Advocate vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au • ISSN 1329-7295
On the higher education policy merry-go-round ɓɓGender equity targetted ɓɓTrans-Pacific Partnership ɓɓVictorian election ɓɓQueensland election ɓɓInnovation funding
ɓɓKylie Belling, NTEU Lecture 2014 ɓɓNot Closing the Gap 2015 ɓɓModern Award review ɓɓInsecure Work Conference ɓɓERA: Why not just say no?
ɓɓCopyright vs open access ɓɓWhich SuperCasual are you? ɓɓGreece veers left ɓɓAcademic freedom ɓɓ... and much more.
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Contents Cover image: Volunteer in front of NTEU posters at Victoria University open day. Photo by Toby Cotton
2
Ethical investment of funds From the General Secretary
3
Unwrapping the ‘neoliberal embrace’ Editorial, Jeannie Rea
Advocate ISSN 1321-8476 Published by National Tertiary Education Union ABN 38 579 396 344 Publisher Grahame McCulloch Editor Jeannie Rea Production Paul Clifton Editorial Assistance Adrienne Bradley Feedback, advertising and other enquiries: advocate@nteu.org.au All text and images © NTEU 2015 unless otherwise stated.
NTEU National Office, PO Box 1323, Sth Melbourne VIC 3205 1st floor, 120 Clarendon St, Sth Melbourne VIC phone (03) 9254 1910 fax (03) 9254 1915 email national@nteu.org.au Division Offices www.nteu.org.au/divisions Branch Offices www.nteu.org.au/branches
p. 22
p. 26
FEATURES
34 Award review: Hours of work will be a key focus
UPDATE 4
Pyne’s first HERRA bill defeated, but MkII still hanging around Go Home On Time Day
5
NTEU Lecture: Kylie Belling University sector buoys Australian public sector wage growth
6
Productivity Commission review will focus on employee protections Bargaining update NTEU at ECU O-Week
7
Bargaining State of Play, March 2015
8
Unions pivotal in Labor’s Vic win Post-election developments in TAFE
9
Queensland election a stunning rejection of austerity
10 Gender equity reporting targeted 11
24 Beyond HERR – investing in students
12 New Defence Trade Controls laws
The HERR Bill will impact domestic students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
New door opens for TAFE and Adult Education bargaining UNICASUAL NEWS 15 Which SuperCasual are you? A&TSI NEWS
NTEU members may opt for ‘soft delivery’ (email notification of online copy rather than mailed printed version). Details at nteu.org.au/ softfdelivery
A quick guide to the Government’s Bills.
22 False and misleading advertising
14 International visas and education
Advocate is available online as a PDF at nteu.org.au/advocate and an e-book at www.issuu.com/nteu
19 HERRA vs HERR
NTEU Expert Seminar series 2015
13 The 6-step guide to getting better pay and working conditions
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.
Christopher Pyne’s continuing attempts to negotiate his higher education changes through the Senate are going round and round and not getting anywhere in a hurry.
Women’s Action Committee 2015
Nobel laureates slam innovation funding
Environment ISO 14001
18 The higher ed policy merry-go-round
16 Nothing new in Closing the Gap 2015 17 Janine jumps at jillaroo gig 17 First A&TSI MPs in Queensland p. 9
25 End game for TPP? The Coalition Government’s free trade agenda continues with little public alarm despite the massive implications.
26 Insecure Work Conference Participants in the NTEU National Insecure Work Conference in Hobart last November were empowered by the experience of meeting with others precariously employed like them.
32 Resisting ERA. Why not just say no? After two rounds of ERA, Andrew Bonnell believes the evidence is now in that it is doing more harm than good.
33 Whither peer reviewing? The editors of 43 academic journals to write to universities and funding bodies calling for institutional recognition and support.
p. 46
From early March, the NTEU will have its claims before the Fair Work Commission as part of the first four yearly review of our Modern Awards.
36 Copyright & open access debate Angela Daly and Leigh Blackall explore what fair use changes might mean for Australian academics.
38 Shining a light on higher education AUR endeavours to bring to its readers articles, opinions and reviews about what is happening in contemporary higher education.
39 Greece veers left New Greek PM Alexis Tsipras has placed emphasis on education reforms.
Yanis vs Europe Former NTEU member Yanis Varoufakis is Greece’s new Finance Minister.
40 Academic freedom defended in Canada 41 US adjuncts stage Walk Out Day COLUMNS 42 Queensland votes: SM 1, MSM 0 News from the Net, by Pat Wright 43 ‘How could Australia not think of investing heavily in science? This is just insanity.’ Lowering the Boom, by Ian Lowe 44 The sessional generation and nostalgia for the uni of the past Thesis Whisperer, Inger Mewburn 45 A dirty international deal that could harm education Letter from NZ, Sandra Grey, TEU YOUR UNION 46 NTEU Branch Presidents Conference 48 Farewell Stephen Darwin 49 NTEU art show celebrates CDU’s anniversary Members in Australia Day honours 50 New NTEU staff 51 Obituary: Graeme Hugo
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 1
From the General Secretary Grahame McCulloch, General Secretary
Union moves to ethical investment of members’ funds Although the Union has a core obligation to maximise investment returns on members’ funds, it also needs to ensure that investment is ethical and sustainable, with a particular focus on labour and environmental standards. This has been the subject of ongoing discussion at the Union’s national Staffing and Finance Committee against a backdrop of growing concern about these and other ethical investment issues amongst many NTEU members. Getting the balance of priorities right is increasingly important with NTEU now generating revenues of $20 million, and holding financial assets of nearly $4 million. The Committee considered important policy and technical issues, including: • The need for financially sustainable investment returns on members’ funds. Part of any investment strategy usually involves setting a benchmark return against bond yield and inflation assumptions. The current low inflation and low interest rate environment makes this a difficult task.
Until recently an environmentally and socially sustainable investment portfolio might typically have a large exposure to Government bonds and securities with reasonable rates of return, and a smaller growth oriented component exposed to markets. However, in today’s abnormal conditions Government cash or bonds are currently yielding for medium term debt around 2.3 per cent per annum and an Australian corporate bond is yielding around 5.2 per cent per annum In contrast, typical balanced portfolio options yielded between 10 per cent and 12 per cent per annum in the last year. For further comparison purposes, a World Bank green bond (kangaroo) is yielding 8.5 per cent per annum • Whether there should be negative screening and/or positive investment measures, and if so, the best balance between them. • Confirmation that companies or investment selected are involved in ethical and sustainable practices (e.g. some argue that World Bank Green Bonds are ‘greenwash’).
The Union’s National Executive will consider a detailed final policy in August based on three key principles: • A long term investment target of inflation plus 3 per cent. • A mix of negative screening (e.g. tobacco, armaments, alcohol, uranium, animal testing, gambling, fossil fuels) and positive investment measures (e.g. renewable energy, energy efficiency, mass public transport, sustainable agriculture). • A diversified portfolio with an appropriate balance of sectors and stocks. Grahame McCulloch, General Secretary gmcculloch@nteu.org.au Members may be interested that UniSuper which had a small indirect exposure to Transfield Services (a company involved in refugee detention) divested itself of this holding for commercial reasons in late 2014.
• The need to have good professional advice before finally proceeding.
Do you have ideas about recruitment opportunities for the NTEU at your place of work? If you do, please get in touch with your local NTEU Branch office. NATIONAL EXECUTIVE
NATIONAL OFFICE STAFF
National President Jeannie Rea Vice-President (Academic) Andrew Bonnell Vice-President (General Staff) Michael Thomson
Industrial Unit Coordinator Sarah Roberts National Industrial Officers Linda Gale, Wayne Cupido, Susan Kenna, Elizabeth McGrath
General Secretary National Assistant Secretary
Grahame McCulloch Matthew McGowan
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) Policy Committee Chair Terry Mason National Executive: Stuart Bunt, Carolyn Cope, Gabe Gooding, Genevieve Kelly, Colin Long, Virginia Mansel Lees, Kelvin Michael, Michael McNally, Anne Price, Kevin Rouse, Cathy Rytmeister, John Sinclair, Ron Slee, Mel Slee, Lolita Wikander
Policy & Research Coordinator Policy & Research Officers
Paul Kniest Jen Tsen Kwok, Terri MacDonald
National A&TSI Coordinator National A&TSI Organiser
Adam Frogley Celeste Liddle
National Organiser National Publications Coordinator Media & Communications Officer National Membership Officer Education & Training Officers
page 2 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
Michael Evans Paul Clifton Courtney Sloane Melinda Valsorda Ken McAlpine, Helena Spyrou
Executive Manager Peter Summers ICT Network Engineer Tam Vuong Database Programmer/Data Analyst Ray Hoo Payroll Officer Jo Riley Executive Officer (Gen Sec & President)Anastasia Kotaidis Executive Officer (Administration) Tracey Coster Admin Officer (Membership & Campaigns) Julie Ann Veal Administrative Officer (Resources) Renee Veal Receptionist & Administrative Support Leanne Foote Finance Manager Glenn Osmand Senior Finance Officer Gracia Ho Finance Officers Alex Ghvaladze, Tamara Labadze, Lee Powell, Daphne Zhang National Growth Organisers
Gaurav Nanda, Rifai Abdul, Priya Nathan
Editorial Jeannie Rea, National President
Unwrapping the ‘neoliberal embrace’* In the current industrial and political environment, I often hear the complaint from members and others, that NTEU is always sounding oppositional; we always want to stop something. We are accused of being negative and resistant to change. This is not very surprising considering that what we are seeing in our workplaces and across the country is the deliberate erosion of employment conditions along with the ongoing withdrawal of government from supporting public institutions and programs in favour of protecting the accumulation of even more by the already wealthy. Australia’s proportion of public spending and taxation as a share of GDP is amongst the lowest of OECD members. Our universities have opened their doors to more and more diverse students and staff, but at the same time they are choked in the neoliberal paradigm of reimagining education and research as commodities and students are customers. Vice-Chancellors no longer even aspire to be educational leaders, but as one assured me, they are CEOs of transnational corporations. ‘Protecting the brand’ and accepting silly slogans as recommended by marketing consultants seems to be the way that competitive advantage is to be gained whilst academic endeavour is judged in terms of its usefulness. Entrepreneurial success is valued over creating, challenging and disseminating knowledge. Indeed knowledge is now an ‘economy’. Academic, general and professional staff have got the message very clearly that they are not wanted if they do not acquiesce. In particularly gloomy moments, we too readily dwell upon how little influence we are having upon the adverse changes to higher education, and the role of the public university. Some like to hark back to the old days, but this is a conservative view both in terms of casting back to the elite liberal university with its pale, male visage, and because it ignores the positive changes for which our union can share much credit. Amongst these are industrial success in increasing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment, in leading paid parental leave provisions in Australia and
championing women in education and research, and in maintaining decent salaries and conditions including fair employment practices. We should applaud our constancy on a raft of policy issues from academic freedom to student rights, and enforcing high standards of education and research. But while we blinked, staff and student rights to participate in university governance has been severely eroded with faculty boards abolished, academic boards stacked with management appointees and constant attacks on staff and student representation on councils/senates. The concept of the democratic university is not even part of the debate these days. Towards the end of our recent gathering of NTEU Branch Presidents (see report, p.46), participants were asked: ‘What will you do differently when you return to your Branch?’ One respondent wrote, ‘Have a big think about articulating a succinct vision for higher education beyond just reacting to external events.’ Professor Raewyn Connell’s speech at last year’s National Council meeting on the knowledge economy and university workers excited delegates. She proposed a Possible U as a democratic workplace, modest in demeanour, multiple in epistemology and ambitious intellectually. The clear message I get from NTEU members is that we are at the stage of needing to go beyond identifying and analysing what is wrong and working at holding the line. We need to start a process of developing and articulating an alternative vision for contemporary Australian higher education. But we are not starting from nothing. There is much that is implicit in our current bargaining and political positions which says what we think about higher education – and also about the role of higher education and our Union in progressive social change. In the environment of the current funding debate, the Government (and Universities Australia) sought to posit the debate as deregulation or nothing. NTEU, along with others, immediately responded by saying that there are alternatives. In our 2015 Federal Budget submission, we argued for a fairer and more accountable funding model which puts the onus on universities to justify their enrolment of students by demonstrating that they could provide a high quality education in an inclusive environment (see report, p.18).
We are arguing that not only are we opposed to deregulation of fees and government subsidises to private providers, but we have also consistently spoken out against a free market in undergraduate places. It is not good enough for universities to just keep enrolling students to get the CSP funding and then herd students into massive seminars and push them online. The NTEU will continue to advocate for governments to prioritise funding public education at all levels. These are political decisions and higher education funding is not an optional extra, as it has been treated by governments. Even in economic rationalist terms, this makes sense. Graduates are needed for more and more jobs and nobody disputes that a better educated society is physically and socially healthier. In our Budget submission we started from certain assumptions about access, inclusiveness and educational quality as underpinning a funding model for public higher education. Also implicit is support for a mass system. We repeatedly restate the proposition that public universities are a public good and have responsibilities to act in the public interest. As the union representing higher education and allied workers, we focus upon the working conditions and remuneration of staff. We make the links between precarious work and the quality of education, research and engagement. We also point to the threats to ‘academic freedom’ and freedom of intellectual inquiry when staff do not have security of employment to fearlessly teach and research the hard stuff. So, when we turn our attention to a vision for higher education or a blueprint for the 21st century university, the NTEU has already put two decades into debating and developing our policy positions and they underpin our industrial and political work. If you are interested in pursuing this discussion, please email me. Jeannie Rea, National President jrea@nteu.org.au *Margaret Thornton, 2014, Through a glass darkly: the social sciences look at the neoliberal university, ANU Press, p2.
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 3
Update Pyne’s first HERRA bill defeated, but MkII still hanging around When the Coalition Government’s Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill (HERRA) was defeated in the Senate on 2 December 2014 the relief was short-lived. Education Minister Pyne introduced a new version of the bill into the House of Representatives the very next day, calling it HERRA Mk11. Minister Pyne spelled out that he wanted crossbench senators to think very carefully about the future of higher education in Australia over the Christmas break, and then return to Parliament in 2015 ready to vote. The new version of the bill included a miserly structural adjustment fund for regional universities, the removal of the market interest rate, and a commitment not to charge new parents any interest for a period of 5 years. While aspects of the new bill may have appealed to some crossbench interests, the Government’s taxpayer-funded advertising campaign also angered them. The Government has become increasingly desperate to get the main planks of the bill through – deregulation of tuition fees and the extension of public funding to private providers – and there is even talk of cutting the size of the 20 per cent CSP cut announced in the Budget last year. This would mean a massive increase in higher education funding if coupled with the extension of CSP funding to sub degrees and private providers. So much for the budget repair rationale! The defeat of the first version followed a sustained campaign that brought together the NTEU, students, international experts, political parties and community groups. Voting against the bill were the Labor, the Greens, Palmer United, and
Go Home On Time Day The NTEU marked Go Home On Time Day on 19 November last year focusing upon the vast amount of unpaid overtime performed by university staff. Go Home On Time Day is an initiative of the Australia Institute and aims to draw attention to the $110 billion worth of free labour Australians donate each year, as well as deteriorating work-life balances. independent senators Jacqui Lambie and Nick Xenophon. At the time of writing there is little to indicate that those that voted against the first HERRA Bill will change their vote and they are likely to be joined by further crossbenchers including Senator Muir. The essential unfairness of deregulation and shifting of Government responsibility to fund higher education onto students continues to be the critical issue. This oppositional group sent the bill to a further Senate Review Committee, but this time focusing upon the advertising campaign and opening up the debate to sustainable alternative funding models. The wheels are falling off the Government’s campaign and their major advocates including prominent Vice-Chancellors are becoming more isolated. The absurdity of sector leaders actually supporting funding cuts to their sector is probably a first. Other Vice-Chancellors are now coming out and admitting that with all the amendments required to ameliorate the damage of deregulation and government-subsidised private competition, alternatives to deregulation have to be found. The NTEU will continue to fight against the destruction of our publicly-funded public university system and $100,000 degrees that will leave some indebted for decades and others abandoning all hope of a university education. Jeannie Rea, National President Courtney Sloane, Media Officer nteu.org.au/degreemortgage See also: Paul Kniest’s in depth report on the Coalition Government’s higher education changes, pp.18–22.
page 4 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
General and professional staff alone donate over $200 million to their employers in unpaid overtime each year. That’s seven extra hours each week. On top of this, general and professional staff face increasing workloads and a lack of recognition for the work they do perform leading to higher levels of stress and lower morale.
