involvement in US-led wars and the US Alliance? And what are the alternatives?

NTEU Queensland Division and the NTEU nationally are members of IPAN.

The experts who make up the Panel Leaders are:

This Inquiry has been established in response to the issues we are confronted with as a country, nationally and internationally, and the need to increase awareness and to build a movement for change towards peaceful, independent Australian foreign policies.

• Panel Chair: Kellie Tranter

Australia has supported wars initiated by the United States since the end of WW2. The countries of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria did not threaten Australian security, but those wars resulted in the deaths and maiming of millions of civilians, destruction of infrastructure and contamination of the affected countries environments.

The findings of the Inquiry into Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan are damning, reinforcing the need for an end to our involvement in foreign wars where Australian security is not threatened.

IPAN has identified eight areas of Australian society affected by the US-Australia Alliance and/or the wars which we have participated in, especially those over the past 20 years. For each of these areas IPAN have enlisted a panel leader, many of whom are NTEU members or ex-members.

IPAN have also confirmed a chair for the Inquiry Panel – lawyer and investigative journalist Kellie Tranter.

Submissions will be sought in relation to these eight areas, with a period of around six months for submissions to come.

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• First Peoples: Terry Mason and Debbie Woodbridge • Foreign Affairs: Dr Alison Broinowski • Political (incl Democratic rights): Greg Barns QC • Military and Defence: Dr Vince Scappatura • Environment and Climate Change: Prof Ian Lowe • Economic: Dr Chad Satterlee • Social and community: Very Reverend Dr Peter Catt • Workers and Unions: A/P Jeannie Rea Reports will be written by Inquiry Panel leaders with an executive summary written by the overall Chair. The final report will be ready to publish and promote towards the end of 2021.

The Inquiry was launched on the 26th of November last year. IPAN has been publicising the Inquiry through all sectors of society to encourage as many organisations and people as possible to enter their submissions. Working groups in each state/territory have responsibility for managing this process.

At a recent presentation to the Queensland Division, ex-NTEU Division Organiser, Ross Gwyther, and IPAN Qld Representative Annette Brownlie, outlined the progress of the Inquiry so far and

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

highlighted the amount of funding that bilateral defence projects with the US receive compared to higher education funding. It was quite shocking even though it was no surprise.

There was a webinar on two of the focus areas: Ian Lowe talking on ‘Environment’ and Rev Peter Catt on ‘Social and Community’ impacts held on 25 February. The next webinar will be held on 25 March – chaired by Kellie Tranter, with Alison Broinowski talking on foreign policy, and Vince Scappatura on military and defence impacts.

All people and organisations interested in a peaceful and independent Australia are encouraged to make submissions to the Inquiry, with the closing date being 31 July 2021. NTEU Qld Division will be making a submission. The working groups in each State are also available to give a brief presentation to any organisation which is interested in hearing about the Inquiry. ◆ Michael McNally, Qld Division Secretary If you are interested in getting in touch with the working party in your state please email ipan.australia@gmail.com IPAN website independentpeacefulaustralia.com.au Facebook facebook.com/AusInquiry Twitter twitter.com/AusInquiry Image: Linda Xu/Unsplash

NEWS ◆ Image: Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels

Fighting for workload and pay justice Federal Labor MP Ged Kearney threw her considerable nursing and unionist weight behind the NTEU's campaign at La Trobe's School of Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health around workload allocation and pay rates for casuals. As a result of our campaign, the Heads of Schools have agreed to a consultation process.

Fear of wage theft In the final semester of 2020, a group of activists and delegates at La Trobe approached the local NTEU Branch for help with the campaign.

As we all know, wage theft is not uncommon in the university sector; the cynic in me feels that wage theft is simply a part of the business strategies for many industries.

The first part of the campaign involved the School members coming together to discuss their concerns and next steps.

They then established a working group and created a survey designed to collect data on how workers were being impacted across both Schools.

The survey went out to all workers who worked in the discipline of Nursing &

Midwifery and Rural Health. The idea was simple, obtain the data to see if it backed up the claim that people are overworked and, in some cases, underpaid.

Not surprisingly, the data did back up that claim.

Coming to the table The next step was to request a meeting with both Heads of School to discuss these problems and come to a solution.

The requests were reasonable, pay casual staff for the work they do, correctly categorise the type of work completed, and ensure that workload plans reflect the actual workload.

Initially, the Heads of both the School of Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health refused to respond to requests to meet.

Not to be easily put off the members regrouped and decided collectively that it would be a good idea to see if Ged Kearney MP would like to come and have a discussion with them.

Before Ged Kearney became the popular federal member for Cooper, she was a nurse who served as Assistant Secretary, Federal President and Victorian Branch President of the ANMF before being appointed Federal Secretary. Not to mention she is also a former President of the ACTU.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

Ged, of course, agreed to meet with the workers across La Trobe's Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health. This invigorated our activists and delegates who went back to their workplace and encouraged more people to attend the meeting.

Impacted workers from across all La Trobe campuses participated in the meeting and agreed as a group to give the Heads of both Schools a second chance to 'come to the party' so to speak.

Consultation process Once word got back to the Heads of School that union members in the School of Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health were not going to walk away silently, they agreed to a consultation process in semester one of 2021.

The fight is not over, but workers across La Trobe's School of Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health will not take this lying down.

We look forward to working with the Heads of La Trobe's School of Nursing & Midwifery and Rural Health to make sure workers are not only paid for all the work they do but are paid under the correct classification. ◆ Aimee Hulbert, Organiser, La Trobe University

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◆ WERTE!

Staffing data 2020 & expectations for the future University staffing data for 2020 was released in December. In keeping with previous years, there has been a strong increase in the number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) academic and professional staff nationally, and across institutions in most States and Territories.

While this is positive, expectations for employment growth from 2021 and beyond are very different.

Annual university staffing data is reported in numbers (headcount) and full-time equivalent (FTE) and provides a snapshot of full-time and part-time staffing in March each calendar year. A&TSI staffing is reported separately to data for all staff, and like the all-staff data, is separated into both number and FTE. A&TSI staffing in both academic and general/professional roles have risen for sixteen out of the past twenty years. In those years where A&TSI employment decreased, this decrease was directly influenced by government policy of the day.

In 2006, the Howard Government's Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRRs) and changes to AbStudy directly influenced A&TSI staff employment and student enrolments.

The current state of the Australian higher education sector is influenced

by COVID-19, coupled with a Federal Government who have ensured assistance provided to other industries during

Rank

State/ Territory

All staff 2019-20

Academic %

1

VIC

46

15.8%

2019-20

Professional %

32

36.4%

2019-20

%

14

6.9%

2

QLD

43

15.4%

16

19.5%

27

13.6%

3

WA

32

23.7%

10

18.9%

22

26.8%

4

ACT

23

40.4%

7

41.2%

16

40.0%

5

NSW

20

4.4%

8

5.2%

12

4.0%

6

SA

9

7.0%

2

3.7%

7

9.1%

1

4.2%

3

33.3%

-2

-13.3%

7 TAS 8

NT

-3

-6.0%

0

0.0%

-3

-9.7%

9

ACU

-3

-7.3%

0

0.0%

-3

-10.0%

Table 1. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staffing increase/decrease, 2019-2020 the initial stages of the pandemic, was not available to Australian universities.

This has resulted in the loss of dedicated academic and general/professional staff, many of whom were already in insecure employment.

COVID-19, job losses & the Job Ready Graduates package COVID-19 has been devastating for the Australian higher education sector. The loss of staff, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, is simply inexcusable and could have been averted through specific, targeted support to the sector. Rather than assisting and supporting, the Federal Government chose this time to implement the Jobs Ready Graduate package.

The Jobs Ready Graduate package targets courses in the areas of arts, performing arts, humanities, and commerce, deeming those fields to be of less importance to Australian industry, and therefore subject to increased course costs. While initial student enrolment data has seen numbers maintained or increased in those targeted subject areas, it is simply too early to determine the total impact of the Jobs Ready Graduate package upon student enrolments.

By way of example, full-year 2018 university student data showed fifty-one percent of A&TSI commencing and total students were studying in the areas of arts, performing arts, humanities, and commerce. Enrolment growth in these areas has been consistent over a 14-year period.

It must be recognised that the Jobs Ready Graduate package provides a total of 1,400 Commonwealth Supported Places for A&TSI students in rural and regional areas. Although, the increase in Commonwealth Support Places will be of little impact if enrolments into those targeted course areas are significantly reduced because of higher course fees.

How this will impact A&TSI employment is yet to be seen, yet what is certain, is if enrolments into those study areas begin to reduce, universities will seek to cut staffing in these areas.

With a potential loss of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in the years to come, it is feared A&TSI staff will carry this loss directly, with consequential impacts for their families and communities. ◆ Adam Frogley, National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Director

WERTE! is Advocate's Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander news section. Werte (pronounced wer-da) is an Arrernte word – a greeting like 'hello', it can also be used to grab someone’s attention.

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ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

WERTE! ◆

Campaigning on A&TSI employment targets NTEU members are passionate about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) employment targets.

Development of targets NTEU has long advocated for and won clauses in Enterprise Agreements around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) employment targets.

Traditionally, the first iterations of employment targets Enterprise Agreements referred to a percentage of the overall staff cohort, while a useful figure, this proved to be easy for management to manipulate as the percentage of A&TSI staff would increase when a redundancy round occurred without a single A&TSI person being employed.

To address this in recent bargaining rounds, the National A&TSI Policy Committee has pushed for these to be hard numeric targets, which have the benefit of providing a consistent picture of the level of A&TSI employment, weathering fluctuations in overall employment numbers due to redundancies and restructuring of universities.

While the NTEU started the conversation, over the years other external players have joined to ensure that universities must take the increased employment of A&TSI people seriously.

Not only are there clear stipulations in government funding arrangements around the need for universities to be striving towards a 3% target, but the representative body Universities Australia has also set the same target for universities in its Indigenous Strategy 2017-2020.

Conversations with management With targets now being an obligation for universities in order to receive funding from the Government, it has created a scenario where management may be increasingly open to constructive conversations around meeting targets in

Enterprise Agreements, but it is up to the NTEU to lead these conversations.

The conversation with management may sound like an industrial task but in fact all Branches should see this as an organising opportunity. This was made no more apparent to me than during the last round of bargaining at Monash University, when we informed members that management had pushed back against the current A&TSI targets in the Agreement.

We were met with shock and intense frustration at what some members and potential members assumed was a core value of Monash, not realising that targets were in fact an NTEU initiative only adopted by universities through our campaigning and organising on the ground.

What this told me is that A&TSI employment targets were seen by Monash members as a key part of their unionism and it was a reminder that union values of fairness and equity in the workplace is of huge importance to our members.

Organising opportunities Organising around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment targets should be a priority for Branches throughout the life of Agreements, but it is never more important than in the year leading into bargaining.

First and foremost to organise in this area Branches need to ensure that the narrative is correct and being controlled by us, for too many years management has taken the lead in telling the university community that targets are a core value of the institution rather than something that has to be fiercely defended and improved on by the NTEU in every bargaining round.

Union education is a key part of ensuring members will advocate for A&TSI targets, but also a key tool in attracting potential members to join the NTEU and protect the current clauses. This union education must also be done in partnership with A&TSI members at the Branch, there is no stronger narrative to members, potential members and management than affected

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

members clearly articulating that the enforcement and strengthening of current clauses is core NTEU business.

The power of being vocal about enforcement is in the understanding that the spotlight will force management to make real movements towards action on improving A&TSI employment.

Actively communicating about NTEU expectations on enforcement and showing potential inaction by management is a powerful organising tool when it may mean raising serious questions about whether management are complying with the terms of Government funding agreements and expectations of Universities Australia.

Management should no longer be able to rely on glossy employment strategy documents without having to show real structured programs and the progress attached to those programs.

Put simply in order to organise effectively in this space we need to ask ourselves four questions: • Are we actively engaging with our A&TSI members?

• Do we have control of the narrative?

• Is our membership educated on the history of A&TSI employment targets at our Branches?

• Are we actively communicating managements action, or inaction to members?

All of this can build power as our membership is passionate about A&TSI employment targets.