To mark Go Home On Time Day, the NTEU developed a short video to highlight the issue of unpaid overtime in our universities, released on 18 November via YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and our website. The video was embedded in news coverage of the day, leading to over 120,000 people being reached with our message about unpaid overtime. The Union also put together a website in the lead-up to the day with resources outlining just how far reaching the problem of unpaid overtime is. Watch ‘Heart of the University’ video www.nteu.org.au/gohomeontimeday
Update NTEU Lecture: Kylie Belling
What has education done for me lately? On 10 December 2014, Kylie Belling delivered the 4th annual NTEU Lecture in Melbourne. Kylie is a Yorta Yorta/Wiradjuri/Bangarang woman born and raised in Melbourne. An accomplished actor and entertainer, in a career spanning over 20 years Kylie has performed in numerous film, television and theatre productions, including Redfern Now, The Sapphires, The Flying Doctors, The Genie from Down Under and Until the End of the World. Kylie was co-founder and Artistic Director of Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Cooperative, won a Deadly Award in 2006 for Outstanding Achievement in Literature, and was a recipient of a Koorie Women Mean Business Arts Award and Sidney Myer Performing Arts Indigenous Individual Award. Heavily involved with the Victorian Indigenous community, Kylie has held roles at numerous Koori community and government organisations, working across a number of industries including education, health, arts, culture and justice. She recently accepted a position as a Senior Policy Advisor for the Office of the Commissioner for Aboriginal Children & Young People.
University sector buoys Australian public sector wage growth Higher education bargaining again leads the economy, according to latest Wage Price Index figures. As reported in the Department of Education’s Trends in Enterprise Bargaining
In delivering the 2014 NTEU Lecture, Kylie gave an entertaining and heartfelt account of her life and education experiences. One of four Aboriginal siblings adopted by white parents growing up in the 1960s in what was then the ‘small township’ of Keilor on the outskirts of Melbourne, Kylie is a ‘one per center’ – part of the one per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children adopted by white parents that was actually successful. Kylie described her educational journey as ‘haphazard and opportunistic’, with no long term education or careers plans. She is indebted to the Whitlam Government’s education reform agenda, which enabled her to leave high school in year 11 and attend a secretarial college as part of an Aboriginal Employment Program. This resulted in her first job as a secretary for Professor Geoffrey Blainey in the Department of History at Melbourne University. It was about this time that she observed that ‘acting looked easy – I could do that’, and she successfully auditioned for a three year Diploma of the Arts at the Victorian College of the Arts Drama School.
Report for the September quarter 2014, public sector wage outcomes averaged 3.9% annually. The Department of Education explained this high figure (0.4% above the average across industries) as stemming largely from university and local government deals which delivered 4% or more annually. By contrast, private sector wage growth had remained below 3% for six quarters in a row as at September last year. Source: Trends in Enterprise Bargaining, September Quarter 2014, Department of Employment January 2015.
‘It was the craft of acting that politicised me,’ Kylie related, noting that the roles she played were invariably written by non-Aboriginal writers and left a huge cultural gulf. This changed when she attended the second National Aboriginal Playwrights Conference in 1989, where she was taught how to use the power of her Aboriginality through the arts. This led to her co-founding the Ilbijerri Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Theatre Cooperative, producing shows that were written, directed and acted by Aboriginal people, for Aboriginal people.
So what has education done for Kylie? ‘It’s politicised me, it’s empowered me, and through institutions like IKE (Institute of Koorie Education) that embrace Aboriginal ways of learning, it has allowed me to continue my lifelong learning experience. I’ve been a student for much of my adult life, within and outside of a classroom. Formal education has enabled me to work with my community, to really learn, and to gain my Aboriginal community qualifications; and that’s what really counts.’ ‘So, for me, that’s what many educational institutions need to embrace – when you prepare an Aboriginal student to go forth and share their knowledge with their community and be an agent of change if required, they need to have been given an opportunity to learn about all the issues impacting their communities.’ ‘The voice and needs of community must be heard in our education system. It’s pretty basic; to me just as basic as teaching and acceptance of diversity. The younger a person is able to look through a different cultural lens, the better.’ Michael Evans, National Organiser Watch a video of Kylie’s lecture at
nteu.org.au/lecture
Photo Michael Evans
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 5
Update Productivity Commission review will focus on employee protections The Abbott Government has recently announced the Productivity Commission will be conducting a ‘root and branch’ review of the Australian workplace relations system. The breadth of the inquiry’s terms of reference will make it one of the most comprehensive in decades. While ‘WorkChoices’ is indeed ‘dead, buried and cremated’ in the Liberal vocabulary, the essence of that policy is in the very DNA of the Liberal Party. There can be no doubt the Coalition will seek to cherry-pick recommendations from the inquiry as the basis for a new assault on working people and the unions that represent them. The issues paper, released in January, reveals the inquiry will focus broadly on bargaining, safety nets and other employee protections. Most of the politically relevant issues are unlikely to directly affect our members, with the Government fixing its cross hairs on the minimum wage and penalty rates.
Our sector is fortunate enough not be reliant on such statutory protections. Nevertheless, the slated changes ought to be of concern to everyone in the community passionate about fairness in the workplace. The Productivity Commission has a commitment to impartiality, and insists it will not seek to benefit any section of the community over another. However, its predispositions are evident in the language it uses. References to justice, equity, fairness, inequality, poverty and gender are virtually non-existent in the issues paper. Instead, the paper is littered with terms like ‘flexibility’ and other euphemisms for workplace insecurity. It is therefore essential that the interests of working people are brought to the attention of the Commission. The NTEU, in conjunction with the ACTU, will be taking the opportunity to make submissions highlighting important issues such as protected industrial action, the ‘better off overall’ test, protections against unfair dismissal and adverse action, and the risks associated with broadening individual employment contracts.
Submit your views The NTEU encourages members to submit their views or comments. Submissions can be made through the Productivity Commission’s website, and can be made anonymously if so desired. The deadline for comments or submissions is 13 March 2015. The final report is due to be released on 30 November 2015. Matt Raymond, National Industrial Unit intern www.pc.gov.au/inquiries/current/ workplace-relations/issues
Bargaining update A round-up of developments in enterprise bargaining over the last few months. University of Wollongong Union members have secured a strong agreement at the University of Wollongong for Professional Staff, including a pay rise or 3.15% p.a.. Academic Staff members at Wollongong are also hopeful that agreement will be reached on the outstanding matters over the coming weeks.
Macquarie University At Macquarie University, the Union has agreed to enter into intensive negotiations with management to finalise an agreement for Professional Staff.
Other sites Elsewhere, negotiations have been progressing well at the University of the Sunshine Coast and Federation University Australia. Members at the University of New South Wales and Southern Cross University are continuing their industrial campaign in pursuit of terms and conditions that are comparable to those achieved across the sector. Wayne Cupido, National Industrial Officer
NTEU at ECU O-Week Edith Cowan University Branch Secretary Cathy Moore talks to students about the 4 March rally against higher education reforms (below, left), and WA Division Industrial Officer Donna Shepherdson with ECU students (below, right).
page 6 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
Update Bargaining State of Play, March 2015 Round 6 Bargaining – State of Play March 2015 University
Casual academics
Academic workloads
General Staff Claims
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Employment
Expiry Date
Annual wage growth (expiry to expiry)
More secure positions
Hours-based cap on teaching
Enforceable classifications
Development or mobility
Employment strategy / targets
Monitoring Committee
Curtin
30/06/16
4.25%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
CQU
30/06/16
4.30%
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
ECU
30/06/16
4.25%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
Sydney
1/03/17
3.20%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
Deakin
30/06/16
3.50%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
JCU
30/06/16
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
CSU
31/12/16
2.75%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✘
✘
ANU
30/06/16
3.15%
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
UCAN
1/06/15
3.30%
✔
✔
✔
✘
✘
✔
Griffith (Aca)
30/09/16
3.15%
✔
✔
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
Griffith (Gen)
30/09/16
3.15%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
VU
31/12/17
3.20%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
CDU
30/12/16
3.15%
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
UTAS
30/06/16
3.15%
n/a
✔
✔
✘
✔
✔
Melbourne
30/06/17
3.20%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
RMIT
30/06/16
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
ACU
30/06/17
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
Murdoch
30/06/16
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
UniSA
9/06/18
3.40%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
La Trobe
1/01/17
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
QUT (Aca)
1/03/17
3.00%
✘
✘
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
QUT (Gen)
1/03/17
3.00%
n/a
n/a
✔
✘
✔
✔
UWS (Aca)
31/01/17
3.20%
✔
✔
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
UWS (Gen)
31/01/17
3.20%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
UNE (Gen)
1/10/17
3.25%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
UWA (Aca)
30/09/16
3.15%
n/a
✔
n/a
n/a
✘
✘
UWA (Gen)
30/09/16
3.15%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✘
✘
UQ
30/04/17
3.30%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
Flinders
30/06/17
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✘
✔
MQ (Aca)
30/06/17
3.15%
✔
✔
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
UNE (Aca)
1/10/17
3.25%
✘
✔
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
Monash
30/06/17
3.20%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
UTS (Gen)
2/05/17
3.20%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
Adelaide
31/03/17
3.15%
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
UTS (Aca)
2/05/17
3.20%
✔
✔
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
Newc (Gen)
30/06/17
3.15%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
Newc (Aca)
30/06/17
3.15%
✔
✔
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
USQ
30/06/17
3.15%
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
✔
UoW (Gen)
1/03/18
3.15%
n/a
n/a
✔
✔
✔
✔
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 7
Update Post-election developments in TAFE The new Victorian ALP Government has started reasonably well with TAFE. Late last year, the NTEU’s protests – including members protesting at a local member’s office – regarding Bendigo-Kangan TAFE’s plans to make over 100 staff redundant contributed to the Government intervening to impose a moratorium on redundancies in the sector. This moratorium continues.
Unions pivotal in Labor’s Victorian election win The Victorian Division put substantial effort into the Victorian Trades Hall Council’s ‘We Are Union’ campaign, which played a major role in removing the Napthine Coalition Government after only one term. The campaign’s message was simple: in order to protect emergency services, education and other important public services voters needed to put the Coalition last. The Trades Hall campaign targeted six marginal seats and managed to achieve sufficient swings in each of them to ensure that Coalition members were not returned. Given how close the final margin in the election was, the six seats were vital to the change of government. The campaign was highly successful because it was supported by all unions, was well resourced, well planned, coordinated by dedicated and highly proficient staff,
engaged union members in all activities and focused on grassroots organising. Over the duration of the campaign, Trades Hall accumulated over 5000 volunteer activists. Key unions, including the United Firefighters Union (UFU) and the paramedics’ union, mobilised large numbers of their members to participate in activities like doorknocking. The devastation of TAFE by the former government was also a major issue during the campaign. The AEU and NTEU were key unions in this regard. However, while some NTEU members and staff participated in campaign activities, it is clear that we still have a long way to go to achieve the same level of activism as the UFU or paramedics. The success of the campaign has not gone unnoticed by the new ALP Government or by the Coalition. Indeed, even on election night defeated Coalition politicians identified ‘the unions’ as having played an important role in their downfall. Since the election Premier Daniel Andrews has been very open to consultation with unions, as have ministers. While we always view relations with governments with caution, the ALP’s approach so far is much better than the Coalition’s. One of the real positives for the NTEU is the Government’s commitment to restore staff and student representatives to university councils. We will continue to push this hard and keep members updated on progress. Colin Long, Victorian Division Secretary www.nteu.org.au/vic
Image: ABC
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The Andrews Government has also announced a $20 million TAFE rescue package to deal with the most pressing problems. Given the stand-alone TAFEs have gone from collectively having more than $100 million in surpluses in 2011 to being over $70 million in deficit in 2014, this money – and probably more – is sorely needed. The Government has committed to returning over $300 million in funding for TAFE’s public service functions. This will be particularly welcome for PACCT staff, who suffered disproportionately from the former government’s cutting of full service provider funding. The other major announcement is the establishment of a review of TAFE funding, to be chaired by the former CEO of Holmesglen TAFE, Bruce Mckenzie. While such a review is welcome, the appointment of a chair who enthusiastically embraced ‘contestable’ funding is viewed with some caution. And, while business is represented through VECCI, no union nominee has been appointed. While we are pleased that the Andrews Government has said that it wants to strengthen TAFE’s role in the vocational education sector, we remain disappointed that it shows no real appetite to review and wind back the contested funding model that has diverted hundreds of millions of dollars into the pockets of often dodgy private operators and has undermined TAFE institutes. The NTEU will make a submission to the review and encourages members with an interest to do the same.
Update Queensland election a stunning rejection of austerity Queensland’s snap election was called at a time when many NTEU members were either on leave or extremely busy with enrolments. The Queensland Council of Unions (QCU) ran a very focused campaign around asset sales and cuts to essential services. The message: number every square, put the Liberal National Party (LNP) last. The NTEU contributed to the television campaign by funding ads in Townsville and Cairns (where JCU has campuses) and Central Queensland. It is worth noting
that every seat in the Townsville and Cairns regions were lost by the LNP. Perhaps, like many of you, I was surprised by the result. Switching over to the ABC at half time from the Asian Cup final, I couldn’t believe the results (apparently Antony Green couldn’t believe them either). We now have a minority government in Queensland with Labor holding 44 seats and ruling with the assistance of long-time independent, Peter Wellington. At least until the Ferny Grove electoral irregularities are dealt with. What can we take from this stunning electoral result? I am not a political economist, but perhaps this is a rejection of the slash and burn austerity prescription of neo-liberal economics? Ever the optimist, I sus-
pect I am over-egging things. Regardless, the result in Queensland, and earlier in Victoria, demonstrates that there will be a backlash when essential government services are threatened. The success of the NTEU campaign against the deregulation and privatisation of higher education is further evidence. Thank you to those members who supported the campaign and those who were able to make it at late notice to the final QCU rally on election eve. We were one of the bigger contingents in King George Square (soon to be renamed Sir King George Square) and we had coffee afterwards with the indomitable ACTU President Ged Kearney. We have big challenges ahead with the privatisation of higher education back before the parliament, and a federal election campaign possible any time (though recent setbacks to the Coalition make sooner rather than later somewhat less likely). We will need to continue to fight for higher education as an electoral issue while political parties (of many persuasions) play football with policy that should clearly have higher education as publicly-funded for the public good. Michael McNally, Queensland Division Secretary See also: First Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander MPs in Queensland, p.17
Top: New Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk (Image: ABC). Middle: Ch9 gives Premier Campbell Newman ‘the boot’ from his seat of Ashgrove on election night (Image: YouTube). Left: NTEU members join with other unions at the QCU rally on election eve. (Image: NTEU).