To organise in this space is important for the NTEU, for members and potential members, and for the respect and safety of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community within higher education and is something we should be actively pursuing in the lead up to the next round of bargaining. ◆ Frank Gafa, Branch Organiser, Monash University

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◆ FROM THE IMMEDIATE PAST PRESIDENT

Jeannie Rea, Immediate Past President k jrea@vu.edu.au

Underpinning change in universities We need to talk about the future of universities. We are in a moment of disruption. Crises can lead to progressive radical change, but also deep conservatism. We have to act quickly, but not hastily, and make time to listen, think and debate. I suggest some starting places to underpin these conversations.

Australian universities are on Aboriginal land Acknowledging, recognising and respecting that sovereignty has never been ceded is a start. Unpacking what this means is the next step. Universities have a lot of rhetoric, policies and plans, but persistence is lacking. The wavering of institutional commitment to keep going adds to the anger, disappointment and frustration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, students and communities who are repeatedly having their hopes dashed, while they are still expected to keep trying.

Starting from recognition that university campuses and other sites are on A&TSI should be fundamental to not just how universities make partnerships with A&TSI peoples and communities, but should be foregrounded in undertaking university operations and across education, research and engagement.

Decolonising universities Universities must face up to their complicity in colonisation and post-colonialism. The movement for decolonisation has not yet publically erupted in Australian universities nor have demands to dismantle the structures and institutions of white supremacy, as is the case in the UK and North America. But the mumblings are gaining momentum.

The past and ongoing roles of Australian universities will increasingly come under scrutiny, as they must. Universities have direct historical roles in the dispossession, murder and colonisation of First Nations peoples of this continent as well as in the Pacific. And complicity continues today, in what is taught and researched, as well as in ongoing discrimination and racism faced

by A&TSI people, other First Nations People and People of Colour. White supremacy remains systemic and systematic.

There is a climate emergency Australian universities have not joined the international call to declare a climate

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emergency. Australian universities are engaged in many environmental sustainability and planetary health activities across all aspects of university operations. However, there are also contradictions increasingly evident to internal and external stakeholders.

For example, educating for sustainability and social justice is undermined if research and commercial partnerships and investments continue with organisations who are part of the problem. Declaring a climate emergency would force a closer look – and increase pressure upon universities. Listening, learning and acting upon the intersections with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledges, standpoints and perspectives on Country are critical. If universities do not provide leadership in acting on climate change, they are part of the problem.

Equity, inclusion and diversity The neoliberal university has become more equitable, inclusive and diverse, but this has more to do with the massification of higher education and demand for tertiary qualified workers. Our campuses look different than a generation ago with many more women and children of migrants. They are more representative of the Australian population, but this is also a thin veneer. Women, for example, are the majority of staff and students, yet sexism and gender based violence are still common. A few gaining entry to bastions of pale, male power makes little change.

The racial, ethnic, cultural and religious diversity amongst academic staff is low compared to similar countries. The more diverse student population see this and increasingly ask why. Class, is not spoken of, yet the barriers of low income and expectations start at school and continue through university. Current scholarship schemes make a difference only for the chosen few.

‘Free TAFE’ opened the door again to free tertiary education. The rhetoric of a higher education deferred payment

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

loans scheme making fees a non-issue must be debunked. And fully deregulated fees remain the norm for most postgraduate courses, including those critical to progressing careers. University debts continue to be a millstone, and even a deterrent. Free government funded tertiary education is a reality in some countries and increasingly an election issue in others.

Insecure employment Australia now has a two tier academic employment model, with a thinning tier of ongoing staff while the majority are employed sessionally and do most of the teaching. The former have a career. The latter have no security, no career paths, no paid leave, no say, and their casual contracts can be withdrawn anytime.

Amongst professional staff more jobs are now temporary. The current trend in university employment is to cobble together a series of casual and short term contract positions. At the same time, these, usually younger, workers are relied upon to implement the new initiatives. Their passion, commitment and loyalty are callously exploited. The impact of this workforce model on quality, integrity and even productivity is under increasing scrutiny.

Queries from students and others are not deflected by explanations that it is because of inadequate government funding.

The question being asked of university leaderships is what are you doing about changing this. The option of subsidising domestic student education with international student fee income has finished.

And the next generation of academics have had enough and are abandoning academia.

Democratising universities Decision-making in universities is made by vice chancellors and their coterie, employed on limited term contracts, often with limited loyalty to the university community. University councils have shrunk and are dominated by corporate continued opposite page...

FROM THE CAPA PRESIDENT ◆

2021: A CAPA home coming For years, we saw the higher education sector experience decades of sector growth despite the Government's aggressive funding cuts.

Universities adopted a management-led culture focused more on expansion and profitability than delivering quality knowledge to our wider community.

This period of perceived sector prosperity was never going to last; we all knew the bubble would eventually burst, and as always, those with the least power or influence were going to be taken for granted.

In the land of postgraduates, 2020 was a year to forget. A large proportion of our cohort (international students) were made to feel unwelcome in Australia after a comment was made by our Prime Minister that students could just return home. Many of our coursework students were provided, rushed online learning material without any fee reduction for lower education quality.

Our research students were restricted to work from home, unable to gather data from lab experiments or in the field. Many universities were reluctant to provide scholarship extensions to cover living costs for students who lost time in research. Holistically speaking, these disruptions to our research, study, employment and social isolation bore heavily on our mental health.

To this day, much of these concerns have felt only superficially acknowledged by decision-makers. For many of us, 2020 ended with very low morale.

tional students who work for below minimum wage, the insecure employment of students engaged in sessional teaching.

Where to from here?

Regional Representation. This is part of CAPA's long term strategic plan to build a Regional student representative community. We need to improve our long term longevity as an organisation, strengthen our working relationship with RUN and further legitimise our coverage of representing all postgraduate students.

NTEU and CAPA always had a long-standing working relationship.

This collaboration can still vary from year to year, but as the new CAPA National President, I will be redirecting ourselves back to what we know and what has always been 'home'. So I will prioritise strengthening the working relationships between our organisations for this new chapter of our sector.

I'm fortunate to be based in Melbourne and will be on-site at the NTEU head office as often as needed. Frequently running into the National Officers in the office to bounce ideas off will bring an organic and coherent voice between university staff and students. I believe we are the majority and, therefore, the authentic representative voice of universities to parliament.

What to expect in 2021?

This is the year we regroup and push back. We saw last year, both staff and students were the designated cannon fodder through unprecedented record redundancies and poor education delivery for students. However, this is only the beginning, and we should always be prepared for the worst.

We should be under no illusion we could ever get back exactly what we had before. Then again, do we really want to bring back a broken system that did us wrong? No. We want a better system where our universities' success and prosperity flow through the entire sector, not just for the top end.

Priorities for 2021 Wage theft and Job Security. This includes the exploitation of interna-

Research Training Program. Universities have continued to stretch their resources to increase their research student cohort at students' expense.

Many PhD programs are pulling back to guaranteeing 3 years of stipend only. We will be working with the Dept of Education to change any incentive to rushing student completions and hopefully increasing the minimum stipend amount.

Quality of Education. We want to see work-integrated learning used to enrich student learning and not a means of labour exploitation. We also want to see many courses back on campus fully and expect a standard to be developed for online learning.

SSAF. As always, we need to see our student organisations receive a higher proportion of SSAF. This ranges from working, helping less funded student associations develop to justify earning more SSAF. However, we will also be appealing to government(s) for greater accountability on the proportion of SSAF given to student associations. ◆ Errol Phuah, President, Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations k president@capa.edu.au

Underpinning change in universities continued... appointees, while the few elected staff and students are viewed with suspicion.

Academic boards are toothless tigers with pre-determined agendas and no time for questioning. Electing leaders from amongst peers, as used to be the case with deans, has disappeared. Student unions still operate under draconian government legislation. And too many staff are afraid to join or become active in their union. There is little scope for staff

to exercise any self-determination in their jobs. Critique is construed as criticism.

Outcomes of consultation are pre-determined and ‘captured’ with the latest digital tool.

Meanwhile, there is much talk of encouraging student agency and even activism.

While staff are constantly judged as to whether they are ‘fit for purpose’, there are few change making role models.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

Meanwhile students across the world are increasingly organising and acting for change. I could go on, but this is a start.

While there are pockets of recognition of the need to do things differently and cast off the platitudes, across our public university system we need to democratise power and decision-making. ◆ Jeannie Rea was NTEU National President 2010–2018, and is an Associate Professor at VU

13

◆ COVID-19 Image: David Ballew/Unsplash

Course cuts Student choice in the Job Ready Graduates era Last year’s decline in international student numbers, coupled with the Federal Government’s funding cuts and refusal to grant universities access to JobKeeper set the scene for heavy austerity measures across Australian universities. In 2021 multiple course cuts are the result.

Of universities in this category, the NTEU has been able to tally a total of at least 1783 courses (units or subjects) and 151 programs (usually degrees) that have been slated for removal in 2021.

As NTEU members know too well the major cost saving measure pursued by university managements has been to reduce the number of staff they employ. Universities Australia recently confirmed that its members had shed 17,300 staff in 2020 – an enormous number, one that exceeds even the combined total of all public job loss announcements made by individual universities.

It is difficult to conceive of a scenario under which this mass dismissal of staff will not impact upon the core teaching and research work of our institutions.

Indeed, it has become clear in reports coming from NTEU Branches that courses and programs are being cut across the sector. However, only a handful of universities embarking on major restructuring of course delivery have officially announced significant course losses (see table).

This figure, however, only covers a few universities where numbers are available. There is a much larger group of universities that have not announced course cuts at an institutional level but have reported significant job losses.

Reports from our Branches suggest that these universities are quietly reducing or withholding course offerings on a discipline by discipline basis without announcing systematic changes – and thus avoiding public scrutiny.

Course reductions uncovered by the NTEU have varied significantly in scope by institution. Data collection is still underway, but from initial reports disciplines more affected appear to be Arts

Kieran McCarron, NTEU Policy & Research Officer

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ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

(especially Performing Arts), Languages, Sciences, and Maths – areas that mainly contain disciplines slated to receive funding cuts this year under the Federal Government’s Job Ready Graduates legislation.

While redundancies and job losses among our insecurely employed colleagues have been felt strongly by staff, it is current and future students who will feel the impact of reduced choice and opportunity in their education, especially in regional areas where there are already limited choices.

By educating the public about course cuts in the wake of the Job Ready Graduates Package we can keep up pressure on the Government for adequate university funding. ◆

COVID-19 ◆ Image: Name

Known course reductions in 2021 ANU

Some engineering majors impacted.

Charles Stuart

100 courses & 115 programs to be removed.

Arts, Sciences, Commerce, Communications, Creative Industries, Business, Statistics, Sustainable Agriculture.

Curtin

Courses unaffected but face to face teaching permanently reduced.

Flinders

Drama and Arts impacted.

Griffith

648 courses & 5 programs to be removed including in Qld College of Art, Environment & Science and Allied Health.

La Trobe

Arts and Education Courses affected. Languages cuts reversed under pressure!

Macquarie

Reduced majors in Arts and fewer degree programs in sciences and engineering expected.

Melbourne

Faculty of Arts and other 'low enrolment' courses affected.

Monash

Up to 103 courses may be ceased, and dozens of programs incl Theatre and Music impacted.

Murdoch

Some Arts and Languages courses, Theology, Maths and Statistics impacted.

Newcastle

530 courses, 26 programs to be removed.

Creative industries, IT, Computer Science, Fine Arts, Engineering, Environment impacted.

Swinburne

Design and Languages programs impacted.

Sydney

Music courses and programs reduced.

UQ

HASS restructure with course impacts expected

USC

STEM, Gender Studies & Biostatistics impacted.

Some universities (SCU, UNSW, UQ) are undergoing restructures, from which course cuts are expected. At Curtin, face-toface teaching is permanently reduced.

This list is not complete! To provide more information to the NTEU about course cuts at your institution please contact Kieran McCarron kmccarron@nteu.org.au

Members' react to course cuts Kim Wilder, Griffith University Amongst the many courses slashed from Griffith University is the entire Master of Speech Pathology program at Nathan campus. This was one of several popular, innovative programs designed to meet the changing needs of the community and workforce, which is now lost. Other innovative and often boutique courses, which were a drawcard for the University and met specific needs, have also been culled as they did not generate enough revenue.

Yet the lack of foresight into broader considerations will have significant repercussions.

Liz Shaw, Griffith University Our comprehensive Photography degree has been reduced to major in the Visual Arts. This is despite photography graduates regularly receiving international recognition. The Bachelor of Fine Art was cancelled and re-introduced as a Bachelor of Visual Art. The Print and Jewellery & Small Objects studios in Fine Art were criticised as being 'bespoke' and were proposed to be closed despite being popular, with high student satisfaction and national and international recognition. The criticism of 'bespoke' worryingly suggested specialist equipment was a hindrance in higher education.

Following a broad and sustained protest, led by students and alumni, the Print and Jewellery & Small Objects studios are being kept. The current students are being taught out.

In two years, Print will cease to be offered at a third year level and Jewellery & Small Objects will combine with the Sculpture Department.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

15

◆ COVID-19 Images: NTEU members socially-distance protesting at WA universities in 2020.

2020: The year the Government abandoned unis On 16 February 2021, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, said the COVID-19 pandemic 'highlighted a vulnerability' in the business models of universities.

Sorry PM, what COVID-19 and the Government’s higher education policy response exposed was a Morrison-led abandonment of public universities and policies that slashed public funding and increased student fees.

What 2020 'highlighted' is a flawed higher education regulatory and funding framework and a government hostile to public universities. As NTEU says in our 2021-22 Pre-Budget Submission, now is the time for a major re-think of this framework.

A year of reckoning In 2020 the Morrison Government abandoned public universities. In the wake of COVID-19 the Government offered the

Paul Kniest, NTEU. Director (Policy & Research)

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ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

sector a paltry $80m rescue package, the bulk of which was to benefit private providers with fee relief and funding for additional short courses. Public universities were excluded from Jobkeeper while private providers and overseas universities operating in Australia qualified for this assistance.

The Government chose to kick our already battered and bruised public universities with the introduction of its Jobs Ready Graduate (JRG) package that increases student fees and decreases funding to educate each government-supported student.

COVID-19 ◆

The Government’s policy approach to higher education misunderstands the unique role and responsibilities of public universities. This regulatory and funding framework is unsustainable and ultimately threatens to undermine the viability of Australia’s higher education sector. This is evidenced by the rising tide of insecure employment. In 2020 only one in three (35%) of all employed at public universities enjoyed a secure ongoing job.

Now is the time to re-think higher education policy and examine how universities are regulated, funded, governed and staffed. Secure employment is critical for ensuring staff enjoy academic freedom and can sustain high quality teaching and research.

For a detailed analysis of the latest employment data, see article on p.22.

Regulation of tertiary education While Australia guards the use of the term university through legislation, tertiary education regulatory and funding policies in recent decades have deliberately tried to blur the distinction between vocational education and training (VET) and higher education (HE) and between public and private providers.

Two aspects of this approach concern NTEU. Firstly, the Government’s repeated attempts to deregulate higher education. Fortunately, they have failed to gain support in Parliament. Had they succeeded we may have seen a repeat of the failed policy experiment in VET that included contestable funding between public (TAFE) and private providers and income contingent loans. This policy failure not only undermined public TAFEs, it witnessed widespread exploitation of students and rorting of public funding through the now defunct VET-FEE HELP scheme. For NTEU this proves the point that education is far too important to be left to the market.

Secondly, with government’s predilection to reduce university education to narrowly defined and standardised jobsready graduates, echoes VET competency-based training. For the Government, this has the advantage of reducing the cost of this education. Unfortunately, this fails to develop students’ critical thinking and problem-solving skills central to a university education.

The Government’s desire to increase competition and contestability as well as narrow the scope of higher education is shown by recent policy initiatives to recognise, promote and provide funding

for short-term courses and 'micro-credentials' offered by universities and other providers.

NTEU calls on the Government to acknowledge the importance of public universities and ensure the regulatory framework promotes and protects institutional autonomy and academic freedom.

government supported student places allocation.

• Phasing-out tuition fees for government supported students, which under the JRG will on average equate to 50% of total resourcing, up from the 20% when HECS was first introduced in 1989.

Sustainable public investment

University governance and executive power

Australia has one of the lowest levels of public investment in tertiary education (0.7% of GDP in 2017) in the OECD (1.0% of GDP for OECD countries). Australian students attending public universities pay amongst the highest fees in the industrialised world. Consequently, the private share of investment is amongst the highest amongst comparable industrialised economies.

In 2019, average remuneration for the vice-chancellors of a public Australian university was $991,000. This is emblematic of the decades’ long shift in the governance of public universities away from collegial stewardship of important civic institutions to the rise of the enterprise university and dominance of corporate governance models, which has gone hand in hand with the rise of executive power.

NTEU’s analysis of JRG and the Government’s 2020-21 Budget papers (October 2020) not only shows that it slashes public investment by 15% per government-supported student, increases fees by an average of 8% and reduces university resourcing to educate these students, but that the Parliamentary Budget Office (PBO) analysis shows that the value of government support for these students (delivered through the Commonwealth Grants Scheme – CGS) is forecast to continually fall as a share of GDP between now and 2030-31.

The shift to a more corporate/managerial approach to governance of public universities has been facilitated by government policies, including the introduction of National Governance Protocols under Minister Nelson in 2005 and various changes to university establishing legislation which has changed the size and composition of university governing boards. Most of these changes have reduced staff and student representation.

In addition, reduction in public funding and increasing reliance on private sources of income has changed the nature of the governance task.

COVID-19 has exposed the over-reliance of universities on overseas student fee revenue (which now exceeds the value of CGS funding). The cuts to public funding embedded in JRG will increase rather than reduce this reliance.

While NTEU acknowledges the $1billion boost in research support funding delivered in the Budget, our analysis shows this sugar hit doesn’t arrest the longerterm downward trend.

Regarding funding, NTEU makes important recommendations including: • Ongoing commitment to increase public investment in Australian higher education to 1% of GDP in line with the OECD average.

• Minimising uncertainty and politicisation of higher education funding through the establishment of an independent higher education commission or agency with regulatory and funding authority.

• Negotiating Public Accountability Agreements between each university as funding and accountability mechanisms and to better manage and plan

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NTEU believes the evolution of the enterprise or corporatised university is not suited to the role public universities are expected to play in Australian society. This evolution has suppressed staff, student and community roles in the decision-making processes of public universities. Additionally, the elevation of financial objectives, including a drive for efficient (low cost) delivery of teaching and research, has resulted in a greater reliance on insecurely employed staff. This severely compromises public universities to act in and for the public good.

NTEU calls on governments to use their funding and regulatory powers to ensure universities and other higher education providers develop open and transparent mechanisms and structures that incorporate staff, students and local communities into their decision-making processes, and report the total remuneration received by vice-chancellors and other members of the senior executive as well as the key performance indicators attached to those positions. ◆

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◆ COVID-19

The art of protesting in a pandemic COVID-19 has presented a number of challenges. As unionists and activists under these extraordinary circumstances, we have had to find new and innovative ways to work. However, when it comes to engaging in activism, perhaps the largest challenges lie in organising people face-to-face to take action in an environment where health regulations and government legislation often prevent that kind of activity occurring.

Without a doubt the biggest protests we saw in 2020 in early 2021 were the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests held across the country in June 2020, along with the annual Invasion Day Rallies.

It needs to be noted that despite there being a great deal of demonisation when it came to the Black Lives Matter rallies, particularly by the media and various politicians who continuously wrongfully claimed that these rallies were responsible for starting the second wave of

Celeste Liddle, NTEU Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Organiser

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COVID infections in Victoria, both BLM and Invasion Day rallies nationally were successfully held with absolutely no community transmission of COVID-19 recorded. At BLM in Melbourne, a good proportion of this was due to both the organisers ensuring that masks and hand sanitiser was available for all participants, and that they were continually reiterating social distancing requirements to the thousands of people who had attended on the day. These tactics were replicated across the country.

COVID-19 ◆ Image: Invasion Day march, Melbourne 2021. Matt Hrkac

However, Invasion Day provided new challenges; challenges, I believe, are important for other social movements to consider when it comes to mobilising of large crowds in protest.

Anyone who attended the Invasion Day rally in Melbourne this year would have witnessed what was an incredible feat in organising. It is difficult to estimate for sure just how large the crowd was this year, however given the fact that previous Invasion Day rallies in Melbourne have exceeded 50,000 participants, an assumption can be made that crowd sizes were again similar to this.

Not only were participants organised into groups of 100 people and kept 10m apart to ensure risks of COVID transmission were minimised, but with very few exceptions everyone in the crowd was wearing a mask and observed social distancing health regulations. In addition to this, marshals ensured the crowd was kept moving.

Stages were set up at various intervals throughout the rally so that whilst participants were moving past, they were able to hear speeches and engage with the calls for justice and solidarity.

Given the unique circumstances of the Melbourne Invasion Day rally, some lessons on how to do things better under similar restrictions can be learnt. It provided an important blueprint for how the organising of mass mobilisations needs to occur under situations where we’re putting public health at the forefront of our actions whilst also grappling with increasing policing powers across the

country. It needs to be noted for example that in Victoria, protesters wearing masks were simultaneously breaking the law whilst adhering to the law.

The Andrews Government had passed legislation a couple of years ago banning the use of masks at rallies in a bid to stop protesters from hiding their identity from the police. Yet COVID restrictions had also made masks mandatory in environments where social distancing cannot always be adhered to. Similarly, gatherings of more than 100 people outdoors were banned, hence why marshals went to great lengths to separate the crowd into groups of 100 and then keep them distanced from each other.

Unions and our peak bodies need to start considering this because in 2021 mass mobilisations to protest governmental policies are going to be incredibly important, particularly in an environment where 13% of university staff have lost their jobs and the sector continues to be increasingly casualised.

Along with the struggles we’re facing within the higher education industry, anti-worker legislation such as the omnibus bill, along with rising levels of unemployment with concurrent cuts to JobKeeper and JobSeeker allowances mean we’ve got more to fight back against this year.

We will need to take to the streets to continue fighting these relentless attacks from our government.

However, we also need to be wary of increasing police powers as a tactic by governments to contain this pandemic.

Though it’s nothing new, in Sydney police

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actively seek to control rallies. Attendees have been arrested for merely not walking on a footpath, or have been kettled because police want them to move a metre forward.

Under COVID, as community surveillance has increased, we have seen police arrest people for merely making a dodgy Facebook post, and statistics have shown that of the fines handed out for perceived non-adherence to health directives, people of colour have been disproportionately represented.

When it comes to protecting our jobs, our industry, and our rights at work, we will need to mobilise because shows of strength in numbers are more important than ever. However we need to mobilise in ways that ensure member safety and more broadly, community safety.

Employing tactics which both demonstrate just how large the opposition is to these continual attacks on higher education and workers’ rights, such as socially distanced pickets, grouped mass marches, online protest activity, and so forth will be incredibly important throughout this year.

As we go into Round 8 bargaining, we can also expect that there will be a need to mobilise members as University management play hardball whilst blaming governmental legislation. Our strength will be in numbers so most importantly, ensure your colleagues are aware of the union and the measures we are taking to fight these continual attacks. ◆

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◆ GOVERNANCE Image: chombosan/123rf

Crowd-sourcing research for better uni governance Australia's tertiary sector is in crisis. Far from being sudden and unexpected, this is a crisis that has been a long time in the making. As many of us are painfully aware, the COVID pandemic has exposed deep structural flaws in how the sector has been governed for decades.

Alessandro Pelizzon, Southern Cross University Alessandro Pelizzon is a senior lecturer in law and member of APU.

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Adam Lucas, University of Wollongong Adam Lucas is a senior lecturer in science and technology studies, and a member of BUG and APU.

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GOVERNANCE ◆

Over the last 30 years Australia’s public universities have been transformed into revenue-generating entities that have lost sight of what the law and most reasonable people agree to be their core mission: to educate and train students for the complex challenges currently facing the world, and to conduct research that contributes to improving society and advancing knowledge and understanding.

Emblematic of this distortion of priorities is the fact that more than half of the people employed in the tertiary sector have no job security. As a consequence, university executives in 2020 were able to immediately terminate the employment of tens of thousands of our professional and academic colleagues, both permanently and casually employed. In addition to the 17,000 fulltime equivalent jobs already lost, it is estimated that another 12,000 to 16,000 colleagues will lose their jobs by the end of 2021.