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 9
Update Employers and business groups target gender equity reporting in latest review In January, the Abbott Government released its review on the public consultations on reporting requirements established under the Workplace Gender Equality Act (WGEA) 2012. The scope and focus of the review appears to be very much in favour of business and employer interests, which is not surprising given the single-sidedness of the consultation process. The public consultation process was announced in March 2014 in response to lobbying by business groups and employers. They were calling for the watering down the existing gender equity reporting requirements and the delay or abandonment of the additional requirements, due to come into effect in 2015 and 2016. While the report states that the employer groups consulted ‘expressed broad support for gender equality objectives’, it notes throughout that the majority of employers who responded felt reporting was too burdensome. Areas for complaint included: • Reporting on employment categories (with a number advocating that only managerial positions should be reported on). • Reporting on remuneration and salaries (preference was to not report on these at all, or confine to reporting on managerial positions). • Reporting on CEOs, and • Broad opposition to the additional reporting requirements that are due to come into effect this year. Employers also advocated for: • A reduction in the frequency of reporting. • The removal or reduction in access and notification requirements, so that employers are no longer formally required to notify employees and employee representatives (i.e. unions) when a report has been lodged.
• Relaxation of the criteria for the Employer of Choice awards so that the application process is ‘less prescriptive’, doesn’t ‘dictate best practice’, and that those questions in the questionnaire that are compulsory for qualification for an Employer of Choice award be identified.
Support for gender equality reporting There were only seven ‘gender equality advocates’ listed by the report, although some of these were alliances of different organisations, such as the Coalition for Working Women which included the ACTU alongside women employer groups. These submissions highlighted the benefits of reporting on workplace gender equality, with most emphasising the economic gains associated with increased female workforce participation and the need to address the ongoing gender pay gap in Australia. Supporters noted that the process: • Enables the collection of meaningful gendered data sets on workforce composition. • Provides a unique data set that is not available through any other sources. • Provides reporting organisations with customised benchmark reports that will allow them to compare their gender equality performance with organisations in the same industry and of a similar size. • Provides the Agency with data that will enable it to develop targeted educational and advisory initiatives and materials to better support employers. While it was acknowledged that there was an opportunity to fine-tune, or adjust, some reporting requirements, there was also strong support for retention of all existing reporting requirements and most recommended additional requirements be introduced. Certainly, a number of reporting requirements that the employer groups opposed, such as reporting on employment status and remuneration, were very important sources of data; for example, tracking the gendered status of casual and insecure work and the link
page 10 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
between women in these employment categories and lower wages.
NTEU position While the response from the business groups and employers is not surprising (and it is clear that this review was designed to give these bodies a platform for expressing compliance), it is concerning that given how minimal reporting is at the moment, any reduction in the requirements for reporting risks renders some data completely useless. Indeed, reporting should be strengthened and industry areas targeted more precisely in order to improve the usefulness of data collected and allow for better planning of future gender equity strategies.
Government action The report states that any changes will be announced by the Government prior to the start of the 2015-16 reporting period, beginning 1 April 2015. It is considered likely that the Government will seek to water down reporting requirements, but to what degree is as yet unknown. It is also unclear if attempts by the Government to amend the Act will receive support from the Senate. However, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI) has publicly called for the abandonment of the new reporting requirements (Schedule 2) provisions, and a change to specialised, voluntary reporting, stating that ‘ACCI welcomes the Government’s review of these requirements but the focus of policy must shift from mandatory reporting and compliance based activities to voluntary, customised strategies and initiatives that enhance gender equality and workforce participation’ (ACCI CEO Kate Carnell, media release 14 Jan 2015). Terri MacDonald, Policy & Research Officer NTEU’s Briefing notes: www.nteu.org.au/library/view/id/5878 The Government report: http://docs.employment.gov.au/ system/files/doc/other/summary_of_ consultations_final_accessibilitypdf_ version.pdf
Update Women’s Action Committee 2015 Bluestocking Week (10-14 August) will again be the NTEU Branch and Division focus for showcasing the achievements of and challenges for women in higher education and research. This will be the fourth year of Bluestocking Week organised by the NTEU with the National Union of Students (NUS), Council of Postgraduate Students Association (CAPA) and campus women’s groups. Each year we are adding more interesting and challenging events. Check out the website for ideas. The bottom line is that we have created a space and voice for women and feminism on campuses in a time when it has become increasingly difficult to raise all sorts of issues. We have to keep widening this space and ‘crossing the line’, as was our slogan in 2014. The reality is that women’s career advancement has stalled; there is a gender pay gap even at universities, women graduates earn less at graduation and this widens once they have children. There are still too many areas of study,
research and work where women have to be pioneers. Too much research for and about women has been lost into more neutralised gender studies. The intersections of gender with race, sexuality, class, abilities and other parts of our identities is also too readily subsumed in the naming of ‘women’. Too often, International Women’s Day (8 March), which was named for a women’s trade union struggle, has been corporatised with tamed teas and lunches. So we have a challenge to raise and pursue the obvious and also the unpopular issues. One key issue is the persistence of racism and sexism on university campuses and male violence against women. Students keep raising this issue, but we hear little more than platitudes. NTEU’s biannual National Women’s Conference will be held in Melbourne in August, with delegates invited from all Branches. The national Women’s Action Committee (WAC) – with two delegates from each division, a nominee of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy Committee and chaired by the National President – is holding its first meeting for 2015 in March and will determine the Conference theme. Jeannie Rea, National President To keep up with WAC, Conference and Bluestocking Week plans: www.nteu.org.au/women
NTEU Expert Seminar series 2015 After the success of the NTEU expert seminar series in 2014, where experts were invited to discuss current issues for workers in the higher education sector, NTEU will be hosting the following four seminars in Melbourne in 2015. However, you do not need to be in Melbourne as you can join in online and also view the edited seminars afterwards. The first seminar will be in held in late March and will investigate the issue of unpaid overtime for general/ professional staff. Surveys of general staff have shown that in many areas of TAFE and universities, staff are working extra hours, but receive neither paid overtime nor the chance to take time off in compensation. This seminar will examine the causes and possible remedies for this situation. In June the topic is academic workload regulation and will focus the long hours also worked by academic staff, increasingly a result of management demands and performance expectations, rather than professional autonomy. This seminar will also look at the problems and possibilities of fairly regulating academic workloads. In the September seminar, speakers discuss the changing role of librarians and in December occupational health safety including workplace stress is the topic. We will be finalising the dates and the names of expert speakers of the first seminar in early March, so please visit the Seminars website (see below) for details and how to join in online. If you missed the two seminars in 2014, on global and local trends in academic casualisation and on limited term contract employment of Australian researchers, you can find video, presenters’ biographies and presentation notes on our website. Helena Spyrou, Union Education Officer www.nteu.org.au/seminars
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 11
Update New Defence Trade Controls laws before Parliament At the time of publication, the Defence Trade Controls Amendment Bill was just cleared for introduction into Parliament. Whether or not it eventually wins the support of Labor, the Greens and crossbenchers in the Senate, there will be considerable implications for particular groups of academics and other researchers at Australian universities. If the Bill fails, university staff involved in scientific research listed on the Defence and Strategic Goods List (DSGL) will be exposed to criminal offences by as early as this May, and all the negotiations on improvements to the existing framework will be lost. If the Bill passes, there will be either six or 12 additional months to get university permit systems up and running, but the legislation will have foregone the proper scrutiny of the university sector. In either event, affected staff will see rapid developments around Defence Trade Controls in 2015. The Defence Export Controls Office (DECO) will have to ramp up conversations with universities about the structures necessary to support the administration of the Act, and these will have to come into effect either by May or in the next 12 months. DECO also have a range of tools to be publicly tested, such as a much-anticipated online program that should provide some certainty for many researchers and research projects who do not fall under the Act. In the last few months, the NTEU has been engaged with members from around the country about the effects of the Bill. This is important because it will ultimately be incumbent upon individual academic and research staff to protect themselves by becoming familiar with the DSGL and applying for a permit once the criminal offences come into effect.
Does the Dept of Defence need to hear about your research? Do you produce applied research in any of these DGSL areas? • MICRO-ORGANISMS
• ELECTRONICS
• CHEMICALS
• SENSORS & LASERS
• TOXINS
• COMPUTERS
• MARINE
• NAVIGATION
• NUCLEAR MATERIALS
• AVIONICS
• MATERIALS PROCESSING • TELECOMS & INFO SECURITY • AEROSPACE & PROPULSION
Based on Defence Trade Controls legislation, by May 2015 you may need to obtain a Defence Export Control Office (DECO) permit if you want to continue to publish or exchange (supply) research in your area of expertise. These new criminal offences extend to scientists who have never had a prior relationship with the Department of Defence. For detailed information about the legislation visit our FAQ page:
nteu.org.au/defencetradecontrols
We encourage members to write submissions when the legislation is introduced. Alternatively, over the course of the year we would encourage members to get in touch and tell us about developments at your institution. We are emailing news and information direct to members through a Reference List, so contact the NTEU Policy and Research Unit if you want to stay on top of this issue through this group. Jen Tsen Kwok, Policy & Research Officer Find out more about our current position on the NTEU website’s FAQ: www.nteu.org.au/ defencetradecontrols
Contact NTEU Policy and Research Unit policy@nteu.org.au or 03 9254 1910 As As an an association association that that defends defends both both the the professional professional and and industrial industrial interests interests of of its its members, members, the the NTEU NTEU provides provides members members with with expert expert advice advice on on matters matters that that affect affect their their employment employment on on aa day-to-day day-to-day basis. basis. Authorised by Grahame McCulloch, General Secretary, NTEU, 120 Clarendon St, Sth Melbourne VIC 3205
page 12 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
Nobel laureates slam innovation funding Australia’s most well renowned scientists have publicly expressed their concerns for science and our ability to compete as an innovation economy. In an interview with the Australian Financial Review in January, Elizabeth Blackburn, Brian Schmidt, Peter Doherty and Barry Marshall were scathing in their assessments of innovation funding in Australia. All hold fears for Australia’s global competitiveness. As stated by the AFR’s Anne Hyland, ‘When it comes to investment in science, Australia is in reverse as other countries floor the accelerator.’ Elizabeth Blackburn (joint Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2009) asked ‘How could Australia not think of investing heavily in science? This is just insanity. The fact that the natural resources boom is fading away – it’s foolishness.’ Brian Schmidt (joint Nobel prize in physics in 2011) said ‘If we lose [our] advantage, are we going to replace that with something else? We damn well better be or we’re going backwards. If we’re damaged it will take 20 years to fix ourselves. It only takes one year to cause 20 years of damage.’ Peter Doherty (joint Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 1996) said ‘We still have high quality universities. If we keep cutting back on that sector we’re going to lose it. It’s sad.’ Barry Marshall (joint Nobel prize in physiology or medicine in 2005) said ‘[There’s] not the priority given to academic and scientific pursuit in Australia by politicians and government... We need to raise some political pressure and educate politicians.’ Read ‘How ignoring science damns our economy’ at www.afr.com See also: ‘How could Australia not think of investing heavily in science? This is just insanity’ by Ian Lowe, p.43.
Update The 6-step guide to getting better pay and working conditions After two years of enterprise bargaining negotiations, in March 2014 Navitas management moved to strip all the terms and conditions of members. The response by NTEU was swift and direct.
NTEU raffled off eight lockers to highlight that casual staff lack basic working conditions and secure space. Local press and Channel 9 attended the event.
Step 4 : #Sportstrike
Navitas Limited is one of the largest private providers in Australia with a market capitalisation of $1.7 billion. It operates a number of companies including La Trobe Melbourne (LTM), co-located with La Trobe University at Bundoora. LTM delivers ELICOS, Foundation Studies and Diploma programs. NTEU has covered these members for many years, including prior to the Navitas purchase of LTM from La Trobe University.
A week later, members held a day long strike. In response, Navitas cancelled all classes for the day and held an inaugural ‘Sports Day.’ Our rally joined the Sports Day and we discussed with students the impact of quality working conditions on quality teaching. Most students joined the rally and took photos with placards.
Step 1 : Protected Action Ballot
As an accredited tertiary education provider to international students, LTM is required to take attendance records and report on attendance to the Federal Government. With a ban on marking attendance rolls, accurate student attendances records were not kept for over a month.
In April 2014, over 96 per cent of members vote in a Protected Action Ballot to take industrial action at LTM. Approved actions included stop work, bans on placement days, logging student attendance and class records.
Step 2 : Increase union density Working with NTEU Staff, the LTM delegates mapped their workplace to identify which NTEU members were in ongoing, casual or fixed-term roles and whether members were teaching or general staff. NTEU delegates identified individuals who they work with to ask to them become NTEU members. Union density increased to over 80 per cent, and half of all casual teachers became members. We found that, in some programs, there were no ongoing teaching staff at all.
Step 3 : Starting industrial action Staff stopped work for a lunchtime event with over 70 taking part. This brought the issues to the attention of students with hundreds attending the free BBQ.
Step 5: Gaining national media coverage
NTEU wrote to the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA), raising concerns that La Trobe Melbourne is not fulfilling these requirements. The NTEU press release received national media coverage in The Australian.
Everyone wins better working conditions At risk of increasing industrial action, Navitas agreed to abandon its attacks and settle a satisfactory new Agreement with NTEU. Navitas also agreed to provide secure personal lockers to all casual teaching staff (having destroyed the lockers NTEU installed during its campaign for safe working conditions). Key wins include : • Long Service Leave of 13 weeks after 10 years for all staff. • Casual staff rights to allowances (worth thousands of dollars per year). • New Agreement coverage for over 50 staff – meaning coverage for half the staff for the first time. • Strong job security provisions, including twice-yearly casual conversion arrangements, rights to work for current staff, conversion for fixed term staff and more. • The broad suite of workplace rights such as dismissal protections, change management and fair treatment enjoyed at universities.
Step 6: Gaining student support
• No ‘worse off’ rule for those coming under the Agreement for the first time.
NTEU members followed up these actions with a postcard campaign. Students signed postcards in support of their teachers and sent them to Rod Jones, CEO of Navitas, and John Dewar, Vice-Chancellor of La Trobe University.
In addition to 3% wage increases per year from July 2013, with back pay, members also secured an additional 0.5% wage increase in July 2015 in lieu of the previously legislated superannuation increase cut by the Abbott Government.
Over 1000 postcards were sent over several weeks. The postcard showed images of students supporting their teachers in previous industrial action. NTEU also handed out free pumpkin soup for students on the first day of the new term.
It is clear to everyone that the decisive action of members has delivered a historic and superior Agreement. Josh Cullinan, Senior Industrial Officer, Victoria Division. www.nteu.org.au/navitas
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 13
Update International visas and education The NTEU represents the ACTU on the Federal Government’s Education Visa Consultative Committee (EVCC), which meets in Canberra quarterly. The scope of the EVCC is broad, but in general it deals with Australia’s interests in international education. The EVCC has representatives from all areas of education and both state government and federal departmental representatives. It provides feedback on Government policy and initiatives around international education.