The irony of all this is that staff and students are regularly subjected to a constant churn of technocratic metrics of performance and efficiency. But if similar measures are ever applied to senior management, staff, students and the public are never made privy to their findings.

The current situation can be primarily attributed to the failed experiment in corporatisation of Australia’s tertiary education system. The financial distress currently experienced throughout the sector has made this failure starkly apparent: universities have adopted the worst aspects of corporate governance but none of those elements that make for-profit corporations efficient, effective, and ultimately accountable.

The governing bodies of Australian public universities have become autocratic entities. Academics, professional staff, students and graduates have very little input into any decision-making processes.

‘Consultation’ generally consists of being told what changes will be made, and there is virtually no ministerial oversight of decisions taken by university executives and approved by governing bodies.

Conflicts of interest, lack of appropriate expertise, and opaque decision-making inevitably characterise the senior management of most of Australia’s public universities. Enabled by state and territory legislation that privileges corporate over tertiary experience on university governance bodies, they are almost completely free of any constraints on how much they pay their executives, how they spend operating surpluses, and how and when they hire and fire staff.

Instances of mismanagement, malfeasance, nepotism, incompetence, corruption and fraud rarely become public, and are dealt with ‘in-house’, with all the ethical and legal quandaries that such a culture engenders.

Academics for Public Universities (APU) is a research think-tank comprised of concerned academics from multiple universities who wish to study, understand, and ultimately oppose these regressive trends. We are developing a range of strategies to examine and confront the existential crisis currently facing higher education in Australia. Our primary goal is to develop crowd-sourced research and a range of derived strategies that can raise the awareness of our colleagues, students, publics and political representatives about the current state of tertiary education in Australia.

The two main areas we feel are most strategically important with regard to holding executives accountable for their poor management and decision-making are university finances and governance.

With these two foci in mind, we invite interested colleagues to join us in an Australia-wide research project to investigate the financial situations of our tertiary institutions and the ways in which they are currently governed.

We do not accept the claim that the ‘funding crisis’ presented by COVID justifies current policies in relation to job, wage and condition cuts. Our research is being undertaken with reference to publicly available documents and data, and does not involve drawing on sensitive or confidential material.

The Better University Governance (BUG) research action group at the University of Wollongong (UoW) has provided the blueprint for our financial analysis. BUG members have been mapping UoW’s current and past income and expenditure, focusing in particular on the indefensible quadrupling of executive and senior managerial salaries and the many opaque areas of financial expenditure.

On the basis of BUG’s research, it has proposed to UoW management significant reductions in executive remuneration and financial expenditure on non-core university activities, demonstrating that significant savings can be made without any loss of jobs. Similar financial analyses conducted by staff at the University of Sydney have already proven successful in enabling the prevention of planned involuntary redundancies there.

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Several dozen colleagues are now working with us to undertake this research.

We would like to invite anyone who is interested in participating to join us in exploring the finances and governance of their own institutions. We are hoping to map the anomalies in expenditure across the entire sector in order to demonstrate just how profligate has been much of this public expenditure.

The statistical data we are using is being drawn from the annual reports of home institutions. We are mapping issues such as executive and staff remuneration, levels of casualisation, domestic and international student numbers and revenue, non-teaching and research expenditures and revenue, levels of operating surpluses, and the financial exposure of our universities through borrowings for capital works.

Our hope is to compile our research at a national level and leave it as a permanent repository on the APU website for future reference, elaboration and emulation. We also propose to produce a series of popular and academic articles, public reports and press releases to raise public awareness and inform our ongoing campaign for tertiary governance reform.

Examples of the analyses undertaken to date by BUG, along with methodological instructions as to how to conduct this research, can be found on the APU website.

We are adamant that there is no justification for the excessive salaries currently enjoyed by university executives and senior managers. Nor is there any justification for terminating the employment of thousands of people who are arguably better qualified to run our institutions than those who currently do so. The same kinds of short-sighted managerialist responses that have been imposed on us over the last thirty years cannot possibly get us out of this mess.

We appeal to our colleagues across the sector to work with us in developing just and sustainable solutions to the problems we confront; solutions that are informed by transparent evidence that is accountable to all. ◆ If you would like to join us, please contact us directly: Alessandro Pelizzon alessandropelizzon@gmail.com, Adam Lucas molendino@gmail.com APU website: publicuniversities.org

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◆ EMPLOYMENT

The changing university workforce landscape A response to regulation, funding or the emergence of the enterprise university The very significant changes to the university workforce landscape has little if anything to do with improving the quality of teaching, research and community service.

Based on an estimate of the total level of employment (about 228,000 people over recent decades) this represents 8% of all people employed in the sector.

Is the increased reliance of insecure employment, especially amongst academic staff, a response to changing regulation and compliance and accountability requirements? Or reduced public investment and increased reliance on overseas student fees? Or is it the enterprise university’s business model?

UA’s reported loss in revenue of $1.8 billion was less than that originally predicted which was in the order of $3.1 and $4.8 billion. This downward revision in the extent of financial losses is consistent with reports from a number of universities, including Sydney, Newcastle and Adelaide that the financial outcomes for 2020 were not as bad as originally expected.

NTEU’s 2021-21 Pre-Budget Submission (see article, p.16) argues that the current policy framework related to regulation, funding and governance of Australia’s public universities is in need of a major re-think.

Our view is the current policy framework is no longer fit for purpose and threatens the sustainability of our world class higher education sector. Cuts to public funding, changes to governance structures and a regulatory framework that doesn’t do enough to promote and protect the unique role played by our universities has resulted in the emergence of the enterprise university where students are seen as a source of revenue and university staff as a cost.

State of Play – February 2021 On 3 February, Universities Australia (UA) released data that showed Australian universities shed at least 17,300 jobs in 2020 and lost an estimated $1.8 billion in revenue compared to 2019. It is understood the job losses included permanent jobs as well as the non-renewal of limited term and causal employees.

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Unfortunately, UA does not breakdown this data into ongoing, limited term contract and casual employees. Neither does it expect this to be the full extent of job losses in the sector as the full impacts of COVID extend into 2021 and beyond.

Despite its better-than-expected outcome Newcastle insisted that it would be continuing to seek $35 million in savings.

While Adelaide agreed not to proceed with negotiated delays to pay , it was still proceeding with over 150 voluntary redundancies.

In early February, Monash University announced an operating surplus for 2020 of $259 million, which was $29 million more than the $230 million operating surplus reported in 2019. Vice-chancellor Gardner described the 2020 result as 'a buffer for the future'. The question for the NTEU is whether this ‘buffer’ was achieved at the expense of the over 200 redundancies at Monash announced in 2020.

The changing nature of employment at Australia’s universities The latest Department of Education, Skills and Employment (DESE) staffing data (based on data collected in March) shows the total number of employees at our universities increased from about1

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222,000 in 2019 to some 228,000 in 2020, an increase of 6,000 or 3%. In 2020 only one in three (35%) employees enjoyed a secure ongoing (tenurial) job, 22% were on limited term contracts and 43% were casuals. While the data shows the number of tenurial and limited term employees increased respectively by 2,800 and 4,800, this was offset by a reduction in the number of casuals.

The NTEU estimates the reduction in the number of casual employees (even as early as March, and given that most of the lost casual jobs were likely to have been in teaching related areas) was likely to have been in the order of 3,000 or 5,000 individuals. We have to wait for the release of 2021 data to get the full picture.

An increasingly exposed and vulnerable university workforce Previous NTEU analysis2 showed that the Australian university workforce was becoming increasingly insecure, feminised and specialised amongst academic staff.

Unpublished data provided to the NTEU

by DESE shows in terms of full-time equivalent (FTE)3 employment in 2018, 57% were female, 53% were general/professional staff, 50% were ongoing secure positions, 32% were limited term and 18% casual.

The data also shows that the proportion of specialist academic staff (teaching-only and research-only) accounted for 26% of the total workforce which outnumbered the FTE of more traditional teaching and research academics (20% of total FTE).

This is the inverse of the position of just a decade ago and shows a strong increase in the use of specialised academic roles.

This is also crucial because insecure employment is very much the preferred mode of employment amongst specialist academic positions, with three quarters

EMPLOYMENT ◆

TEACHING ONLY

6,000

TEACHING & RESEARCH

CASUALS

RESEARCH ONLY

LIMITED TERM

FULL TIME 19%

5,000

16%

4,000

3,000

PROFESSIONAL/GENERAL

OVERALL JOBS GROWTH

10%

10%

10%

7%

JOBS LOST

JOBS GAINED

2,000

6%

5%

6% 3%

5%

3%

1,000

0

,

-1,000

Figure 1: Growth in University FTE Staffing 2008 to 2018 by Contract of Employment, Gender and Function

(74%) of teaching-only positions being casual and eight out ten (79%) of research-only positions being limited term.

Changing landscape Figure 1 shows changes to university FTE workforce between 2008 and 2018.

The emerging picture is not only one of increasing feminisation and insecurity but also a distinct difference in the pattern of employment practices between general/ professional and academic staff.

Of the almost 30,000 new FTE positions created between 2008 and 2018, two out of three (66%) were general/professional positions, 69% of which went to females.

Only 15% of these new general/professional FTE positions were casual with another 44% being limited term, with 41% being secure tenurial positions.

This large increase in general/professional staffing resources can only be explained by a change in the relative importance of administrative and managerial functions relative to core academic (teaching and research) responsibilities.

This might be explained by higher compliance and/or accountability requirements or it might be associated with elevation of administrative and managerial roles in the enterprise university.

Between 2008 and 2018 academic positions only accounted for one third (34%) of all new positions, the majority (61%) of which were female. In stark contrast to general/professional employment, four out of ten academic positions (41%) were casual and less than one in three (31%) of all new academic positions were tenurial.

The data also shows that the majority of new casual academic positions were in teaching-only roles and that the use of limited term contracts is concentrated in research-only positions. While there were an additional 1,140 tenured female teaching and research academic positions, this only represented 4% of all new jobs between 2008 and 2018.

This was also offset by the loss of 350 tenured male teaching and research FTE over the same period. In other words, tenured academic positions accounted for fewer than three out every 100 new FTE.

Conclusion

While we welcome the increased levels of female employment, the data show this is largely a consequence of increased use of general/professional staffing resources.

The increasing use of insecurely employed academic staff seems to be a consequence of the increase in use of specialist (teaching-only and researchonly) academic roles. The question is what is driving these changes – is it regulation, funding or internal university governance? Whatever the answer, the NTEU believes each of these aspects needs a major rethink. ◆ Paul Kniest, Director (Policy & Research), NTEU National Office 1. DESE does not collect or publish data on the number (headcount) of casuals employed by our universities. The NTEU estimates that the number of casuals is estimated as Casual FTE x 4.

2. NTEU (2018). The Flood of Insecure Employment at Australian Universities (https://www.nteu.org.au/ library/view/id/8988) 3. There is no officially published reliable estimate of the number of casual in each of these categories.

There is no evidence to suggest that the very significant change to the landscape of Australia's university workforce over the last decades has anything to do with improving the quality of core teaching and research functions.

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◆ ACADEMIC FREEDOM

Academic freedom and (free?) speech After two reviews into academic freedom, the Government is seeking to change its definition in law. Yet NTEU believes that the only way to guarantee individual rights is through strong clauses within Enterprise Agreements.

French Review In November 2018, the then Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, announced that the Hon Robert French, former Chief Justice of the High Court, would undertake an independent review into freedom of speech in higher education.

While Justice French’s very comprehensive review published in March 2019 concluded that there was no crisis in free speech at Australian universities, he did nonetheless make a number of important recommendations including some changes to the current wording of the academic freedom provisions in the Higher Education Support Act 2003, and that universities adopt a voluntary umbrella

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code which would clarify the importance of academic freedom in the plethora of university polices, such as codes of conduct, that weaken the application of academic freedom.

Walker Review At the end of 2019, all Australian universities agreed that within a year they would implement ‘the French Code’. Apparently, unhappy with progress, in August 2020 Minister Tehan asked Emeritus Professor Sally Walker AM to review the implementation of a Model Code which universities had agreed to by the end of 2020.