Review into Skilled Migration and Temporary Activity Visa Programs Of particular interest at the moment is the Federal Government’s Review into Skilled Migration and Temporary Activity Visa Programs. The external consultation for the Review commenced with the release of a discussion paper on 19 September 2014. Forums were held with stakeholders in October 2014 and 68 written submissions were received, leading to the release in December 2014 of a white paper outlining a proposed new model. Consultations are now underway, with the ACTU making a submission to the Review, and the new skilled migration framework is set to be implemented from 1 July 2016. Interestingly, the controversial Temporary Work (subclass 457) visa has not been considered as part of the Review, with the Government stating that any outcomes of this Review will be consistent with the endorsed recommendations from its previous 457 Integrity Review.
Review into the Education Services for Overseas Students There is also a Review into the Education Services for Overseas Students (ESOS) Framework underway. There were 70 submissions lodged, including NTEU’s (see link at end of this article).
While a number of recommendations in the discussion paper are supported by NTEU, the Union remains concerned that the focus of this Government is more on streamlining and less on improving quality and accountability of service providers. We look forward to participating in consultations scheduled for February 2015.
Temporary Graduate (subclass 485) visa These post-study visas were introduced in 2013 and are designed to allow a graduate to work to up to 4 years (depending on level of degree) in Australia once they have graduated, without restriction on where or what kind of work can be undertaken or the need for employer sponsorship. However, it appears that there has been a low rate of take up of these post-study work visas, despite their low refusal rates. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP) has been asked by the EVCC to investigate what data is available regarding the take-up rate among eligible graduates and the Government has bought in a campaign to increase awareness of these 485 visas, including flyers providing information on these visa that are tailored to two audiences: employers and students. In addition to raising issues around the potential undermining of pay and conditions by a proposed pool of young workers who are not entitled to any kind of income support or social/welfare benefits, the NTEU’s has also voiced concerns over the absence in the Government’s promotion of any kind of information regarding the industrial rights of visa holders. Workplace abuse of young workers – and particularly international students – is rife in many industries, and has been a major concern for the union movement. The NTEU has insisted on the Department including additional information about industrial rights and the Fairwork Ombudsman in its promotion of the visa scheme, and will be monitoring the both policy and industrial outcomes of this initiative. Terri MacDonald, Policy & Research Officer NTEU submission to ESOS Review www.nteu.org.au/article/NTEUSubmission-on-the-Reform-of-theESOS-framework%3A-discussionpaper-17070
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New door opens for TAFE, Adult Ed bargaining NTEU members employed in Victorian public sectors – primarily in TAFE and Adult and Community Education providers – should benefit from a recent Federal Court decision which has overturned a long-standing prohibition on Enterprise Agreement regulating matters affecting the hiring and firing of staff, such as dismissal reviews, redundancy rights, and limits on the use of casual and fixed term employment. An infamous High Court decision known as Re AEU relied on a Constitutional principle that the states should be free from interference by the Federal Government in relation to the number and identity of their employees, to find that a Federal Award – which has the status of Federal legislation – could not bind the states in relation to the hiring and firing of staff. State governments, and particularly in Victoria, have relied on that decision to say that Enterprise Agreements – which, once made, also have the status of federal statutory instruments – were similarly constrained. As a result, bargaining on those issues in the Victorian public sector has met a brick wall. This proposition was challenged in a recent case by the United Firefighters Union (UFU) and the decision of the Full Federal Court held that as Enterprise Agreements are entered into voluntarily by the parties, the conditions they contain are not imposed on the States. This decision opens the door for all state public sector employees, including many NTEU members in Victoria, to win back rights against insecure employment and arbitrary dismissal. That doesn’t mean state governments will be keen to restore those rights, but they can no longer hide behind Re AEU to avoid negotiations.
Casuals News Which SuperCasual are you? The Victorian Division has hit the ground running with their 2015 SuperCasuals campaign, which will focus the fight to improve the working conditions and rights of casual employed academics. The Victorian SuperCasuals campaign will draw upon the successful approach used in the 2012 SwinSessionals campaign that won the ACTU Best Workplace Campaign Award. A former SwinSessional activist and casual academic, Dustin Halse commenced work in early January as the Campaign Coordinator. Dustin understands the challenges confronting casuals as academics and as workers wanting to organise to fight for their rights. Working towards a campaign launch later in March, a meeting is planned with the Victorian Branch delegates who participated in the National Insecure Work Conference last November (see report, pp. 26-31), as well meeting with NTEU organising and recruitment staff. Most heartening have been successful SuperCasual meetings organised at five universities already that focused upon participants sharing their experiences and planning activities for this year. Meetings were held at Victoria, Monash, Swinburne, Federation and La Trobe universities.
COMMITTED. TALENTED. EXPLOITED.
THe magic marker?
can you mark10,000 words in 2 hours? Yes but it hurts.
THe invisiblist?
THe TIME LORD?
The Ability to disappear (conveniently at the end of semester)?
Do you have The power to stretch time?
WHICH ONE ARE YOU? In 2015 the NTEU Victorian Division will be fighting to improve the working conditions and rights of casuals. The Supercasuals campaign will draw upon the successful approach used in the 2012 SwinSessionals campaign that went on to win the ACTU Best Workplace Campaign Award. Dustin Halse has been appointed to lead the campaign. He is passionate about improving the working rights of casuals. Having been involved in the SwinSessionals campaign he understands the challenges that confront casuals on a daily basis.
Supercasual meetings held recently at VU, Swinburne, FUA, Monash and La Trobe have been a huge success. Casual academics have come together collectively share their experiences and to plan campaign actions for 2015. Supercasuals perform herculean tasks for inferior rights and conditions. They are committed, they talented but they are also exploited and this is why we have branded the campaign ‘Supercasuals’. If you are a casual academic and want to get involved sign up at supercasuals.org.au.
supercasuals.org.au follow us on twitter
@thesupercasuals #supercasuals
Why SuperCasuals? Casuals perform herculean tasks for inferior rights and conditions. They are committed and they are talented, but they are also exploited. If you identify as a SuperCasual, please join in. 2015 Casuals campaigns are also getting underway in other Branches and Divisions. Contact your local Branch or Division office for details. Dustin Halse, Campaign Coordinator supercasuals.org.au
M @TheSuperCasuals M #SuperCasuals Right: Over 90 Academic Casual staff attend lunch meeting to discuss the SuperCasuals campaign at Monash University in February 2015. Photo by Toby Cotton.
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 15
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander News Nothing new in latest Closing the Gap report The release of the Closing the Gap Report 2015 in February brought with it few surprises, with it reading much the same as the 2014 report. Prime Minister Tony Abbott expressed his disappointment that there had been little-tono improvement in most of the identified target areas. There are many opportunities for the government to engage the higher education sector in achieving more equitable outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) people. Yet they are reluctant to do so. Declining Employment Rates As shown in the report, A&TSI employment rates have fallen. In response to this, the ACTU has questioned the rolling out of a targeted and discriminatory ‘Work for the Dole’ program, due to be implemented in July this year. 30,000 Aboriginal people in remote communities will be engaged in 25 hours’ work per week as part of their welfare conditions.
the needs of that community would have a positive effect on employment growth. In the tertiary education sector, casual and fixed term A&TSI staff rates are rising. This means that even our most educated and most qualified A&TSI people are having trouble securing ongoing employment. In 2012, the Behrendt Review into A&TSI participation in higher education was released. This report called, amongst other things, for our staff to be engaged properly across the universities in many capacities whilst maintaining strong A&TSI support centres on campus. While the recommendations were supported by the Government and the universities, there seems to have been very little progress since and indeed, we have seen many support centres and designated academic programs under threat. As A&TSI employment rates fall, we urge the Government and universities to revisit their commitments to creating a more inclusive higher education sector.
Health gaps remain The Closing the Gap Report 2015 highlighted that the gap between the life expectancies of Aboriginal people compared to the rest of Australia had only shown a small improvement since 2008. In addition, it was noted that while deaths from chronic disease had decreased, the rates of cancer morbidity were increasing and there had been no improvements in the rates of diabetes. Of the budgetary cuts the Federal Government made last year, $164 million was
ACTU President Ged Kearney called on the Federal Government to pay the workers involved at least the minimum wage and stressed that ‘Work for the Dole’ programs do nothing to reduce unemployment. In addition, the ACTU called for the Government to work in consultation with the communities, outlining that self-determination increases the success of our programs. Certainly employing people in communities properly in ways which work in consultation with page 16 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
to A&TSI health programs. These included targeted physical and mental health initiatives as well as health research. When it comes to research in particular, universities have a key role to play in assisting to close the A&TSI life expectancy and health gaps and the NTEU will continue to lobby the Government and universities to ensure that these programs are expanding, rather than collapsing, at this crucial time.
Educational gaps remain The Closing the Gap Report 2015 showed that while more students are completing year 12, the rates of literacy and numeracy had barely improved. Attendance rates had also shown little improvement. This raises concerns about how students are moving through the primary and secondary systems and what their future prospects may be. Are our students essentially just being pushed through a system which remains reasonably hostile to their needs and aspirations, only to exist it with few options? Higher education has a key role to play in the development of curriculum and community-inclusive educational programs to ensure that A&TSI students are as successful and have as much opportunity to move on to tertiary education as other students. The NTEU urges the Government to work more closely with our educational professionals on these initiatives.
Conclusion There are many ways in which the government could draw on the expertise in the higher education sector to ensure that the gaps between mainstream and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people do indeed close. Unfortunately though, in an environment of cuts both to A&TSI Affairs and to the higher education sector, it seems only too likely that Closing the Gap Report 2016 will also be a disappointment on many fronts. Celeste Liddle, National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Organiser Closing the Gap 2015: www.dpmc.gov.au/ pmc-indigenousaffairs/publication/ closing-gap-primeministers-report-2015
Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander News
First A&TSI MPs in Qld
Janine jumps at jillaroo gig Janine Gertz, current Team Leader Community Engagement at James Cook University (JCU), and long-time union activist, is currently being featured in the latest series of Jillaroo School – a documentary series/reality TV program airing on ABC. A definite change of scenery to her role at JCU, the series follows the experiences of five women from around the country learning all the fundamentals of jillaroo work on a cattle station in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. The pastoral industry has been a huge part of Janine’s family history, and a huge part of her deciding to apply to be on Jillaroo School was to reconnect with this history. Like so many Indigenous people who worked on cattle stations, Janine’s family worked under the Protection Act and her grandfathers were among the Aboriginal workers who undertook strike action for better pay and conditions. The decision to move to town a couple of generations ago was made so that the children could access school in the hope of bettering their situation. Janine hoped to gain experience in the industry so that she could then plug those skills back into her community. The Gugu Badhun people, whose native title was recognised in 2012, have plans to set up a cattle station, amongst other ventures, to encourage people to return to country to work and live. This will ensure that not only will there be opportunities for people
to prosper economically on country, but that culture can thrive and there will be better opportunities for future Gugu Badhun. In Jilaroo School, Janine noted that times have changed for Aboriginal people and where they once were the unpaid or underpaid labour on cattle stations, they can now be the owners. In addition, much of the economic development on traditional lands at this point in time seems to centre on the mining industry, which is limited and carries with it a number of concerns with regards to cultural appropriateness and environmental degradation. When the opportunity therefore arose for her to undertake jillaroo training in a bid to assist her community to achieve these goals, Janine jumped at the chance.
It has been an absolute joy to see Janine on our television screens, and the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy Committee wish to congratulate her on being selected to participate. We also want to send our best wishes to the Gugu Badhun communities and look forward to seeing the fruits of their endeavours in the years to come. Celeste Liddle, National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Organiser www.abc.net.au/tv/programs/jillarooschool
Photos: ABC
The Queensland state election was full of many wonderful surprises and firsts – such as the momentous swing and a Cabinet with a majority of women – but one of the most striking is that two Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander ALP candidates won office. The last Aboriginal person to gain office in Queensland was Eric Deeral back in 1974, in the seat of Cook in far north Qld, which he held for the Country Party for just 3 years. In Deeral’s old seat, former cane-cutter and army reservist Billy Gordon convincingly won office, achieving a swing of more than 10%. A long-running grass roots campaign was credited with being integral to Gordon’s successful election. Billy spent a number of years working with TAFE, supporting students throughout the Tablelands, Torres Strait, Cape York and Cairns. In the seat of Algester, Leeanne Enoch won with a swing of more than 16% to the ALP. Leeanne has most recently been the A&TSI Engagement Officer at the Queensland Council of Trade Unions, was an executive member of Red Cross and is a former teacher. Leeanne is a proud Nunukul/ Nughi woman from North Stradbroke Island.She is the first Aboriginal woman to gain office in Queensland and has taken up the dual ministerial portfolios of Housing and Public Works and Science and Innovation. We congratulate Leeanne and Billy for their successful elections and look forward to working with them closely during their terms of office.
Photo: hoydenabouttown.com
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 17
The higher education policy merry-go-round In the very first episode of Yes Minister, Bernard Woolley, Principal Private Secretary to newly-appointed Minister Jim Hacker, observes that there are ‘two kinds of chairs to go with two kinds of ministers: one sort that folds up instantly and the other sort that goes round and round in circles.’ Christopher Pyne has certainly demonstrated that he is not the sort of Minister for Education to fold. But Pyne’s relentlessness shows Bernard’s words may have some truth because his continuing unsuccessful attempts to negotiate the passage of his policies through the Senate is going round and round and not getting anywhere in a hurry.
Paul Kniest Policy & Research Coordinator
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The Government’s position in relation to higher policy has changed dramatically both before and after the election (see Timeline, p.21). Promises of ‘masterly inactivity’ and ‘no changes’ to university funding before the election translated into a 2014–15 Federal Budget which included the most radical change to higher education policy in over two decades. Throughout the process, Pyne’s doggedness has been clearly on display. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the fact that even after his original Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment Bill 2014 (Deregulation MkI) was defeated in the Senate on 2 December 2014, he introduced a new Bill into the House of Representatives the very next morning (see HERRA vs HERR aside, opposite). In this regard, however, the Minister’s determination was trumped by his effrontery to commence a $15 million government-funded advertising campaign which makes a number of highly misleading claims about government policies which have not, and in all likelihood never will, become law (see p.22). While the new Higher Education and Research Reform Bill 2014 (Deregulation MkII) makes a number of substantial changes to the original policies including dropping the plan to charge students market based interest rates of their Higher Education Loans Program (HELP) debts and the introduction of a $100 million structural adjustment fund, it still removed
HERRA vs HERR The Higher Education and Research Reform (HERR) Bill 2014 was introduced into the House of Representatives the day after the Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment (HERRA) Bill 2014 was rejected by the Senate. Here we provide a comparison of the two Bills. What is retained All core provisions of the original Bill remain. These are: • Cuts to Commonwealth Supported Places (CSP) by 20 per cent. • The deregulation of course fees so that universities can charge students whatever fees they want.
education providers (at a rate of 70 per cent of universities) as well as to sub-bachelor higher education courses at public providers. Also unchanged are: • A 10 per cent reduction in the Research Training Scheme (RTS) program, along with allowing universities to charge RTS Higher Degree Research students tuition fees (capped at about $4,000 p/a and payable through HELP). • The misnamed ‘Commonwealth’ scholarships which are funded from increased fee income where $1 in $5 must be put aside to for these scholarships.
What is new • Removal of market based interest rate on HELP - abandons the policy to apply the government bond rate (capped at 6 per cent) on existing HECS-HELP debts and retains the CPI rate. • HELP indexation holiday for carers of young children – primary carers with
• The extension of CSPs to sub-bachelor and bachelor courses at private universities and non-university higher
Despite months of negotiations and compromises to his original policies, the Minister has indicated that the Government will abandon its higher education policies if it cannot get Deregulation MkII through the Senate by the end of March 2015. The highly unlikely prospect of the policies getting through Senate was articulated by Clive Palmer on 11 February 2015, when he made the following comments in his second reading speech on the new Bill: How many times does the Senate have to reject this legislation before the Government gets the message? The message is: this legislation will not pass the Senate. This legislation is through, finished, wound up. (Clive Palmer) Therefore, it would appear that Deregulation MkII is also destined for failure because while the Minister is reportedly prepared to contemplate reducing the size of the 20% cut to funding per student, it would appear that he is determined to maintain fee deregulation, which is the that part of the policy that the Australian public and Senators opposed to the Bill are most concerned about. Despite their best efforts, it is becoming increasing clear that neither the Minister
• Structural adjustment fund – $100m to help universities transition to new market environment. • Domestic fees not to exceed international fees. • Targeted rural and regional scholarships - rehash of the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP), which will now become the Higher Education Participation Program (HEPP). The HEPP will have three components: an Access and Participation Fund, a new Scholarships Fund and a National Priorities Pool.
What it means for the Budget The Mid-Year Economic and Financial Outlook (MYEFO) released on 15 December shows that projected Budget savings from higher education have been revised down from almost $5 billion over four years at the time of the May Budget, to $642.4 million, as result of changes included in HERR. MYEFO also shows that total outstanding Higher Education Loans Program (HELP) debt which, as $25.1 billion at 30 June 2014, is projected to grow to $30.6 billion in 2014-15 and $52 billion by the end of the forward estimates.
• The lowering of the Higher Education Loans Program (HELP) repayment threshold.
the cap on fees for Commonwealth supported places and allow universities to charge students whatever they think the market will bear (see report, p.4).
children five or below will not have their HELP debt indexed at all over the five year period.
nor the Vice-Chancellors have been able, either publicly or privately, to convince the Senators, whose votes they need, that fee deregulation will not result in very significant increases in tuition fees and some students paying more than $100,000 for a degree. Whether the Government chooses to abandon its higher education policies or face the humiliation of another defeat in the Senate is unclear at this stage. The irony, of course, is that the defeat of the Bill will bring the Government’s higher education policy full circle and allow it to meet its ‘masterly inactive’ and ‘no change’ election commitments.
$100,000 DEGREES? I DIDN’T VOTE FOR THIS.
Style versus substance Can the Government’s failure to get the support of the Australian public and the Senate for its higher education policy be attributed to bad salespersonship (style) or the fact that they are trying to sell a bad product (substance)? The Government would be fooling itself if it believes that the main reason its higher education policies have been unable to gain support in the broader community or in the Senate is due to bad process, poor communication and a failure to sell the benefits of its policy. Indeed, the Government must have realised that Minister’s Pyne ‘charm offensive’ had run its course when they began exploring whether Tasmanian Senators might be willing to
www.nteu.org.au/1stdegree2ndmortgage
support the Government’s policies if the University of Tasmania were offered a redevelopment package reportedly in the order of $400 million. Not only did these stories of pork barrelling provoke the ire of other Vice-Chancellors, it was flatly rejected as blackmail by the relevant Senators. While there can be little doubt the Minister’s arrogance and effrontery to think he could push through his policies without an electoral mandate, or without adequate and genuine consultation, or any research or analysis, has contributed to the Government’s difficulties in trying to sell its higher continued overpage...
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 19
Higher education policy 5,000 $4,628m
4,000 3,000 2,000
$ million
1,000
$642m
0 -$508m
-1,000
-$1,758m -2,000 -3,000
Source: 2014-15 Federal Budget Papers, 2014-15 MYEFO Papers and NTEU estimates
Figure 1: Projected Budget savings from various higher education packages education policies, these factors pale into insignificance when compared to some very important substantive problems associated with the policies including their rationale, unsustainability and unfairness.
Rationale One of the major problems the Government has had in trying to sell its higher education policies is that nobody, including the Government, seems clear as to the rationale of the policy. Given that reform of higher education funding and regulation was not on the Government’s policy radar prior to 2013 election, one can only assume that real motivation was part of the Government’s budget repair strategy. This is confirmed by the fact that the Kemp-Norton Review of the Demand Driven had fiscal sustainability as one of its terms of reference, as well as the following passage from National Commission of Audit which said the ‘uncapping of places also led to strong growth in Commonwealth funding for universities, with additional costs from 201213 to 2016-17 forecast to be $6.5 billion, largely due to a greater than expected increase in student numbers.’ (National Commission of Audit 9.13)
Universities Australia (UA) is urging Senators to support an amended version of the latest policy including a moderation of the 20 per cent cut to funding per student and an increase in the size of the structural adjustment fund from $100 million to $500 million. Should the Minister agree to go half way to meeting UA’s demands (that is, reduce funding per student by 10% and increase the structural adjustment to $250 million – shown as Mk II in fig.1) the higher education package would actually end up costing the Government an extra $500 million over the forward estimates. If the Minister acceded to all of UA’s demands – in a last ditch desperate bid to get his package through – Mk IV (in fig. 1) shows this would add about $1.7 billion to forward estimates. In other words, the Government can no longer sustain the rationale that these policies are for the higher education sector and university students to make their contribution to repairing the budget. Indeed, the Government’s budget repair rationale has been so discredited that is now using rhetoric about students paying their fair share and the need to improve
The budget repair rationale is also supported by the fact the higher education policy released on Budget night 2014 (Mk I) included almost $5 billion in savings over the forward estimates (see fig. 1). However, the savings rationale for the Government’s package is disappearing quickly. As noted, the changes to policies included in the second HERR Bill (Mk II, fig. 1) reduced the savings from almost $5 billion to something in the order of $640 million.
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‘It is a waste of taxpayer money – it doesn’t matter what colour lipstick you put on a pig, it is still a pig’ Senator Jacqui Lambie, commenting on the Abbott Government’s higher education advertising campaign, Dec 2014. Image by Terri MacDonald. choice and efficiency to sell its reforms. This won’t wash with crossbench Senators however who are primarily concerned with sustainability and fairness.
Sustainability The NTEU’s 2015 Federal Budget submission, Towards a sustainable policy framework for Australian higher education (available from nteu.org.au/degreemortgage/publications), provides a detailed analysis of why the Government’s proposed higher education policies are financially unsustainable. In essence, the Government’s plans to expand the current demand-driven funding model to sub-degree qualifications and to private higher education providers is the equivalent of writing a blank cheque. Under this policy, greater than expected increases in the number of student enrolments (as has been the experience under the demand-driven system and deregulated VET market in Victoria) will result in budget blow-outs and the inevitable cuts to funding per student to bring the total level of expenditure back under control. All of the evidence suggests that the Government’s policy of unplanned and unmanaged growth in student enrolments will result in further reductions in funding per student. Under these circumstances the NTEU would argue that the Realpolitik behind fee deregulation has nothing to with allowing ‘price signals’ to allocate student places, but instead is all about alleviating the Government of the political inconvenience of having to raise student fees every year to compensate universities for future cuts funding per student. Unplanned and unmanaged growth in student numbers will also result in a rapid increase in the number of students with Higher Education Loans Program (HELP)
Higher education policy debts. Average HELP debt will rise in concert with substantial fee increases. Higher average levels of debt will lead to higher unpaid debts which are a direct cost to the budget. This will bring into question the sustainability of the HELP scheme itself. Andrew Norton of the Grattan Institute (grattan.edu.au/report/doubtful-debt-therising-cost-of-student-loans) has made the case that the HELP scheme was not designed to deal with a policy framework in which both the number and cost of university degrees are unregulated. While the Government will not have to respond to this issue in the short term, ultimately it will be required to reign in the cost associated with rising bad debts. Norton has argued this will require a cap on student loans and/or recovering unpaid HELP debts from student estates. In other words, the Government’s policies will have a double whammy on the fiscal sustainability of higher education. It will lead to ever increasing levels of expenditure unless the Government cuts funding per student and it will lead to increasing average fees and debts which will bring into question the sustainability of the HELP scheme itself. Our Budget submission proposes an alternative and sustainable funding and regulatory framework based on: • Maintaining the cap on fees universities can charge students. • Using Public Accountability Agreements (PAAs) as the basis of flexible and coordinated oversight of the allocation of student places. • Establishing an independent agency or council with statutory planning and funding responsibilities to negotiate and administer PAAs. • Restricting eligibility for public subsidies to public higher education providers.
Fairness Without doubt, the main reason the Government has been unable to get support for its higher education policies is because they are fundamentally unfair. Despite the Minister’s and Vice-Chancellors’ best efforts to dismiss the prospects of $100,000 degrees as nothing but scaremongering by the NTEU and other opponents of the Government’s policies, they have been unable to satisfy Senators or the public that this will not be the reality. Indeed, some Vice-Chancellors and peak bodies are now actively calling for the establishment of an oversight body to ensure that excessive fees increases do not occur. If Vice-Chancellors do not trust themselves to do the right thing, it should continued overpage...
Timeline of the Coalition’s higher education policy positions Jan 2013 Liberal Party’s Real Solutions booklet declares ‘we will continue the current funding arrangements for our universities’.
Feb 2013 Universities Australia Conference Tony Abbott, says Coalition’s higher education policy will be one of ‘masterly inactivity’.
Sept 2013 On SBS TV on the eve of the Federal Election, Tony Abbott promises ‘no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS.’
Nov 2013 In response to a question on whether the Government was considering raising university fees, Christopher Pyne, Minister for Education, says ‘I am not even considering it, that is, raising university fees, because we promised that we wouldn’t and Tony Abbott made it very clear before the election that we would keep our promises.’
May 2014 In his first Federal Budget, Treasurer Joe Hockey announces the most radical changes to higher education policy in 30 years, including fee deregulation and a 20% cut to funding per student. Forecast to contribute close to $5 billion to the Government’s budget repair.
Sept 2014 Higher Education and Research Reform Amendment (HERRA) Bill 2014 (Dereg MkI) is passed by the House of Representatives.
Oct 2014 Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee Inquiry into HERRA 2014 reports.
Dec 2014 HERRA Bill 2014 is defeated in the Senate. Higher Education and Research Reform (HERR) Bill 2014 (Dereg MkII) introduced into House of Representatives. $15 million ‘Your future is Australia’s future’ government advertising campaign commenced to promote the yet to be passed higher education policies (see p.22).
Feb 2015 Senate Education and Employment References Committee Inquiry into principles of HERR 2014 (Dereg Mk II) commenced (to report by March 17).
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 21
Higher education policy not be surprising that public might be sceptical that they would do so in an unregulated market. Others, including Professor Glyn Davis from the University of Melbourne, are arguing that fees are already capped at international student fee levels, less the government contribution. Unfortunately, this argument holds little water because international students in undergraduate programs at many universities, including Melbourne, already pay significantly more than $100,000 for a degree. The Government either isn’t listening or is refusing to hear that the Australian public will not accept students paying significantly higher fees to attend an Australian public university. The public also understands that just because you don’t have to pay upfront for a university degree doesn’t mean that the potential of incurring large debts after graduation won’t be a major deterrent to some students. Students from low SES backgrounds, and the increasing number of mature age students, will have to carefully weigh up whether they can afford to attend university. Clearly the public, if not the Government and the university Vice-Chancellors, believe that access to a university degree at an Australian public university should be based on merit and hard work and not on the ability to pay. The inherent unfairness of the Government’s higher education policies are not only reflected in fee deregulation and inevitably higher fees. The fact that the proposed new Commonwealth scholarship scheme, which it claims will deliver a record number of scholarships for disadvantaged students, is being funded entirely from increased students fees has also not been lost on the public. It is highly dishonest for the Government to take credit for scholarships to which they do not contribute a single cent. It is highly unfair to ask all students to pay to support their disadvantaged classmates.
Conclusion The Australian public and the Senate are not prepared to accept a higher education policy which is premised on the basis of fee deregulation which would allow our public universities to charge whatever they like for a degree. They also understand that the current funding and regulatory environment is unsustainable. NTEU believes there is a viable alternative based on using Public Accountability Agreements to help plan and manage growth in student numbers and provide the basis for increased public investment.
False & Misleading Advertising. I didn’t vote for this. THE real facts ABOUT HIGHER EDUCATION
DEMONSTRABLY UNTRUE The Government cannot claim that it will continue to pay about half of student fees because it does not know what universities fees will be in a deregulated market, where universities can charge students anything they like. To demonstrate how untruthful this statement is, we simply need to look at the fee structure proposed by the University of Western Australia (UWA) which has said it will charge $16,000 per year (for the first 3 years) for government supported undergraduate students. As this table shows, if universities adopted a similar fee structure to that being proposed by UWA, then on average the Government would be contributing about one third of the cost of a degree – a long way short of the half that the advertisements are claiming. Government & Student Contributions Based on UWA Fee Structure 2016 Discipline
UWA Fees 2016
Govt contribution 2016*
Total Funding
Govt %
Law, accounting, commerce, eco, admin
$16,000
$1,896
$17,896
11%
Humanities
$16,000
$6,326
$22,326
28%
Computing, built enviro, other health
$16,000
$9,490
$25,490
37%
Mathematics, statistics
$16,000
$12,655
$28,655
44%
Behavioural science
$16,000
$9,490
$25,490
37%
Social studies
$16,000
$6,326
$22,326
28%
Education
$16,000
$9,490
$25,490
37%
Clinical psychology, foreign language
$16,000
$12,655
$28,655
44%
Visual and performing arts
$16,000
$9,490
$25,490
37%
Allied health
$16,000
$12,655
$28,655
44%
Nursing
$16,000
$12,655
$28,655
44%
Engineering, science, surveying
$16,000
$12,655
$28,655
44%
Dentistry, medicine, veterinary science
$16,000
$18,982
$34,982
54%
Agriculture
$16,000
$18,982
$34,982
54%
Average
$16,000
$8,909
$24,909
36%
* Based on announced 2014 values indexed at 2.5% per annum.
To be TRUE this claim should read: Australian students will pay an increasing large share of the cost of their publicly supported university education.
nteu.org.au/degreemortgage page 22 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
Higher education policy Find out more at nteu.org.au/degreemortgage/facts
TRUE, but for how long? The campaign claims that Australia has one of the best higher education systems in the world—standards are safeguarded by the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA). It is true that Australia has one of the best higher education systems in the world and that has been achieved through appropriate planning and regulation over many decades. The NTEU questions whether the recently established TEQSA will have the resources to maintain the quality of the Australian higher education system especially given the Government is proposing to expand public funding to private providers and to sub-degree qualifications which will mean a significant increase in the number of providers and/or courses to be accredited and/or registered, but TEQSA has had its funding cut by 40 per cent in the Budget. From the NTEU’s point of view one only needs to look at the havoc visited upon vocational education and training in Victoria to understand the unacceptably high risks associated with a deregulated tertiary education sector where thousands of students are accumulating debt for qualifications, with few job prospects.
To be TRUE this should read: Cutting TEQSA funding and deregulating higher education including making funding available to private providers presents an unacceptably high risk to the quality and reputation of Australian higher education.
WRONG, UNFORTUNATELY TRUE and also TOTALLY MISLEADING
graduates will still be paying their HELP debts off after their kids have started university.
The Government’s claim is technically wrong.