Professor Walker’s report, published in December 2020, finds that a considera-

Paul Kniest, NTEU

Kelly Thomas, NTEU

Director (Policy & Research)

Senior Legal Officer

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ACADEMIC FREEDOM ◆ Image: DB King

ble amount of work remains in aligning university policies and codes with the French model code on academic freedom and free speech.

limitations that are not included in the code such as limiting it to a person’s area of expertise or within standards of scholarship.

The report shows that while 33 universities had claimed to have completed the implementation of the Code, only nine could be considered to be fully aligned.

• Where universities have policies, code or procedures (including codes of conduct) that leave room for the exercise of administrative discretion or evaluative judgments that could limit freedom of speech or academic freedom, that these policies should be amended to make it clear that the power or discretion must be exercised in accordance with the university’s academic freedom or free speech policy or code. She makes it clear that it is simply not good enough to say the polices need to be ‘read with’ or ‘subject to’ the code.

From the NTEU’s perspective, the Walker Review not only revealed universities tardiness in dealing with the implementation of ‘the Code’ but perhaps more importantly, university managements that are more concerned with protecting an institution’s reputation than they are in upholding academic freedom, one of the essential characteristics which differentiates universities from other types of education providers.

This hostile attitude to academic freedom is no more clearly demonstrated than in two recent court cases involving: Professor Peter Ridd and James Cook University; and Tim Anderson and University of Sydney. In both these cases the court found that the universities' code of conduct provided the universities with the power to discipline the academics, despite their claims of academic freedom.

Protecting uni staff

In this regard, the NTEU is particularly welcoming of some of Professor Walker’s findings and recommendation including that:

At the time of writing, the Government had (on the insistence of One Nation) introduced the Higher Education Support Amendment (Freedom of Speech) Bill 2020 into Parliament. When passed, this Bill will amend the Higher Education Support Act 2003 to incorporate part of French’s recommended wording changes including his proposed definition of academic freedom.

• All universities adopt an overarching single policy or code that deals with academic freedom and free speech.

• Universities should remove from definitions of academic freedom

However, this does not go far enough to ensure that university workers are protected from administrative overreach.

Without a clear, readily enforceable right to exercise academic freedom and the ability to seek a remedy if it is breached by the university, it might as well cut the pretence and stop calling itself a university.

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While the adoption of French/Walker recommendations would go a long way to clarifying the primacy of academic freedom and free speech within our universities and limit universities’ ability to constrain or limit their exercise, NTEU still believes that the only way to guarantee individual staff members’ academic freedom rights is through strong clauses within Enterprise Agreements.

In the Anderson case, the University of Sydney itself argued that its Enterprise Agreement did not create enforceable rights. Australia’s oldest institution told the Federal Court that it did not want its academics to have rights.

Academic freedom also remains a key issue being litigated in Australia’s highest courts. In February 2021, the High Court granted Peter Ridd special leave for his case to be heard and determined by the High Court. That will proceed later in the year and will provide one of the first High Court decisions on the issue of academic freedom.

In addition, NTEU has lodged an appeal in the Full Court of the Federal Court to defend the intellectual freedom clause in the University of Sydney Enterprise Agreement. That case will also be heard later in 2021.

We will keep you informed of these important cases.

This must be a call to action. NTEU commits to making academic freedom a central issue in Round 8 bargaining, but it is up to all of our members to start to talk about the issue. ◆

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◆ INTERNATIONAL Image: Professor Pal Ahluwalia. FijiVillage/YouTube

Fiji's deportation of USP VC is a shameful act The shocking deportation of the University of the South Pacific (USP) Vice-Chancellor, Professor Pal Ahluwalia, and his wife, Sandra Price, is a highly shameful event — in not just the history of the institution, but also in the history of Fiji and the region.

The heavy-handed manner in which the deportation was carried out has major implications for human rights, democracy, free speech and academic freedom in Fiji and the Pacific. Additionally it has serious implications for the unity of the region and effectiveness of regional organisations. The events reflect Fiji’s failure as USP’s host country and also a

Professor Biman C Prasad Leader of the National Federation Party Adjunct Professor, James Cook University Adjunct Professor, Punjabi University Patiala

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failure of its leadership role the region as a whole.

Professor Ahluwalia and his wife were taken from their home in Suva at midnight and put on a plane bound for Brisbane. Up to 15 police and immigration officers participated in what can only be described as a raid. The couple were manhandled and even refused a toilet break.

INTERNATIONAL ◆

The Government claimed that the VC’s work visa and contract were nullified as a result of the deportation, even though it is the USP Council which hires or fires the VC. This is a naked attempt by the Fiji government to usurp the authority of the Council and to impose its will on the USP, its staff and its students – at any cost.

The strong armed, thuggish tactics is unbecoming of a government that claims to have brought ‘true’ democracy in Fiji’s history, but more indicative of a military dictatorship. It is an act of aggression by a member state against the region’s highest academic office – the office of Vice-Chancellor of USP, and shows total disrespect of the rights of the member states of USP. While the official reason offered for the deportation was that Professor Ahluwalia’s conduct was ‘prejudicial to peace, defence and public safety, it is common knowledge that Professor Ahluwalia has been targeted for blowing the whistle on widespread mismanagement at the institution, under the previous Vice-Chancellor, Professor Rajesh Chandra, who was seen to be close to the Government. The deportation comes after a failed attempt by the Fiji Government’s USP representative to suspend Ahluwalia.

The losses under Rajesh Chandra ran into the millions of dollars, as articulated in the BDO special audit report, which was leaked to the media and was a source of embarrassment for a government that claimed to be cleaning up corruption. The chairman of the USP Council, Mr Winston Thomson, and others implicated in the scandal, may have had a hand in the deportation.

In a media interview, Mr Thomson played down the biggest financial scandal in USP’s history while openly stating that he would sack Professor Ahluwalia if he had the power to do so. Since then Professor Ahluwalia has been the subject of a witch hunt.

This government’s unilateral decision and ongoing actions undermine USP's regional character and it is the most serious attack on academic freedom in the regional institution’s history. In the days after the deportation, police were seen on campus in what was regarded as an act of intimidation.

The Government’s actions, which strike at the heart of democracy and free expression, are bound to have a chilling effect on both local and expatriate academics. Indeed, the reaction from the USP academics has been muted for fear of suffering a similar fate. It’s mostly the

Professor Pal Ahluwalia, and his wife, Sandra Price, being deported from Fiji on 3 Feb. NZ Herald

USP staff unions and student associations that have been vocal in the public arena.

For many, the deportation is highly questionable from a legal standpoint, besides a flagrant abuse of power by a government that clearly thinks that it can trample on the human rights of USP employees with impunity.

This is clearly reflected in the media comments of the Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, who made light of the home invasion, abduction and deportation of the VC and his wife in the media.

Sayed-Khaiyum claimed that there is ‘no crisis, no saga’ at USP. He stated that there was ‘very bad governance ‘under VC Ahluwalia, while totally ignoring the gross abuses highlighted in the BDO report.

Most respected observers reject Sayed-Khaiyum’s ‘no saga, no crisis’ claim. They describe the situation as the biggest crisis in the USP’s 50-year history and state that the scale of the damage to USP is enormous and unprecedented, with severe, longer-term implications for regional unity, academic freedom, respect for human rights and the rule of law.

Since last year Sayed-Khaiyum, as the economy minister, withheld Fiji’s $27 million allocation to USP, but there has been no protest from the Education Minister, Rosy Akbar. The $27 million is taxpayer money for the education of Fiji’s youth that was approved by parliament.

More seriously, it threatens the future of the country’s youth and their right to education. It shows that the Government is a poor custodian of public funds.

Parliament was of no help either, with the opposition’s attempt to bring up the matter in the house ruled out by the Speaker on the grounds that it was not a matter of national importance. This decision only served to strengthen suspicions about the Speaker’s impartiality.

USP staff and students, civil society, and all persons of integrity must stand up to this gross violation of human rights and the total disrespect shown to USP Council processes, and legal precedents. It is critically important that the USP unions keep actively engaged with the public and workers to keep them informed about the truth.

The future of the regional university now rests with the firm action of the USP council including major donors Australia and New Zealand to uphold the independence of the University’s governance body. Fiji on its part must stop its interference in the University and pay its grant to the University and allow the council decisions to be upheld. ◆

There are legal questions if the Attorney-General can legally circumvent a parliamentary decision unilaterally. The decision to withhold funds is tantamount to the blackmail of the USP Council.

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◆ INTERNATIONAL

Turkish students fight for autonomy and democracy Millennial and Gen Z students at Istanbul's Boğaziçi University are writing history, not only by resisting heavy-handed police violence, mass detentions, and arrests for defending democratic rights in Turkey, but also for showing how to do it in style.

Gallup conducted a study among Millennials in 2016 and concluded that 'Millennials will decisively change the world more than any other generation.'

These tech-savvy generations take active roles in recent global pro-democracy demonstrations, ranging from Hong Kong to Thailand. Recently, Myanmar (after the coup) and Turkish youth joined their peers’ ranks.

Why are students protesting?

Boğaziçi University students have been in demonstrations since 4 January 2021 due to a trustee (in Turkish 'Kayyum,' referring to an unelected political appointee) rector’s appointment, a businessman and member of the ruling conservative AK Party. My alma mater, Boğaziçi University, established in 1863, is one of Turkey’s most prestigious universities.

Prof. Dilek Cetindamar, University of Technology, Sydney

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Most of its students are among the top 1,000 students entering the university exam each year, where around two million students compete. Its graduates serve significant senior roles across industries; for example, 60% of the top 500 companies’ senior managers are alumni of the university.

These students found plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation and essays in the first week of his illegitimate appointment.

Students have been exercising various peaceful protests every day and inviting the appointed rector to resign during the past month, parallel to the Boğaziçi University academicians’ protests.

Its graduates support them. A survey among the university alumni points out that 99% of them favour elected rectors, and another survey shows that 70% of citizens reject the idea of a political person’s appointment.

The demonstrations have spread widely across many Turkish universities, becoming a demand for the 'Autonomous and Democratic University' movement.

INTERNATIONAL ◆

Image: Police clash with student protesters at Boğaziçi University. ahvalnews.com

Students have been exercising their constitutional rights of free speech, while the Government’s answer so far has been heavy-handed police violence, mass detentions, and arrests. Around 600 students have been detained, nine have been arrested, and more than 25 have been put into house-arrests.

Additionally, the Turkish Government has been attempting to discredit student protests by calling them elitist, terrorist, and foreign forces’ prawns. Some government officials and followers of the ruling party put forward grievous threats to students, inciting hatred with homophobic comments and discriminating against LGBT student groups.

Students get creative In response to these assaults, students do not give up, and they do stand up for their future. They do not fall into provocation while insisting on their demand and responding with humorous language.

Contrary to their image living in the virtual world, they are out there on their campuses and organise numerous creative protests every day. They even declared an open letter to the President, who targeted them for not being courageous, and they insisted on proclaiming their simple and straightforward demands: • All students detained, under house-arrest, and arrested should be immediately released!

• The police blockading universities must withdraw from all campuses!

• All trustee rectors, including Boğaziçi's rector, should resign immediately!

• Rectors' elections should be held with the participation of all components of the universities!

• The freedom of expression of students exercising their constitutional rights be guaranteed, and all forms of discrimination be ended!

The Boğaziçi University students use social media effectively, producing slogans, launching impressive videos, online broadcasting of protests, and Twitter campaigns that reach international audiences. They rapidly organise open democratic platforms and communicate their messages effectively. They always come up with something new and attractive for their generation, such as running a song competition for their protests.

institutions, including universities, for the past 19 years. According to the Academic Freedom Index, Turkey ranks 135th among 144 countries in 2020.

The Boğaziçi University students are aware that tomorrow is possible with scientific, secular, and independent universities, and hence they are wholeheartedly engaged with their ideals. They strongly exist in the 'real world' for their future as any other generation in history.

Interestingly enough, they own the universal university principles that go back to 1830 by Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the University of Berlin. As he highlighted: Academic activity should be protected from government control and interference.

Their protests have rippled through other universities across the country.

They have received endorsements from Turkish writers, artists, and journalists.

Numerous high school and university student clubs use their names and declare endorsements or open letters.