Totally misleading
Sorry for being pedantic, but the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) was replaced by the Higher Education Loans Program (HELP) in 2005. The Government’s market research no doubt shows that HECS is considered a far more benign term than one that includes the word ‘loan’ (something that needs to be repaid).
Unfortunately true While students might not have to pay anything upfront, the 20 per cent cut to funding and removal of cap on price that universities can charge students for a degree means the amount of HELP debt that students incur will increase significantly, and in some cases will exceed $100,000. Under this scenario, HELP will certainly be here to stay because the high debt will take students decades and decades to repay. Indeed, many
The decisions to cut funding by 20 per cent and remove the cap on how much universities can charge students for a degree means that the average cost and debt incurred by students will increase significantly over the years. Higher average costs and debt levels will result in a higher levels of bad and doubtful HELP debts which will eventually have to be written off as a cost to the Government. As Andrew Norton from the Grattan Institute has pointed out, this means that HELP in its current form will be unsustainable as the costs writing off bad HELP debt grow disproportionately to other costs. Norton’s solution is the imposition of a graduate death duty, where unpaid HELP debts would be recovered from an individual’s or family’s estate on death. While Tony Abbott has ruled the imposition of such a death duty, it is likely only a matter of time before this is back on the table.
To be TRUE this should read: HECS HELP will be with you for decades as results of budget cuts and $100,000 degrees.
ABSOLUTELY TRUE The Government correctly claims that university graduates earn on average 75 per cent more than school leavers over their lifetime. Indeed, higher education is not only worth doing for individuals who earn higher incomes, it is also worth doing for the Government’s income tax revenue stream, and contribute to better health and social outcomes for society.
Encouraging more Australians to do higher education is a ‘no brainer’ in terms of simple budget arithmetic. At the moment, it costs the Government about $40,000 to educate the average university graduate. Over their working life, that graduate will earn an average extra $1,000,000 and pay an extra $300,000 to $400,000 in income tax. In other words, the more the Government invests in getting people to go to university, the more revenue it will reap in the form of tax revenue in the medium term.
Additionally, the social benefits a society derives from having a better educated population is one obvious element missing from the current higher education debate in Australia. Among other things, a better educated population results in: • A more productive workforce. • An internationally competitive economy. • Better health outcomes. • Lower crime rates. • A more cohesive and tolerant society.
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 23
Higher education policy
Beyond HERR – investing in students The Higher Education and Research Reform (HERR) Bill will impact domestic students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels of study. The most significant of these changes, university fee deregulation, could lead to degrees costing over $100,000, but other equally significant reforms including a fee on research degrees lurk in the background. Individually each of these reforms may appear insignificant when compared to a $100,000 degree, but taken together the detrimental effects of these reforms are magnified and over time cumulative.
Harry Rolf CAPA President M@CAPAPresident
Currently, a HELP debt which is on average $30,000 can take up to a decade to repay when earning an average salary. A 50% increase in this debt would see the repayment period almost double. For postgraduate students the level of debt will be even higher as debt interest is accumulated through a 2–4 year Masters or PhD degree. Even worse, the HERR Bill also proposes to introduce a fee on research degrees for Research Training Scheme (RTS) students. This will allow universities to charge a fee of up to $1,700 per annum for a low cost course in a discipline like Humanities or up to $3,900 per annum for a high cost course in Science, Engineering or Technology. Many postgraduates survive off the Australian Postgraduate Award (APA) stipend that in 2014 was just $25,392 or $488.31 a week, an amount below the Henderson Poverty Line of $509.53 as of June 2014. If a postgraduate relying on the APA allowance was to pay the fee upfront it would reduce their income by as much as $75 per week, 18% below the poverty line. In this case a postgraduate will be left with little option other than to defer the fee, a decision which will compound their growing debt problem significantly. A further concern is that while the fee is linked to the cost of research training in specific disciplines, this is where its connection to research training ends. The HERRA bill does not stipulate that a university must put monies raised from new fees towards the actual cost of research training, or to cover the $173 million cut in Research Training Scheme (RTS) funding in the 2014–15 Federal Budget, the primary justification for such a fee to exist in the first place. The RTS is a critical source of financial support to help universities cover the costs of research training. Annually, over $670 million in funding is distributed to universities; in 2015 RTS funding will make up approximately 33 per cent of the research block grant funding allocated to the higher education sector. Despite this, RTS funding does not cover the full cost
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of research training at a university. A 2011 study by Deloitte Economics found that on average there is a 27 per cent funding gap between RTS funding and the full cost of research training, which must be covered from other funding sources by a university. If the Government proceeds to cut RTS funding by the proposed $173 million over 3 years (equivalent to 10 per cent per annum) the funding gap will widen to over 33 per cent which could lead to many postgraduates missing out on a desk or other resources required for research. At this point the key question which needs to be asked is: why should the Government invest money into research training and postgraduate students at Australian universities? One fundamental reason is the contribution which postgraduates make towards Australia’s innovation system, tipped to be the main driver of economic growth over the next 50 years. The Australia Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has shown that over the last decade postgraduates have been responsible for the majority (up to 57 per cent in 2012) of the higher education sectors research and development (R&D) effort. If investment in research training and postgraduates is cut, so too will one of the key drivers of economic growth in Australia. Perplexingly, these cuts come at a time when the Government has invested in a review of Australia’s innovation system, and is receiving advice from authoritative sources including its own National Commission of Audit which says investing in R&D is crucial for a strong Australian economy. In response to this issue, the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA) prepared a pre-Budget submission proposing that the Government maintain funding to the RTS and investigate other measures which can reduce the financial burden on postgraduates during their degree. Ultimately, investing in university students at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels not only benefits the individual, it benefits every Australian. www.capa.edu.au
Free Trade Agreements
End game for TPP? While much of the focus is on other matters, the Coalition Government’s free trade agenda continues with little public alarm despite the massive implications of the Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) signed in 2014. Soon after the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (ChAFTA) negotiations ended, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) announced that the draft agreement contained both Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) provisions, as well as temporary labour mobility clauses. One will allow Chinese corporations to sue the Australian Government for new laws that damage the profits of those companies, the other will allow Chinese companies to import labour to work on projects worth above $150 million. The agreement also means that the Japan-Australia agreement (JAEPA) will have to be modified because of a previously dormant clause that introduces ISDS provisions if such provisions are agreed to in another FTA. The Coalition Government’s enthusiastic support for signing itself and future governments up to binding financial obli-
gations with foreign companies is heading towards another crescendo in 2015. Firstly, the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade is reviewing the Commonwealth’s treaty-making process in light of the growing number of bilateral and multilateral trade agreements, and will report on this by June. Secondly, there is the extension of talks on the all-important Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). This multilateral agreement contains the aforementioned controversial ISDS arrangements, but binds it to 12 jurisdictions across the Asia-Pacific, allowing companies from countries as afar as the United States, Brunei and Mexico to sue all tiers of Australian Government when they introduce public welfare laws that affect their corporate bottom line. There has been little public protest in contrast to the massive public opposition highlighted in a recent European Commission report on
the introduction of ISDS in equivalent negotiations around the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). With the United States heading towards presidential elections in 2016, their trade diplomats will push harder than ever to resolve the TPP in the first part of 2015. A meeting of Trade Ministers from the negotiating countries has been called for 14-16 March. The NTEU, along with a number of other trade unions, recently signed a letter that calls on the Coalition Government to reject the TPP, and to release the full text of the agreement for public scrutiny. The full text of this letter, as well as our Senate Committee submission on treaty-making, can be found on the NTEU website. The NTEU is backing the Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network (AFTINET), the trade union movement and a multitude of NGOs in protest actions throughout March 2015. We encourage members to get active, push back against the TPP and Australia’s negotiation of other unjust trade agreements. Jen Tsen Kwok, Policy & Research Officer Australian Fair Trade and Investment Network aftinet.org.au
Above: TPP protest in Canberra in June 2014. Left: Japanese farmers protest the TPP at a rally in Tokyo, April 2014. (Photo: AFP). See also ‘A dirty international deal that could harm education’, p.44
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Photo: NTEU’s Insecure Work Conference at the University of Tasmania. Photo by Paul Kniest.
Insecure Work Conference Participants in the NTEU National Insecure Work Conference in Hobart last November were empowered by the experience of meeting with others precariously employed like them. They also learned of the differences and similarities across types of insecure work in higher education and research; and they heard a commitment by the National Executive to heighten the priority of addressing both insecure work in the sector and the issues for insecurely employed staff.
Jeannie Rea National President
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Almost every NTEU Branch was represented and their delegates had to come from one of the target groups of academic teaching casuals, contract research staff or ‘project and other fixed term staff’. These delegates now have the authority to report back to their Branch Committees on the conference and to recommend what they think their Branch and Division should do next – for and with their precariously employed colleagues. Delegates nodded knowingly to the presentations by researchers (often also precariously employed) who explained the magnitude of the problem and also the impact upon the people. They cheered the reports from activists on campaigns and networks that have spearheaded actions within and alongside the NTEU. They worked hard in the action-oriented workshops to come up with recommendations on where the Union should focus activity now. The NTEU National Executive met the day following the Conference and undertook to develop an action plan incorporating feedback from Divisions and Branches on current activities and priorities for 2015. This plan will pick up many of the concrete suggestions including establishing a national contract research staff reference group to consider specific items towards developing enterprise bargaining claims.
L–R: Kaye Broadbent, Griffith University; Luke Nickholds, Monash University; Simone Mooketsi, USQ. Photos Paul Kniest
Ongoing campus based action However, as academic casuals, research contractors and other fixed term delegates emphasised, there are many ways that the Union can be actively pursuing issues and be visible at a campus level organising and advocating for and with precariously employed staff. Many branches have worked for many years now on assisting casual academic staff with not only information about their rights, but also picking up issues like under and late payment, access to facilities and to professional development. The enterprise bargaining claim for payment-for-marking originated from protests from casuals that the supposed inclusion of marking in the casual pay rate was nonsense. That marking remains underpaid was further confirmed in recent NTEU research, blogs like CASA (Casuals, Adjuncts, Sessionals & their Allies, actualcasuals.wordpress.com) and by conference delegates. An initiative from Swinburne Branch to take up the issue of inequity in superannuation was also popular and seen as one where improvements could be made at particular sites with some concerted campaigning and networking.
Expose and stop free labour Academic casuals emphasised that the Union must keep focused on increasing secure jobs, but also on the pay and conditions of current casuals. All agreed that success at a campus or university level in changing university policy and practice does mean that casuals do need to organise, but that they must get support of their colleagues. The invisibility of casual academics and the wilful ignorance of their exploitation is not excusable by union members. Two messages that resonated around the Conference were that there are no grounds that justify being paid and treated differently to the worker next to you, and that we must expose and stop free labour.
These conclusions are most apposite as free labour by university staff in more secure jobs is keeping our universities running, which was the theme of the NTEU’s video for Go Home on Time Day on 19 November (www.nteu.org.au/general). But going home on time is not the issue for academics and professional staff employed for a few hours a week or a few months with no or few employment benefits. They also put in hours and hours of unpaid and totally unrecognised time often using their own equipment and power at home. For staff in the third category of non-research fixed term employment the issue of invisibility is particularly relevant. These people are doing all sorts of jobs in the library to facilities to IT to administration to education development, but universities can get away with employing them on fixed term contracts as soon as they can categorise their job as being part of a ‘project’. Some projects are real and short-term funded, but others are not, especially when viewed through the eyes of someone continuously employed on fixed term contracts doing pretty much the same job.
Insecure work becoming the norm A key message for union members is that precarious work has grown dramatically in higher education. I have reported these figures continuously; but one in two university jobs are now casual or fixed term and four out of five new jobs in the last decade are casual or fixed term. Over 80 per cent of teaching-only staff are casual and over 80 per cent of research-only staff are on fixed term contracts. The sector has grown and new jobs are mainly insecure, but at the same time previously secure jobs have been turned into insecure jobs. Over the past decade the NTEU has exposed the casualisation of teaching and has popularised understanding of the impact on casual academics, the students and the quality of university education. Now it is agreed to be a problem, but uni-
I enjoyed the opportunity to get a more global view of the industrial aspects of the work I do. The presentation from the US unionist was especially interesting. – Gordon, contract researcher
[The conference] helped change my perspectives on a number of areas. Increased my levels of motivation to go back to university and fight for a better and fairer deal for casuals. – Casual academic
The chance to meet fellow delegates face-toface and discuss current issues. The chance to talk directly with members of the National Executive. All of the presentations were very good. – Researcher
The conference had fantastic sessions, great presenters and was well organised at a great venue – Kate, casual academic
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Insecure Work Conference Forum: job creation vs job security versity managements continue to refuse to address it and fight the union when we negotiate for more secure jobs. However, we should have won around 1000 new teaching jobs in this current bargaining round. As was recognised at the conference, we now have to get those jobs filled!
Fixed term contract research The big surprise, to the sector and to some at our Conference was just how prevalent fixed term contracts had become in research work for both academic and professional staff. For example at Queensland and Monash now there are more ‘research-only’ than ‘teaching and research’ academics, and up to 80 per cent of research-only academics are fixed term. The NTEU has campaigned in and outside of bargaining periods for improved conditions and conversion of fixed term research positions, but there is now consensus that we need to prioritise this activity. While we were not watching closely enough, job security has collapsed in the research sector in and outside universities.
On the first evening of the NTEU National Insecure Work Conference, a public forum at the UTAS College of the Arts examined job growth in the island state, and asked ‘does job creation need to be at the expense of job security?’ Moderated by Associate Professor Angela Martin, NTEU member from the University of Tasmania, the panel comprised: Scott Bacon (State ALP member for Denison), Amina Keygan (demographer based in NW Tasmania), Roz Madsen (President, Unions Tasmania), Nick McKim (State Greens member for Franklin), and Professor Tony Lamontagne (Deakin University). Each panellist provided their opinion about employment in Tasmania. Surprisingly, considering the often gloomy predictions, the speakers had a generally optimistic approach, noting the need for strong policy intervention from government. Tony Lamontagne stressed the links between insecure work and poor mental health. The panel fielded a diversity of questions from audience members. It was refreshing to hear both the State politicians speak frankly and openly about the challenges of boosting employment in Tasmania from a governing perspective. It was unfortunate that no-one from the current Liberal State Government had been able to participate. Jeannie Rea provided a closing summary, highlighting the parallels and the differences between insecure work issues in the higher education sector and society in general, and thanked all involved for their contributions. Kelvin Michael, Secretary, NTEU Tasmanian Division
Below: Public forum panellists. Bottom (L–R): Angela Martin, Amina Keygan, Nick McKim. Photos Paul Kniest
In the lead up to the Conference, as well as surveying academic casuals about online work, we also surveyed NTEU members in fixed term research jobs. This data will form the base for ongoing work, but importantly exposed the reality that some members had approached their Branch about serious issues of not even getting their current entitlements, but had not been supported. This is not good enough. In discussion, Conference delegates agreed that there are lots of individual issues that quickly turn ‘collective’ with a just a few conversations with colleagues. The crass reality is that fixed term staff are very vulnerable to be employed on all sorts of dodgy and likely illegal conditions just because the university can get away with it because no one has complained. The person involved is reticent because they want another job. They need support. That is why we are a Union. Thank you to all our guests and delegates and our Tasmanian Division hosts. This was a successful couple of days. Whether it was a successful conference depends upon what we do now. For more information, the conference website includes the program, videos and the presentation slides of the speakers, as well as the online casual and contract research survey reports: www.nteu.org.au/insecurework2014
It was an excellent opportunity to network with members from other universities and NTEU staff and executive. I feel like we really managed to promote understanding of experiences of insecurity among contract researchers, and show support for a national network and campaign. – Natasha, research grant funded
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Insecure Work Conference Speaker’s notes Jonathan O’Donnell, blogger at theresearchwhisperer.wordpress. com
I learnt so much at the Insecure Work Conference. As a speaker, I wrote what I was going to say before I arrived. But as I listened to others, and talked to people, I realised that I was in deep water. I didn’t really know what I was talking about. So I threw out half of my presentation.
Hooking the conference online was genius, I was talking about the conference with a colleague back on campus who was ‘dipping in and out’ and speaking very positively – General staff delegate
The videoconference link was great, as I couldn’t attend in person. It was great that I didn’t miss out on the presentations. – Penny, project funded not in research
I learned a lot about the extent of insecure work and what others are doing about it. – Jo, casual academic
Here is what I learnt: • Most employees at Australian universities are now on hourly or short-term contracts. • It is a no-brainer for the union to support these people – they are the majority of the employees.
Enjoyed that it was a working conference, not just a couple of days of absorption of ideas. – Karin, casual academic
• People on short-term contracts have different issues, but the feeling of insecurity is the same. • Doing yoga to highlight the issue is very, very clever. • However bad it is in Australia, I never want to work in the USA. The main thing that I learnt, though, was that I can make a difference. Not just through union solidarity, but individually through my job. I advise people how to get research funding. That means that I can highlight the issue in discussions with young researchers, I can advise people to build better budgets, and I can nudge policy around research centres and ‘soft’ money.
I liked most that there were opportunities in the workshops to discuss what was happening in other universities and how to go forward. However, the time allocated seemed to run out very quickly. – Lachlan, casual academic
I enjoyed every bit of it. I think it was a huge breakthrough in the Union recognising the future probability of a casual and insecure academy, one in which the Union must take action now if it is to be relevant in the future. – Suzanne, academic
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Insecure Work Conference Impressions of a Branch delegate Dr Karen McNeil, delegate from University of Newcastle Branch
The NTEU Insecure Work Conference highlighted the plight of the largely invisible, yet significant numbers of precariously-employed in the university sector. It is becoming increasingly evident that insecure work, in its various forms, has become the norm not just for teaching staff, but for staff working on ‘projects’ in research, learning support, IT, Finance and HR. Unfortunately, the definition of the term ‘project’ is becoming ubiquitous and often misused.
The topic was introduced and covered well. The speakers were excellent. (However) more time to talk in small groups about the issues please. – Ali
As Robyn May reinforced, there is a continuum of employment insecurity. Given that insecure employment has become so widespread across the sector, there needs to be a greater recognition that contracts of one year or more are far more attractive and workable than several shorter –term contracts (from both employee and employer point of view). Moreover, there are important lessons to be learnt from other unions. The Service Employees International Union (SIEU) in the US has waged a very successful recruitment campaign targeting adjunct teaching staff from 4,500 colleges. In doing so, their key message to students is that teaching staff cannot make a viable living working under precarious employment conditions. In Australia, the National Union of Workers (NUW) has broken down barriers between the permanent and casual workforce building solidarity on the basis that ‘Every Voice Counts’. Having recently completed my PhD, perhaps the most sobering message for me was from CASA – universities need to be more honest with their PhD students about the lack of employment prospects in the sector.
Top, left: Professor Aiden Byrne, CEO, Australian Research Council. Top, right: Tim Kennedy, General Secretary, National Union of Workers. Middle, left: Professor Michael Hamel-Green, VU. Middle, right: Kate Bowles, CASA/UoW. Bottom: Karin Stokes, CQU Photos by Paul Kniest page 30 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
The presentations: the quality of the information and the quality of the presenters; the group forums of delegates were well run and allowed productive discussion (at least my group was like that). – Mark, contract academic
Insecure Work Conference Dangers in a casualised workforce Dr Sandy O’Sullivan, ARC Senior Indigenous Researcher, Australian Learning and Teaching Fellow (OLT), Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education, was a speaker at the conference. Later she reflected:
When universities talk about academic integrity, they mean cheating, when they talk ethics, they mean the mitigation of unethical practices. And when universities argue the benefit of a flexible workforce they are talking about a flexibility centred on their plans, but who does it serve? For Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff there are many layers to consider in our ongoing competitive positions, and as the sector moves towards a more transitory workforce, we need to consider the implications of these expectations. There is often an expectation that we participate in more institutional committees, boards and in community engagement at a significantly higher rate than our non-Indigenous counterparts. This can, as the study by Page and Asmar suggests, lead to burnout and academics choosing to leave the sector (2008 p.113). We often have the responsibility to provide both academic and pastoral care to Indigenous students, who studies show require far greater support and engagement than their non-Indigenous counterparts (p.111) We are expected to participate in these activities as emerging academics, often drawing our activities away from building our individual research profile. While these opportunities can sometimes provide governance opportunities, they are often out of proportion with the workload percentage attached to these tasks. All of this occurs in a landscape where Indigenous applicants are expected to complete the teaching and research responsibilities at the same rate as our non-Indigenous counterparts. When the Union steps in to support and assist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff in ensuring that we have permanent, sustainable employment within the sector, it recognises it’s significant responsibility, and the unique pressures. In 2013, I was supported by the Union to convert the researcher position I have held for several years to an ongoing appointment. Batchelor Institute, where I am a Senior Indigenous Researcher, welcomed the input and support of the Union and worked towards this conversion. In order for the Institute to have a sustainable research program, we need to ensure that we have continuity, our research students expect it, our institutional partners are assured by it, and in some cases our national research funding requires it. Our research focus relies on areas of strength having ongoing academic and research consistency. As the research leader across one of these areas, losing me to another institution poses a significant risk. Although we are small institution, due to the modest size of Indigenous cohorts at larger institutions, this same imperatives and risks can result in the collapse of an Indigenous student support structure. Without discussions with the Union I wouldn’t have been aware that the conversion option existed. I found only support and help from my home institution and the Union worked with me to explain the substantial benefits to Batchelor Institute. If I had not been converted, the Institute would have been ineligible for a range of funding, would have struggled to find a replacement with the institutional knowledge and support praxis, and it would have lost time in existing funding rounds: in short, it would have cost the institution money. A casual workforce, particularly in the context of Indigenous academic staff, is dangerous and not just to the staff member, it puts at risk entire programs, institutional obligations, important work that need to happen for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People, and it creates an environment in which that instability is a disincentive to our students entering and engaging with higher education. Page, S. & Asmar, C. (2008). ‘Beneath the Teaching Iceberg: Exposing the Hidden Support Dimensions of Indigenous Academic Work’. Australian Journal of Indigenous Education, Vol. 37, Supplementary, 2008: 109-117.
Fantastic opportunity to meet and network with NTEU and fellow insecurely employed colleagues, and to re-energise and feel inspired that change is possible. … A third day could have been devoted to state / territory organising / brainstorming. As a very diverse and disparate group precariously employed workers need to spend time together and with NTEU and other champions to build solidarity and a critical mass. – Lesa, contract academic
I liked the chance to talk about the issues facing fixed-term ‘research-only’ staff, as distinct from casuals and permanent staff, as there has been no such opportunity to date. … It was an excellent conference. I was both shocked at the current lack of understanding of our issues, and relieved at the opportunity I had to go around raising consciousness at last. One thing: casuals think they’re the only insecure workers and think they work with ‘permanent’ staff. They don’t. They increasingly work with staff on fixedterm contracts, alongside those ‘permanent’ staff they keep talking about as their allies. Neither side of that divide understands that we can take the jobs of either group at any time, depending on the university’s needs. Casuals are also likely to become us, not permanent staff. – Amrita, research grant funded
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Resisting ERA: Why not just say no? On 22 October 2014, I published an opinion piece in the Higher Education Supplement of The Australian under the title ‘Two Rounds Enough: ERA Does More Harm than Good’. In that article, I argued that ‘after two rounds of Excellence in Research Australia (ERA) I believe the evidence is now in that the ERA is doing more harm than good. It is driving intensified managerialism, creating invidious status hierarchies between and within disciplines, and undermining collegiality. Potentially, it may also threaten academic freedom as managers seek to direct staff more and more where to publish, and even not to publish.’
Assoc Prof Andrew Bonnell University of Queensland Qld Division President
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Bad behaviour As a result of this assessment of our research assessment exercise, I wrote, having volunteered to be an assessor in previous rounds, I would decline to do so this time. Like many academics, I do many things out of collegiality that are unpaid (or for which there is largely token payment), but we agree to do such things to benefit our colleagues. Why agree to an unpaid job that could take the best part of a week when it is making our colleagues’ working lives worse, and breeding bad management behaviour? Examples of such management behaviour include increasing efforts to micro-manage research, despite the existence of academic freedom clauses in Collective Agreements. Some universities, including the University of Queensland, where I work, have adopted versions of the profoundly flawed journal ranking lists that the Australian Research Council (ARC) promulgated in 2010 and 2012 for the purpose of ERA, but which the ARC has now abandoned, and advised against using. Staff are being rewarded for publishing in so-called A or A* journals, but those whose work appears in other venues might face being penalised in terms of workload allocation or career progression.
Response from colleagues The response of colleagues around the country was very encouraging. I received many messages from people I had never met supporting the position of refusing to be an assessor for the ERA (we don’t have any option about submitting our work, of course). Months later, when attending academic conferences, I still meet colleagues who thank me for providing them with a good ‘excuse’ not to volunteer for the fairly onerous task of reading ERA submissions. I only received one direct response that did not agree that it would be a good idea to boycott ERA reviewing. A colleague in the humanities argued that the peer reviewing was better for the humanities than a purely metrics-based evaluation process. But this response presupposes that we have to have the ERA in the first place.
Metrics-driven performance indicators The existence of the ERA is a problem to start with, and even if the ERA doesn’t rely solely on metrics, managers within institutions have used the ERA as the justification for the introduction of metrics-driven performance indicators in an effort to drive up the performance of the institution in the ERA. At UQ, for example, there is the absurdity of the ‘Q-Index’, which combines grants, research higher degree enrolments and completions, and publications – weighted by journal ranking, to attach a single number – to two decimal points – to every academic’s research performance. The report of the NTEU’s Policy & Research Unit on the ERA in 2012 shows that such negative phenomena are not confined to one or two universities, but have become relatively widespread.
Defending the ERA It was interesting to hear the response of ARC CEO Aidan Byrne to the critique of the ERA when he spoke at the NTEU’s Insecure Work Conference in Hobart last November. Professor Byrne defended the ERA on the grounds that it provided him with evidence he could use to defend public research funding, as he could use the ERA data to demonstrate a correlation between the places where most research money went and the places assessed as ‘above’ or ‘well above’ world standards. Everyone wishes Professor Byrne well in his efforts to defend our national research effort against further cuts from a short-sighted, mean, and perhaps increasingly vindictive government. But how robust are the findings we get from the ERA?
Gaming the system Emeritus Professor Frank Larkins subjected ERA 2010 and ERA 2012 to a searching analysis. Rather than demonstrating a jump in the quality of research outputs
Whither peer reviewing? Yet another threat to the future of the academic profession was recently exposed. The pressure to ‘publish or perish’ alongside the casualisation of academic work and ludicrous workloads has forced the editors of 43 academic journals to write to universities and funding bodies calling for institutional recognition and support. While academic journals have always survived through the editorial commitment of academics concerned with the integrity of their discipline and the critical role of publishing research in advancing knowledge, workload pressure is making it more difficult to find time to undertake this critical collegial work. The journal editors publishing with Wiley were coordinated by University of Melbourne Associate Professor Martha Macintyre. Their letter focused in upon the need for universities to recognise and reward ‘professional service contributions.’ With the ERA focusing upon the publication of journal articles and universities tying performance appraisal to publication success, the volume of journal submissions has exploded. The editors particularly focused upon peer reviewing. It is increasingly difficult to find peer reviewers, with academics declining to review because of the pressure to write their own articles. They also do not have the time, as the volume of other professional and administrative work has blown out with increased student numbers and the casualisation of teaching. In speaking with academics about this problem, some are turning down requests for peer review because they don’t want to agree, but then find themselves under time pressure and unable to do justice to the submission in terms of assessment of suitability for publication and feedback to the author(s). This collegial responsibility is taken very seriously in the interests of colleagues and academic scholarship. So the question becomes should these professional services be built into workloads, and/or should there be payment to review, as some are suggesting. How would payment make the difference if academics do not have time? At some universities academics are being told to cut back on editing and reviewing and indeed doing any of the traditional collegial activities that define academic and scholarly work, unless they count in HERDC points or ERA rankings. Payment for doing these activities could also become a way for universities to avoid paying their academic staff, particularly vulnerable part-time contract and casually employed academics, by encouraging them to take on paid reviewing and editing to supplement their salaries. Academics are already under extreme pressure to bring more money into the university not just in research projects, but also in consultancies and other remunerated activities. However, these activities are still unlikely to save one’s job if the criteria are contributions to ERA rankings. These are sorts of issues blithely ignored by those advocating or accepting the ‘unbundling’ of academic work. If you are interested in discussing and pursuing this issue through your union, please contact the NTEU Policy and Research Unit at policy@nteu.org.au. Jeannie Rea, National President Editors’ letter: exchanges.wiley.com/blog/2015/01/07/recognition-for-peer-review-and-editing-in-australia-and-beyond/
in only two years (inherently unlikely), the better average results in the second exercise largely showed that universities in 2012 were ‘adopting a more strategic approach to defining their research profile and discipline strengths compared to the 2010 ERA round’.
standard. I sometimes remark that I only have terrestrial standards to go by.
Less polite commentators have used the word ‘gaming’. Universities contain many clever people who will quickly learn how to ‘game’ any reward system, even if it leads to perverse outcomes in the long run. One might also ask how robust the criteria are by which we distinguish ‘world class’ from ‘above’ or ‘well above’ world
www.lhmartininstitute.edu.au/ userfiles/files/Blog/FLarkins_HE%20 Research%20Policy%20Analysis_ ERA2012_pt1_Feb2013.pdf)
Sometimes academics collude too much in their own oppression. Occasionally, we can just say no. Larkin’s analysis of ERA:
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Award review
Hours of work will be a key focus From early March, the NTEU will have its claims before the Fair Work Commission as part of the first four yearly review of our Modern Awards. The 120 or so modern awards are being reviewed across all industries and it’s mandatory that the Commission ensure our awards meet certain requirements under the Fair Work Act. The ‘modern awards objective’ includes taking account of relative living standards and the needs of the low paid; encouraging collective bargaining; social inclusion, and the need to provide additional remuneration for employees working overtime, unsocial or irregular hours, weekends, public holidays or on shifts. This last objective is particularly important as the Federal Government seeks to re-open the debate on scrapping penalty rates via their Productivity Commission Inquiry into the Workplace Relations Framework. NTEU is seeking practical changes to our Higher Education Awards – for general/ professional staff and academics to ensure that the award safety net reflects the modern industry. We will require solid evidence for our claims so we will be calling on member experts in the fields of work, hours, casual employment, work and family and the like. We will also require members who can provide direct evidence of their working arrangements. Parties to the awards must lodge an outline of their variation applications by 2 March, when we will find out whether
there are any changes proposed by the employers.