Universities cannot exist without freedom of education and autonomy of academia, hence Turkish Millennials and Gen Z stand up for their future. Even though they diverge according to their political views, religious beliefs, or sexual preferences, they are at peace with all these differences and demand democratic rights for all.

In addition, almost 5,000 academics worldwide (including Prof. Noam Chomsky) and well-established institutions such as Scholars at Risk and Academic Solidarity Network are among the Boğaziçi declaration signatories.

Their straightforward and heartfelt actions establish a throne in millions’ hearts. That is why the general public care for Boğaziçi University students.

For example, they support students by banging pots and pans at night.

The high popularity of this autonomous and independent university movement comes from the fact that Turkish students are aware that they will lose their future to the ruling government’s conservative agenda if they lose universities.

Turkey has faced the decay of its secular

Time will tell about the outcome, but history books will write their special touch on their fight for academic freedom in Turkey. ◆

Flow on effect

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◆ INTERNATIONAL

Can Biden's plan for 'Education Beyond High School' solve the student loan crisis?

In the race for the US Presidency, former VicePresident (and now President) Joe Biden put forward a higher education policy platform focused on community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and Minority-Serving Institutions.

In addition to increasing investment in these colleges and institutions, his plan would make tuition debt free for those who attend two years of community college or high-quality training programs, and it involves some limited debt forgiveness. Currently budgeted to cost approximately US$750 billion, the plan would be paid for by increasing taxes on the super wealthy and eliminating what the Biden campaign had called tax ‘loopholes’.

Dr Terri MacDonald, NTEU Policy & Research Officer

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INTERNATIONAL ◆

Biden’s 'beyond high school’ policy continues the higher education approach under President Obama. That said, the now First Lady, Dr Jill Biden, undoubtedly has had some influence in its revival under her husband’s presidency; she has worked at community colleges for over 30 years and is currently teaching at Northern Virginia Community College.

The question is, will this be enough?

Supporters of Biden’s proposed plan argue that two free years of community college would cut four year education rates in half, since students could transfer their credits to complete their college education.

There are other aspects to the policy that would appeal to supporters of progressive politics. For example, the plan would see DREAMers – young undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children – be eligible to receive a free two-year education, as well as financial aid, based on requirements already established under existing financial aid eligibility.

Yet, Biden’s policy falls short of proposals from more progressive democrats – Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both proposed four years of free community and public college tuition and, importantly, forgiving most, if not all, existing student debt.

The weight of student loan debt Student loan debt is a major economic, social and equity issue for the US. In a country that remains politically divided over most things – including universal health care – the idea of ‘free education’ is similarly fraught. Many argue that to forgive debt now is unfair for those who have paid back their student loans.

Regardless, the national debt for student loans is immense – in 2020, it was about US$1.56 trillion, and is effectively a national crisis across all ages and demographics.

The statistics reveal the extent of the problem – according to the Federal Reserve, there are some 45 million borrowers who collectively owe the nearly US$1.6 trillion in student loan debt. The average student loan debt is now US$32,731, which is an increase of approximately 20% from 2015-2016. Most borrowers have between US$25,000 and US$50,000 outstanding in student loan debt, making it the second highest consumer debt category – behind only mortgage debt – and higher than both credit card and auto loan debt.

Biden’s plan goes some of the way to addressing this issue, proposing to forgive outstanding student debt for those who have regularly paid it back for 20 years. Those working jobs in 'national or community service' like teaching or non-profits, would also receive $10,000 student debt relief annually, for up to five years for each year that they stay in that vocational job.

Reminiscent of Australia’s HECS-HELP scheme, Biden’s scheme would see loan repayments become income contingent, with people making more than $25,000 annually expected to contribute 5 per cent of their discretionary income toward their loan – half of the current 10 per cent cap. Those who make $25,000 or less would not be expected to pay back the government and would not accrue interest.

Calls to go further Despite these measures, many – including Democrats – have criticised Biden’s plan for not going far enough in dealing with the student loan debt crisis. Recently, both House and Senate Democrats urged President Biden to 'broadly' forgive up to US$50,000 of federal debt through executive order. Indeed, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly said Biden should take this major step during his first 100 days in office.

er-income households are more likely to attend college in the first place, which skews the figures.

A more useful indicator is to look at the overall data for those who attend college, which shows that Black and African American college graduates owe an average of $25,000 more in student loan debt than their White counterparts.

Despite the evidence contradicting his stance, Biden refuses to change his position, arguing that the extra funds involved in increasing the loan forgiveness could be better used 'to provide for early education for young children that come from disadvantaged circumstances'.

He has also claimed that the powers of executive action are limited.

Regardless, the pressure for more action on student loan debt in particular is building. In one of the latest developments, a multi-state group of Attorneys-General have written to Congress, urging the adoption of two resolutions that call on Biden to cancel up to US$50,000 in federal student loan debt.

However, Biden has refused and even pushed back against his own party — repeating he will only support up to $10,000 of debt forgiveness and would prefer Congress to craft the legislation in support of his plan.

According to media reports, the letter states that many borrowers, struggling with student loan debt, are victims of mercenary for-profit colleges, and have been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. The authors also note there are few options for debt relief if the burden becomes unmanageable. Student loan debt generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy, and few people have been able to get relief through current programs such as Public Service Loan Forgiveness.

He gives a number of reasons for his refusal, but primarily argues that forgiving US$50,000 in student debt would disproportionately benefit students who go to 'elite' private colleges.

Noting the racial disparity in levels of debt, the authors of the letter have also pointed out that forgiving $50,000 in student loan debt could help close some of the racial wealth gap.

The problem is that his argument doesn’t stack up – the US Department of Education’s college scorecard tool shows that only 3% of Harvard students take out federal student loans and, among these students, the median amount owed at graduation is between $9,464 and $25,714 – significantly lower than the average student loan debt of US$32,731.

How Biden responds to the growing pressure will no doubt set the tone for many of the other major economic and public policy problems currently facing the US – many of which have been amplified by COVID. Biden’s current policy platform takes much from the Obama era – which was ineffective in dealing with the issue of student loan debt, and in improving equity and access to post-secondary education.

Although it is correct to say that student loan debt shows higher-income individuals are more likely to have such debt (Federal Reserve data shows that the highest-income 40 per cent of households owe almost 60 per cent of the outstanding education debt and make almost three-quarters of the payments), the reality is that students from high-

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Clearly, there are many that want more direct and extreme action to be taken – whether they have a President willing to do that is far from certain. ◆

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◆ INTERNATIONAL

Education unions defend & promote academic freedom around the world Academic freedom is in a dire state globally, according to attendees at the recent International Further and Higher Education and Research Conference (IFHERC). Organised virtually by Education International (EI), the conference also expressed its solidarity with harassed and imprisoned academics worldwide, especially in Myanmar and Hong Kong.

On the last day of the conference on 10 February, panellists from different EI regions highlighted the experiences and challenges of higher education staff and institutions in their respective countries and regions.

Corporate voices edge out academics Annette Dolan, Teachers' Union of Ireland (TUI) Deputy General Secretary, underlined the importance of academic freedom for scientific progress, the pursuit of truth, research, collaboration among academics, and quality higher education. The COVID-19 pandemic had clearly demonstrated the importance of safeguarding academic freedom as academics have played a major role in addressing a wide range of responses to the crisis. However, serious violations of academic freedom and institutional autonomy are on the rise.

There is a concern in Ireland, as in many other countries, which researcher Michael Shattock refers to as the rise of the managerial class in higher education institutions, where the academic voice is marginalised, as the voice of corporate culture replaces the collegial academic one in university governance.

Segregation a historical threat to academic freedom Derryn Moten from the American Federation of Teachers’ (AFT) explained that attacks on academic freedom are not new. In the US in the 50s and 60s, academics and students were threatened with non-renewal of contracts or removal of their teaching certificates if they

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expressed pro-integration views. They had to resort to action, like the Alabama sit-ins in February 1960.

Level of academic freedom dependent on government Suat Yan Lai, of the Malaysian Academic Movement (MOVE), said that academic freedom in the Asia-Pacific region depends on a country's type of government, be it a democracy or an authoritarian regime. In Malaysia, education unions have joined NGOs to push back the declaration of state of emergency made by the government during the COVID-19 outbreak, in reality an attempt to stay in power.

MOVE has had the support of colleagues from the NTEU and Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

In Hong Kong, she said, imprisonment is the sanction for those exerting their freedom of speech. The Beijing-imposed National Security Law is vague, outlawing secession, subversion, 'terrorism', and 'collusion with foreign forces', and forbidding people from 'inciting hatred against the central and Hong Kong government'.

Academic freedom in Colombia Pedro Hernández, President of the Asociación Sindical de Profesores Universitarios (ASPU) in Colombia, one of the most dangerous countries for academics, mentioned how the report by the UN Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Opinion and Expression, Irene Khan, acknowledged the special role played by academics and academic institutions in democratic society. Without academic freedom, societies lose one of the essential elements of democratic self-governance.

For him, academic freedom means freedom of speech, freedom of critical research, critical thinking. And 'members of academic institutions must be protected from military bullets'. He insisted that, in Latin America, in the higher education sector, there is another pandemic, linked to the COVID-19 one: precarious conditions for academics. 'We need more respect for higher education institutions for more democracy,' he stressed.

He also warned about the increasing power of transnational organisations pro-

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viding education services. This situation leads to issues such as surveillance of classrooms and a drastic reduction in the number of teachers, he said.

Union action able to safeguard academic freedom in Ghana In Ghana, there is academic freedom and freedom of association, and students can study whatever they want to study, stressed Charles Ofosu Marfo, President of the University Teachers Association of Ghana (UTAG). However, the Government tried to pass legislation that would have allowed it to interfere in universities' operations. Through strike and diverse actions, UTAG was able to force the Government to respect academic freedom and abandon the bill.

This respect for academic freedom and basic human and trade union rights does not exist in Eastern Africa, in countries like Sudan, Uganda, and Cameroon, he added, where it is safer to be cautious and not oppose the government views in order to avoid harassment and trouble.

'With the COVID-19 pandemic, we experience many challenges to teaching, in Ghana and throughout Africa,' he insisted.

'With no proper equipment, unstable electricity and Internet connection, we cannot provide quality education online.'

Solidarity with Myanmar & HK In her concluding remarks, EI Deputy General Secretary, Haldis Holst, mentioned the 'thought-provoking' research

by Anna Hogan and Ben Williamson, Pandemic Privatisation in Higher Education: Edtech & University Reform. 'We need to decide on how we, as the educators, should move forward to ensure that edtech is led by our profession,' she said.

Holst further said that 'recent cases in Hong Kong and Myanmar show that repressive regimes won’t let go of a chance to accuse academics and teachers to ‘influence’ their students’ minds with liberal/progressive ideas'. Also, in Turkey, institutional nominations have been bypassed by direct appointments and/or dismissals directly from the President.

Holst adjourned the meeting by calling for support for democracy in Myanmar and Hong Kong. In support, participants turned on their cameras and held up three fingers – a sign of solidarity in the protests in Myanmar. ◆ Education International Watch the presentation of the full EI report here: nteu.info/ei2021

DELEGATE PROFILE ◆

Patrick Hampton

Senior Lecturer, University of Notre Dame Australia I first became a member of the NTEU following a ‘door stop’ conversation with the UNDA Branch Organiser. Having been a member of the State School Teachers’ Union when I worked in WA public schools, I had always intended to join the NTEU when I began in the School of Education in Fremantle but had never had the serious conversation until then.

I later became the NTEU Representative on the campus Workplace Health & Safety (WHS) Committee. NTEU members had played a key role in campaigning on WHS issues at UNDA, including the establishment of the WHS Committee and the development of the WHS Policies and Procedures for the University. Ongoing issues with WHS brought about an ever widening range of conversations about other issues in the workplace and soon after I became the delegate for the School of Education and a member of the UNDA Branch Committee.

Our current situation Notre Dame faced significant financial challenges in 2020 however staff were informed this was not primarily due to COVID-19 or the income lost to international enrolments. The University management responded quickly with an organisational restructure, establishing a new University Executive and operating structure, which included swift action to achieve significant recurrent salary savings. As is the case with most restructures, the professional and academic staff not responsible for the financial unsustainability of the ‘business’ have borne most of the consequences at UNDA – workplace uncertainty, job losses and diminished work conditions.

Anecdotally, nearly 200 staff have left UNDA due to voluntary redundancy, early retirement, and sadly forced redundancies.

Consequently, in 2021 many work areas find they are operating with reduced staff and ‘responsibility creep’ is the new normal where continuing staff are asked to assume additional roles.

Every campaign is an opportunity It was only following campaigning by the NTEU Branch Committee and the unity of members that University management have implemented processes whereby staff are informed about the decisions impacting their work. True consultation remains elusive – despite existing structures being available for this very purpose. There is now a growing solidarity amongst many UNDA staff as they see so much of the University community dramatically changing.

This solidarity is extending to conversations with other NTEU Branches and it has been great to work with other delegates and NTEU officers to help us to develop suitable action. I would recommend these conversations to any delegate in these difficult times – collectively, there is an incredibly deep understanding of the complex higher education industrial agenda if you aren’t afraid to ask.

Challenges ahead There has been a fundamental shift in the culture of the staff at UNDA in the last 12 months. I believe we’re yet to reach the nadir in relations between staff and University management with a recent announcement that further cuts to staffing are required.

The Branch has a critical role in supporting members through this process at this critical time for the higher education sector.

Many of the concerns raised in conversations with staff at UNDA are echoed in the 2020 NTEU State of the Uni Survey.

In addition to campaigning for genuine consultation about workplace change and reducing staffing cuts, our Branch is also working for the fair resourcing of the higher education priorities for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff and students; raising staff superannuation to industry standard; and, addressing alarming rates of staff casualisation.

The NTEU Branch recognises casual staff as some of the most vulnerable in our workplace and has a significant challenge campaigning to support them against exploitation. Participation in the NTEU Bargaining Conference last December was an opportunity for us to see the potential for a UNDA campaign that makes a real difference for staff and students.

Becoming active in the NTEU Anyone who is not currently active in the NTEU only needs to look at the current higher education sector to gauge where things would be without active members. Now more than ever, the most important thing for all Universities is that there are NTEU members available to have those serious conversations with staff to encourage them and to support them. We have a by-line in our work area …'Stay Informed, Seek Support, Support Others!' because when management stop listening, it’s important that union members keep talking. ◆ Find out more at nteu.org.au/delegates

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◆ DELEGATE PROFILE

Brian Pulling

PhD candidate, University of South Australia I am a PhD candidate at the University of South Australia, studying persistent pain. My primary goal is to create tools that help researchers and clinicians better understand the experience of people with pain.

Joining the Union seemed obvious to me. I’m originally from the United States, so I’m in Australia on a student visa. There are profound problems with the American higher education system, too numerous to detail here. Suffice to say that in my experience, Australian higher education is extraordinary in many important ways. That said, there are worrying trends and very recent and unresolved injustices facing university staff and students alike. I am a firm believer that we cannot take our fortunate circumstances for granted. In my view, union membership means speaking out and standing up against inequities.

The word 'unprecedented' has come up too frequently in the last 12 months. We are all learning that we cannot merely 'ride-out' the pandemic, and that large-scale adaptations are required if university education and research are going to survive.

In my limited experience, the NTEU is unique in that it represents all levels of university staff, from tenured professors, to part-time lecturers, all the way down the hierarchical order to post-grad students. This presents a phenomenal opportunity to fight effectively for equitable working conditions and protections for workers regardless of stature.

As a PhD candidate just starting my professional journey in academia, I can see clearly that the challenges facing academics are not going away. We will continue to fight against funding cuts, misinformation, and even corruption in our own institutions.

Too much will be asked of our staff and students, and we will rely more on the compassion of our colleagues in an increasingly uncertain world. The weight of this challenge would crush any individual trying to carry it alone. The NTEU has the unique capacity to bring us together to share that challenge.

There are specific issues that are at the forefront of my mind.

I am extremely concerned about the manipulation and mistreatment of international students who flock to Australian universities in pursuit of otherwise impossible dreams. Funding for research is delayed and insufficient, with resources being wasted because of short-sighted, self-interested intermediaries, and expectations that prevent adequate translation of research to those who stand to benefit most from the findings.

And of course, casual contracts are inconsistent and too often insufficient, putting increased burden on full-time staff, with a direct negative impact on students.

Someone recently asked me why they should join the NTEU. Unions, by definition bring workers together to protect the integrity of their work. I feel strongly that our work is valuable and worth protecting. ◆ Find out more at nteu.org.au/delegates

As an NTEU delegate, I hope to be a resource to my colleagues.

My experience is of course biased and limited, but my first priority is that I use my voice and privilege to amplify the issues of others.

NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION

Become an NTEU

Delegate!

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Delegates

D E L E G AT E S . N T E U. O R G . AU

Delegates are a vital part of the NTEU, maintaining visibility, supporting recruitment & building the strength of the Union.

If you’re interested in becoming a Delegate in your work area, contact your Branch today.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

MY UNION ◆

Gearing up for the next bargaining round NTEU National Councillors met online in December 2020 for a Bargaining Conference and Special National Council, to start preparations for the next round of enterprise bargaining.

This next round will commence in the first half of this year and will be progressively rolled out over the coming 12 months, as current university enterprise agreements reach their expiry.

Key issues The key issues that National Councillors agreed to focus on this bargaining round include: • Improving job security and addressing some of the worst aspects of insecure employment.

• Measures to limit work intensification.

• Real targets for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment and the Indigenisation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander services.

Good outcomes are unlikely to be achieved just by the force of argument across the negotiating table. It needs to be supported by as many staff as possible demonstrating to management that there is widespread support for our claims.

Political campaign adds another dimension Following the harrowing experiences of universities dealing with the COVID-19 crisis in the wake of an uncaring Federal Government, National Councillors agreed on the need for an ongoing political campaign integrated with bargaining, to achieve NTEU’s vision for a higher education sector embedding equity of access, quality education and research outcomes, and protecting academic freedom.

The Morrison Government repeatedly blocked universities from accessing JobKeeper and provided no emergency or relief funding, despite a revenue shortfall of $1.8 billion and over 17,300 jobs lost from the sector in 2020.

It also introduced a new funding regime that more than doubled the cost of some courses, especially in Humanities, and reduced overall funding by $1 billion.

National Councillors agreed that the focus of the Union’s political work should be to gain support in the community, amongst political parties and amongst individual parliamentary candidates for NTEU’s vision for the higher education sector in the lead-up to the next federal election, due sometime between May 2021 and August 2022.

• A modest pay rise.

This will include a range of initiatives and activities aimed at engaging with members, other university staff, students and community organisations, amongst others, around developing the demands we need to make to achieve our vision for higher education.

• Local claims around issues that are deeply felt across staff at a particular institution.

Watch out for further details about what’s happening and how you can get involved. ◆

This is likely to be a difficult bargaining round following the COVID-19 crisis, and if we are to achieve positive outcomes we will need to build our workplace strength by engaging with colleagues and friends who aren’t union members and encouraging them to join and get involved.

Michael Evans, National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

• Greater protections for academic freedom.

Since 1958, the Australian Universities’ Review has been encouraging debate and discussion about issues in higher education and its contribution to Australian public life.

AUR is published twice a year by the NTEU. NTEU members are entitled to receive a free subscription on an opt-in basis .

If you are an NTEU member and would like to receive AUR, please email aur@nteu.org.au

www.aur.org.au ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

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◆ MY UNION

Obituary

Dr Rod Crewther 1945–2020 Dr Rod Crewther, Physicist of note, a very popular teacher and supervisor, dab hand at the piano, author of the legendary Rod’s Council Notes (which provided insight into the workings of the University Council, while such a thing was still possible), a formidable Unionist, and passionate student of University, national and international politics, passed away on 17 December 2020.

Rod was born in Victoria on 23 September 1945. He attended Scotch College in Melbourne, which was followed by was followed by a degrees in Science from the University of Melbourne. After his master’s degree, he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the California Institute of Technology, where he studied under the Nobel Prize winner Murray Gell-Mann. Upon completing his PhD thesis, he was examined by another Nobel Prize winner, Richard Feynman. Rod subsequently proceeded to an enviable career as a scholar and teacher. Cornell University at Ithaca, Fermin National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois were followed by a period in Europe, which included a six-year span at CERN, the famous European Laboratory for Particle Physics in Geneva.

After that, he moved to the University of Berne, and then onto Germany, and the University of Dortmund, and the Max Planck Institute in Munich. This was an early career in which Rod circumnavigated the most important centres of research. He became a specialist in Gauge Theory, which he brought to the University of Adelaide, when he moved there in the early 1980s as a Senior Lecturer; a position that he remained for the rest of his career.

I first met Rod after my arrival at the University of Adelaide in the late 1990s. I was drawn to him as a friend and colleague in a variety of contexts, and at first wondered why it was that he never rose to a status beyond his Senior Lectureship. The answer, to my mind, is a simple one: Rod was intellectually and culturally a free spirit; a rare person who was involved in research, for which he gained pre-eminence, and life. Not for him were some of the mundanities associated with a conventional career, it seemed.

He was a dedicated student of politics. As a Political-Historian myself, I never ceased to be impressed with his grasp of politics, and his insights into history. But it was in the area of living politics; organisational politics, politics of institutions that he excelled. He knew the politics of the University of Adelaide inside-out. I learned so much from him in terms of looking at how things worked, and very often didn’t work, at the University.

In important ways, that is why I followed in his footsteps into Union work, became a Branch President, Divisional President, and a National Councillor, and replaced him as a member of the University Council when he left that body. In

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occupying these various roles, I understood how deeply-felt his influence was after many years in his various posts. I also enjoyed the great pleasure of seeing him regularly at the University of Adelaide Club, where he held a very special place, often chuckling and guffawing as he read through State and National news coverage over cups of strong flat white coffee. His delight in this was infectious!

His work for the Union was in some respects peerless. Thirty years as a representative of his university colleagues, and he became a foundation member of the NTEU. For a number of years before the NTEU came into existence, Rod was involved in the Federated Australian University Staff Association (FAUSA). He was not in favour of the amalgamation, but when it happened, he turned his energies and commitment to the new organisation.

Indeed, this was a sign of another important trait of Rod’s. He did not mull over and over on political losses. He was, in this regard, a political realist, and in the finest sense of the word.

Politics was to him the art of the possible, which was why so many members of the University’s senior administration both feared and made light of him in their private settings.

They at all times wanted the impossible, and it was Rod who very often drew them back from that unrealistic position. In truth, politically he would have made a terrific VC! Rod was Branch President for over twenty years, Vice-President (Academic) and Division President, Assistant Secretary (Academic Staff), Councillor, and National Councillor. He led six rounds of Enterprise Bargaining, representing some 36,000 members of staff. It was so impressive to see him entering a new round with energy and enthusiasm, as if it was his first. For many reasons, including very prominently this role, he was in 2014 awarded SA Unions’ Certificate of Recognition to the Union Movement.

For those who knew and admired Rod for his many qualities, this was indeed a sad day when he died. He had struggled with bouts of illness and treatment for some years, and did so in his normal stoical manner – by not allowing these to overwhelm his spirit. At one stage in the course of his often troubled treatments earlier on that he might lose his hearty laugh. But it did return, much to the delight of those who knew him, and were his friends.

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continued overpage...

MY UNION ◆

Dr Rod Crewther continued...

When he died, I posted a notice on the FaceBook page Overheard at the University of Adelaide, an informal site for those who are interested in matters just below the surface at the University. It attracted over 180 acknowledgments, as well as many comments and shares.

Amongst the latter was from a former student who wrote: 'That’s very sad to hear, had him in the first year for Physics, we were all terrified by his brilliance but he was a pretty decent lecturer, helpful too!' Rod would have liked to read this. It was something all his colleagues would doubtless support the spirit of.

He left behind his beloved wife Galina, his siblings, Pauline and David, Galina's sister and family, as well as step-children and grandchildren.

I end this piece with a little levity, as I’m sure Rod would enjoy himself. It is his playing of Gershwin’s Prelude #2 ahead of one of his lectures. The response from the students in the lecture theatre says it all! Vale, Rod. Watch the video at nteu.info/rodcrewther ◆ Felix Patrikeeff, University of Adelaide

Vale Olga Lorenzo

A fearless unionist, Olga fought and won so many battles on behalf of the Professional Writing and Editing program, and we are all in her debt.

Olga Lorenzo, much loved teacher in the Associate Degree in Professional Writing and Editing (PWE) at RMIT and NTEU union activist died earlier this year.

A hero who loved life, and a woman of style and charisma, Olga will be missed and loved by her students, her colleagues, and her friends. Our love and deepest condolences to Ellen, Anita and all the family.

Our beloved PWE teacher Olga Lorenzo passed away in mid-February, at home, surrounded by her family.

John Reeves, Acting Programs Manager, Associate Degree in Professional Writing and Editing and the PWE teaching team at RMIT

Olga was a brilliant writer. She won the Felix Meyer Scholarship and the Percival Serle Bequest at the University of Melbourne for her writing, as well as grants from Arts Victoria and the Australia Council, and a Varuna Fellowship.

Her stunning, lyrical debut, The Rooms in My Mother's House, was published in 1996 and shortlisted for various literary awards, and her latest book, The Light on the Water received rave reviews.

Olga's 2018 launch speech was a masterpiece.

An exacting, compassionate and inspirational teacher, Olga taught writing at RMIT University and other Melbourne tertiary institutions for 19 years, holding a Masters and a PhD in creative writing from the University of Melbourne. She previously worked as a journalist and sub-editor for The Age.

NTEU is terribly sad to hear of the passing of Olga Lorenzo.

Olga was a sensational trade unionist.

Bold, principled and outspoken, she campaigned for a better working life for Vocational Education (formerly TAFE) teachers at RMIT. From 2015 through to 2016, Olga played a vital, leading role in a gutsy union battle to secure a completely new Enterprise Agreement for RMIT’s teachers breaking them free of a desperately outdated TAFE Award.

Olga was among 20 teachers who had the foresight to identify the looming crisis in their workplace entitlements and approached to join the NTEU. Caught between two stools (VE teachers teaching HE Associate Degrees) they had no union and no (workable) Agreement. Upon joining the NTEU, they signed up 200 of their colleagues and went on to lead a campaign that defeated not one, but two, non-union ballots followed by bans and strikes.

After two years they finally broke through to deliver among the strongest wages and conditions for Vocational Education teachers in Victoria. Olga will be missed by all of her friends and comrades in the NTEU and lives on in her beautiful novels and the inspiring impact she has had on her many students over the years.

Dr Melissa Slee, Victorian Division Secretary Image: Olga speaking at a picket on 8 October 2015, when Vocational Education teachers at RMIT took industrial action for 24 hours to fight for a fair and reasonable Enterprise Agreement. Vocational Education buildings were a ghost town with management posting 'class cancelled' signs.

Vocational Education students also came out to show their support.

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◆ MY UNION

Obituary

Professor Margot Prior Hansen 1937–2020 As children, I am not sure that any of us fully understood what our mother did at work.

For many years, while she was studying, my siblings and I did our homework or went to sleep to the sound of her giving piano and oboe lessons.

Sometimes we attended orchestral concerts she played in.

The work she did at her desk or at the university, though, remained fairly mysterious. In retrospect, it is very hard to imagine how she juggled parenting, studying, teaching and working as a freelance musician, but she was never less than fully present in any of these spheres. As we have grown up, and following her death in August last year, we have come to reflect on and understand how the complex counterpoint between these melody lines constituted and informed her rich creative and intellectual life.

Margot first trained as a musician and teacher at Melbourne University, picking up the oboe with astonishing rapidity when it turned out there was an over-supply of pianists. She met our father, Glen Prior, while she was studying music, and by 1964 they had burgeoning careers as orchestral musicians, and were married with three children: Yoni, David and Sian. Tragically, in November of that year, Glen drowned while saving two fellow Queensland Symphony Orchestra musicians from the surf at Fingal Head in northern NSW. Margot, now a widow with three children under 5 years old, returned to Melbourne and to study, retraining as a psychologist. Her Masters and doctoral degrees addressed a condition about which little was then known, autism, and she published the first Australian journal article on the condition now known as Autism Spectrum Disorder.

She moved rapidly from a tutorship at Monash University to a lectureship at La Trobe University, where she apprenticed as a clinical psychologist while expanding her research interests in child developmental psychology to include ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia, Child Behaviour Problems, Developmental Neuropsychology and Temperament.

Throughout her career there were many ‘firsts’, and many awards. Margot designed and launched the Australian Temperament Study, the first longitudinal study of its kind which continues to this day, and established the first Clinical Psychology Doctoral program in the country. She became the first female Professor of Clinical Psychology in Australia (1989).

Her ground-breaking work and advocacy were recognised in the awards of an OAM in 2004 and Victorian Senior Australian of the Year in 2006. A Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences, she was awarded Doctor of Science (honoris causa)

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for her contributions to scientific and clinical knowledge and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Autism Research. The Margot Prior Wing of the La Trobe University Community Children’s Centre is named in her honour.

Margot used her experience and this recognition as a platform to become, as Professor Cheryl Dissanayake observes, 'a prominent voice for child welfare, peace and social justice initiatives.' (The Age, October 9, 2020). She was a clear-eyed, hard-headed pragmatist, impatient to see evidence-based research applied for the betterment of the lives of real people facing real problems.

A skilled communicator who often expressed frustration at the jargon-laden density of academic writing she wrote newspaper columns and was a prominent media commentator, with the aim of raising the level of public understanding about child development, education, peace-making, the arts and the environment.

She co-founded Psychologists for the Prevention of War (now Psychologists for Peace), co-established the La Trobe Institute for Peace Research and was also a co-founder of the Parenting Research Centre. From 2005 – 2007, she chaired the Social and Human Sciences Network for UNESCO, and travelled to places like India and Vietnam to train clinicians to support children with developmental challenges.

She volunteered in an inner-city Aboriginal Health Service for many years and campaigned for The Greens out of a deep concern for the environment and the effects of climate change.

Margot married John Hansen in 1969 and they formed a large, loving, sometimes chaotic blended family with seven children.

In later years she and John travelled widely across Australia and internationally, and they shared a deep love of the natural world and a concern for the environment. To her enduring sadness, the rise of her career as a scholar pushed her career as a musician progressively to the margins, though she continued to play for pleasure, and to accompany her children and grandchildren, almost to the end of her life.

She was also a lover of art and literature and an artist, though pathologically modest and inclined to attribute her continued overpage...

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

MY UNION ◆

Professor Margot Prior Hansen continued... achievements in all things, though particularly as a musician and a writer, to mere 'hard work'.

She certainly worked hard – indeed continued to work until ill-health made it impossible. She taught, learned from, and collaborated with others, and her work made a difference to many people’s lives. The counterpoint between the melody lines of her life was not always easy to sustain, but her capacity to harmonise them testifies to her understanding that human beings need chords – family, fellowship, meaningful work, communion with nature, and art – in order to flourish.

And working conditions that allow this.

Her lifelong union membership aligned with her deep belief in the critical importance of providing scholars (and all workers) with a context in which they could do their best work, serve others and live productive lives. She frequently

expressed deep gratitude for the education and mentoring she received from other scholars through her career, and returned that in spades in her collaborations with, and mentoring of, other scholars.

Her three children have all gone on to work in universities and she commiserated with us often over the incremental erosion of resources for teaching and research and the corporatisation of the sector. Reflecting on her early years as a scholar, and what those gentler conditions and the generous encouragement of her mentors and colleagues helped her to achieve, she would say, 'We need time to think!' ◆ Dr Yoni Prior is a Honorary Senior Fellow (Theatre) in the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music at the University of Melbourne, and Margot Prior Hansen's daughter.

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New NTEU staff Please welcome new staff in our offices.

Dom Rowe National Office Dom Rowe took on the new role of Director (Campaigning & Organising) in the National Office in February.

Guy Noble

Monique Blasiak

NSW Division

ACT Division

Guy started as an Industrial Officer in NSW on 18 January, He has been a lawyer since 2004, and has practised in a number of law firms as well as some of the largest industrial associations in Australia and has over 10 years IR experience.

Dom started her working life as a casual academic from there she worked with a range of unions covering cricket ball makers to oil refinery workers to transport workers to childcare workers.

Guy gained a wealth of experience working on awards during the award modernisation process and the 2012 and 2014 reviews. Prior to entering the law he worked in a number of different fields and has been a multi-media teacher/ trainer and an English language teacher in Europe and Australia.

For the last five years she worked at Greenpeace heading up their campaign work across 19 countries.

Guy and his partner have two daughters – with the eldest starting her undergrad at Sydney in March 2021.

ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

Previous to joining the NTEU, Monique worked as a Political Adviser for five years, with a particular focus on electorate strategy and community engagement.

Throughout this time she also worked on various elections as a Campaign Manager and as a National Field Organiser, and is keen to bring this experience to the union movement.

Monique believes that unions are vital to building an egalitarian and equitable society. She also understands that the rights we enjoy today were fought for by union members and we need to continue to stand up these rights for the next generation of workers. continued overpage...

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◆ MY UNION

New NTEU staff continued...

Gaylee Kuchel Tasmanian Division Gaylee is the new Southern Division Organiser at the University of Tasmania.

Before joining the NTEU, Gaylee was a union delegate within the healthcare industry, while, ironically, being a university student at UTAS. Previously, Gaylee has worked in volunteer advocacy roles as a consumer representative. She looks forward to the new challenges this role will take, supporting members in a post-pandemic tertiary working environment.

Ida Nursoo NSW Division Ida Nursoo started as an Industrial Officer on a fixed term basis in the NSW Division in January. Ida completed a PhD at ANU and has worked as a sessional academic teaching courses in humanities, social sciences and law.

Ida has also worked as a solicitor in various Community Legal Centres in the ACT and NSW. Most recently, Ida worked with the Migrant Employment Legal Service at

the Inner City Legal Centre, Sydney. One of Ida’s goals at NTEU is to achieve secure work conditions and fair pay for tertiary education staff and to uphold academic freedom.

Henry Booth, formerly of ECU Branch, was appointed to the WA Division Organiser position in October 2020.

Lisbeth Latham has moved to the ACU Branch Industrial Organiser position. ◆

NATIONAL OFFICE STAFF

Elliott Dalgleish Victorian Division Elliott Dalgleish started as an Industrial Officer in November. He is a unionist, lawyer and is passionate about social justice, community legal assistance and advocacy for vulnerable clients.

Preceding his employment with the NTEU, he gained significant ‘hands-on’ experience as an Industrial Officer for the meat workers' union (AMIEU), as a solicitor in a private practice law firm, and as a barrister at the private Bar. Prior to joining the legal profession in 2008, Elliott worked as a saxophonist, academic, administrator and teacher.

Staff movements Amity Lynch has transferred from the University of Sydney to NSW Division Office.

Tamara Ryan has been appointedto the position of ACT Division Organiser as a parental leave replacement to 1/6/21.

Director (Industrial & Legal) Wayne Cupido Senior Legal Officer Kelly Thomas National Industrial Officer (Research & Projects)

Ken McAlpine National Industrial Officer Campbell Smith Industrial Support Officer Renee Veal Director (Policy & Research) Policy & Research Officers

National A&TSI Director National A&TSI Organiser

Paul Kniest Terri MacDonald Kieran McCarron Adam Frogley Celeste Liddle

Director (Campaigning & Organising) Dom Rowe National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

Michael Evans National Organiser (Publications) Paul Clifton Communications Organiser (Digital) Jake Wishart Education & Training Organiser Helena Spyrou Executive Manager Peter Summers National Membership Officer Melinda Valsorda ICT Network Engineer Tam Vuong Database Programmer/Data Analyst Uffan Saeed Payroll Administrator/HR Assistant Jo Riley Manager, Office of General Secretary & President

Anastasia Kotaidis Executive Officer (Meeting & Events) Tracey Coster Admin Officer (Membership & Campaigns)

Julie Ann Veal Receptionist & Admin Support Leanne Foote Acting Finance Manager Justin Hester Senior Finance Officer Gracia Ho Finance Officers Alex Ghvaladze, Lee Powell, Tamara Labadze, Daphne Zhang, Jay Premkumar

Please update your NTEU membership details if:

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Office, building, campus etc.

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If your payroll deductions stop without your authority, please urgently contact your institution’s Payroll Department

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ADVOCATE VOL. 28 NO. 1 ◆ MARCH 2021

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