Why are we making these claims? The vast majority of staff in higher education are covered by Enterprise Agreements which include pay and conditions well in excess of the minimums required in Awards. However, the Awards provide an important safety net and if they are not updated this will affect our bargaining outcomes in future. All Enterprise Agreements must meet the Better Off Overall Test (BOOT) under the Fair Work Act. This means their terms are compared against the conditions in the Award so it’s important that the Award continues to reflect changes in the industry. The Award Review does not directly address wages which are reviewed annually via a Minimum Wage Case. Susan Kenna, Industrial Officer
Our claims for general/ professional staff Working hours and overtime The overtime clause in the Higher Education (General Staff ) Award requires payment or time off in lieu for overtime that is authorised. However it is common practice for general staff in our industry to work far beyond their ordinary hours just to get the work done, without ‘authorisation’. This excessive overtime culture developed over time, partly as a result of job cuts and unreasonable workload. A commensurate expectation has developed
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Claims for both general and academic staff ICT Allowances NTEU will claim allowances for the cost of establishing, maintaining and using telephone, mobile, email and internet connections when a worker is required to do so in order to perform their duties.
Research Institutes The NTEU will re-submit our case to have general, technical and research staff in medical, health and science research institutes covered by our two key modern awards. This case was run in 2012 but the Commission did not determine its merits, merely finding that the then 2 year review into modern awards was not sufficiently broad to consider the issues.
that staff will not ask for and/or receive compensation for overtime worked. We will ask the Commission to ensure that employers take all reasonable steps to ensure that overtime worked is compensated.
Classification descriptors Though over 20 years old, the Classification Definitions (‘descriptors’) have more or less stood the test of time. Nonetheless, NTEU will seek to update the descriptors to better reflect work performed in universities in 2015. We will not be asking for a review of work value or to amend job level relativities, and the application is focused only on the wording in the descriptors and not associated issues such as re-classification processes.
Award review Can you assist NTEU in providing evidence for our case? Please take the time to consider the following questions to see if you fit the required profile. For Academic Staff:
For General Staff:
Have you worked as a fixed-term or ongoing teaching and research academic for at least 10 years?
Have you worked as a non-casual general staff member for at least 2 years?
3. You have a constant large workload which can only be completed if you work in excess of or outside ordinary hours.
Are you compensated for overtime when worked (by payment of time off in lieu)?
4. You just do extra things of your own free will which are not really required.
Have you worked overtime and not been compensated?
Do you have a strong story to tell about excessive workloads and unpaid overtime?
Do you consistently work long hours? Have you noticed a change over time in the work allocated to you by your employer? (For example, demands to publish in certain journals; increased teaching loads; increased administration). Do you put in considerable time just staying abreast of developments in your discipline? Do you have a strong story to tell about working long hours and trying to keep ahead of your workload? Would you be prepared to tell this story in the Fair Work Commission as a witness to assist our case?
Has your workload increased since you started your job? If you work additional hours without compensation in the form of money or time, is this because: 1. You are directed specifically to work outside of or in addition to ordinary hours. 2. You are directed or required to meet particular deadlines or perform particular tasks which can only be completed if you work extra hours.
Our claims for academic staff
standards to a professional standard, can be performed within 1845 hours per year (approx 38 hours per week), less leave and public holidays.
A term providing for the determination of ordinary hours for academic staff
A Professional and Discipline Currency Allowance
The Academic Award does not currently effectively provide for regulation of hours for academic staff although the legislation requires that all awards must prescribe a means of determining ‘ordinary hours’. We all know that most academics work excessive hours: While many academics have always worked long hours, the last 20-30 years has seen an inordinate increase in work required of academics by the employer. Our claim will take account of the unique nature of academic work and maintain the current professional flexibility that academics experience in relation to the timing and manner of performing much of their work. Our claim will simply ask that the maximum work allocated to an employee or required to meet their performance
Academic staff are expected to be ‘up to date’ with developments in their discipline. However, casual academics are certainly not compensated for this. They may be employed on a sessional and seasonal basis to teach in their area of expertise – and the award provides payment for marking and preparation time – but they are not compensated for the inherent requirement that they maintain currency in their discipline and relevant pedagogy, or keep abreast of their employer’s policies. NTEU will make a claim for a discipline currency allowance for such casual staff.
Classification protection for academic staff working in an institution where there is no bona fide promotion system. To the best of our knowledge, there are no universities that do not have a genuine promotion system in place but,
Would you be prepared to tell this story in the Fair Work Commission as a witness to assist our case?
Can you help? If you have answered YES to each of the relevant questions and think you could take the time to be involved as a witness, please email awardreview@nteu.org.au with your details (name, place of work, job title, contact details). Our National Industrial Unit will respond to you in due course.
particularly as the industry faces further deregulation, the award classification structure – the Level A to E MSALs – must reflect work value and stand as a minimum reference point for promotion standards. We will seek an amendment to ensure that academics may seek to enforce their correct classification and pay rate for the work they perform in accordance with the MSALs, where no bona fide promotion system exists.
Conversion of casual academic work The ACTU currently has a claim in place across several industry awards to deem casual employees to be ongoing after a period of 6 months’ regular work. We are part of this claim for general/professional staff. The issue of merit selection makes automatic conversion to ongoing work more complicated for academic staff. Depending on how the Commission approaches the ACTU ‘common claim’, NTEU may pursue a claim for conversion of academic work (as distinct from incumbents).
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Copyright & open access debate In the last issue of Advocate (vol. 21, no. 3, Nov 2014), the Chair of the Australian Society of Authors (ASA), historian and biographer David Day wrote on the copyright challenges faced in an era of open access, exploring the detrimental effects of technological innovation upon the proprietary interests of Australian academic staff. The ASA represents the interests of professional authors reliant upon the income accrued from their writing, and was instrumental in establishing the Australian Copyright Agency to collect fees on behalf of authors when their work is reproduced. Day’s article flowed from the proposed changes to Australia’s copyright laws, captured in the Australian Law Reform Commission’s (ALRC) 2013 report Copyright and the Digital Economy. This report proposed the introduction of US-styled ‘fair use’ provisions as a way of modernising Australian copyright law, including legalising instances in which users adapted copyrighted content, such as through the technological ‘transformation’ of copyrighted materials by Google books.
Photo: Alexander Kalina
In this issue, Angela Daly and Leigh Blackall take on the debate for ‘fair use’ from the point of view of Australian academics seeking to use authored work in their teaching and research.
The dark side of copyright Appreciating and rewarding the creative and intellectual work of authors is of the utmost importance for a society which values learning and knowledge. In Australia, as mentioned in David Day’s article, one important mechanism for doing this is through the copyright system, which grants authors of works certain rights, including exclusive ‘economic’ rights over its use and distribution, as well as ‘moral’ rights such as the right to be recognised as the creator. These rights are usually for a certain time period (in Australia currently the life of the author plus 70 years) and are also subject to exceptions, such as fair dealing for the purposes of research and study. Day’s article extolled the benefits of copyright, and pronounced the egregious threats to academics’ rights that expand-
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Open access & intellectual commons I want to offer an alternative to David Day’s advocacy for Copyright Agency Limited (CAL), an agency that collects royalty fees for the use of restricted literary works and pays some of that revenue to some of the authors whose work was used, and outline the opportunities and benefits of working toward an intellectual commons. I want to propose a coming together around the issues David touches on and open up more dialogue in the establishment for how we might help accelerate the building of this Commons and our own intellectual relevance within it. There appears to be a growing interest among academics, the public sector
ing the existing ‘fair dealing’ exception in Australia law to one of ‘fair use’. In fact, a move to fair use would likely be of great benefit to academics, whose position as authors is actually quite different to our literary counterparts. As academics, both research- and teaching-active ones, we create new material and use the material of others, and so participate as both holders of copyright and users of others’ copyrighted work. For many of us, increased access to research and teaching materials, which a fair use exception would permit, is likely to be much more useful than the limited income most of us receive from our own copyrighted work. Copyright is already a controversial area of law, particularly so in the academic realm, for impeding access to knowledge produced by others and sometimes even ourselves. It is true that for academics, writing for publication is a core part of our trade. But the reality of publication is that we usually have to sign contracts with scholarly presses to have our work published in journals or as monographs – and it is these contracts, and publishers’ practices, which demonstrate many problematic aspects of the current copyright regime. These contracts usually contain terms which
and private enterprise toward ideas of openness. Practices that include open research and data, open publishing and open education. ‘Open’ here does not mean simply free access, it includes transparency of process, and the freedom for anyone to reuse - including to copy, modify and redistribute works. These practices are gradually building an intellectual commons, and are a radical inversion of the kind of ‘knowledge economy’ imagined 30 years ago when CAL was conceived, and that are established today. You can find this commons in many open journals, media repositories like Wikimedia Commons or Archive.org and projects like Wikipedia. The things that generally govern these practices are the use of the Creative Commons Attribution and Share Alike copyright licenses, open documentation of process, and the use of free and open standard software and formats. In the university sector these practices offer a few noteworthy opportunities including the reduction or replacement of proprietary teaching media with free and more flexible equivalents; legally seamless collaboration in authorship; wider access and use and improved recognition of authorship. Open academic practices have developed in spite of otherwise very restrictive copyright and intellectual property policies, and in spite of the monetary rewards that help to perpetuate those policies. In 2010 a handful of staff at the University of Canberra proposed an intellectual property policy that would enable and
either transfer the copyright over the work to the publisher or give the publisher an exclusive licence to publish and otherwise reproduce the work – often at a high fee to anyone wishing to access it. The usual result of this process is that university libraries pay large sums of money to access academic books and journals – to which their own staff contribute, and for which their own staff receive no or little payment. Consider that the publisher Elsevier has been specifically targeted through a boycott by almost 15000 academics worldwide (from all disciplines) for its restrictive business practices. As academics, we both create new material and use the creative material of others and so participate in copyright as owners and users – yet income from our copyrighted material is usually marginal at best when compared with our salaries. In fact, for many of us, the copyright regime and publishers’ business models pose more burdens on our work than benefits, in terms of us not being able to access resources to aid our research and teaching. The current copyright regime is not effective in ensuring that both our peers in the academy and the general public can access the work we produce. While open
strengthen open academic practices without undoing the established norms of restrictive copyright, and the agencies that facilitate user-pay fee systems. They documented a wide range of consultation and comment to the proposal, as well as key policy directions from Federal Government that relate to and inform the proposal. If the Intellectual Commons continues to grow at the exponential rate it has done so over the last 10 years, individuals, institutions and governments will inevitably come to question the role of the likes of CAL and the usefulness of the fees they extract and distribute. Some authors believe they are already suitably compensated by the wages and grants given to them by taxpayers and fee paying students, and don’t wish to add more burden to that revenue stream. Many struggle to see the relationship their work has to the financial incentives standing around them. Most simply wish their work to be seen, appreciated and used, free of commodification. I hope readers of Advocate and CAL will continue to consider their relationship to the Intellectual Commons and open academic practices. Perhaps the proposed intellectual property policy cited here will give new frames of reference to aid that consideration. Leigh Blackall has worked across 7 Australian and NZ tertiary education institutions, most recently La Trobe and RMIT as an educational developer specialising in networked learning and open academic practices.
access initiatives from the ARC and NMRC are to be commended, problems remain with the hierarchy of academic journals which usually entail that the more prestigious journals are ‘closed’ access. Also, there are not many open access teaching resources currently in existence. Rather than support more restrictive copyright practices which impede access to this material, we should be promoting solutions which open up our work for use by our peers and for access by the wider society. Therefore, academics should support the introduction of a fair use exception into Australian copyright law in order to ensure greater access to our works, and support other open access initiatives for publishing which preserve prestige and quality while freeing up academic work to be enjoyed and utilised by a greater number of people. Angela Daly is a postdoctoral fellow at the Swinburne Institute for Social Research (Australia) and School of Law, specialising in the legal and social implications of 3D printing. She is a member of Electronic Frontiers Australia’s Policy and Research Standing Committee.
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Australian Universities’ Review
Shining a light on higher education Australian Universities’ Review (AUR) endeavours to bring to its readers articles, opinions and reviews about what is happening in contemporary higher education. What we publish is a reflection of what is going on out there, and unfortunately, it isn’t always good news. It would an excellent state of affairs if we could reflect more often on what was ‘good’ about our universities, and work out how we could make things even better. Instead, we are typically exhorted to deal with many more students than in the past, whilst universities’ broader emphasis is clearly on research, if staffing figures are anything to go by. What’s more, the hugely expanded university teaching load is largely being pushed towards precariously-employed sessional and other casual staff. Authors of a couple of the papers in the forthcoming issue of AUR have these sorts of issues in mind.
Research over teaching On the matter of research emphasis over teaching, ‘we are not alone’. A paper worthy of your attention by Viviane Callier, Richard Singiser and Nathan Vanderford explains there are similar pressures in the US. The authors note that research benefits an academic career, but teaching does not. Universities’ mis-emphasis in this regard means that universities on both sides of the Pacific are under-performing
in their teaching mission. The authors point out that many competitively-acquired research grants cost more money than they bring in. Even less funding for teaching!
Working in universities: happiness and sociopaths This issue also has a paper about academic happiness by Roderick Duncan, Kerry Tilbrook and Branka Krivokapic-Skoko. They surveyed staff, who kept diaries of what they were doing. The paper is based on statistical analysis of the results. They found ‘that for a teaching and research academic, the ideal day is a long day spent entirely on research activities without the interruptions of administrative or teaching tasks’. From these two papers alone, it seems that we could have a ‘mission clash’ in our universities. To run well, universities need good leadership. Chad Perry is concerned however, that universities might end up with the types of sociopathic leader that have helped to ‘derail’ some businesses. Such people place little value on relationships. He sees the threat as being that a sociopathic leader could degrade the collaborative nature of academic work sufficiently to produce mediocrity within the university. AUR has reported in the past through its papers about the onset of managerialism in universities. Themes about university work and how universities are changing are regular fare in AUR. In the past three years alone, AUR has brought you papers on casual staff
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and precarious employment written by Rothengater & Hil, volume 55, no. 2; Byers & Tani, 56(1); papers on ‘happiness’ (and related issues) by Ryan 54(2); Flood, Martin & Dreher, 55(1); Freudenberg & Samarkovski, 56(1); and papers that cut across issues of leadership and leadership style by Aspromourgos, 54(2); Harkin & Healy (55(2); and Connell, 56(2). Of course, many other authors have also touched on these important issues.
Vale Whitlam The current issue of Australian Universities’ Review is the first to be published since the death of Labor icon Gough Whitlam. He championed the idea of education for all and the policies of his governments in the1970s enabled many people to gain a university education which would have been kept out of their reach just a few years earlier. The current government seems not share the view the view that education should be affordable. Many of those holding the reins of power at the moment are in the age cohorts that benefited from the Whitlam reforms. However, they seem determined to return to the days when post-secondary education was restricted to the better-off in society. A final gripe about the sort of ‘government’ we seem to have these days is about how those representing governments frequently speak of ‘reform’, and sometimes I wonder if these people have checked a decent dictionary to see what ‘reform’ actually means. It unequivocally means that the changes to be implemented will improve things. The trouble is, the only way to see if something has been ‘improved’ is to compare the effects of those changes with the situation before the changes were implemented. When the last time a government did that? Don’t hold your breath waiting for them to say ‘We were wrong!’ However, we can live in hope. With these thoughts, I leave you to read the current issue of Australian Universities’ Review. Ian Dobson, Editor, AUR www.aur.org.au
International
Greece veers left Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras placed emphasis on education reforms as he presented the newly elected left-wing government’s inaugural statement in parliament. True to his pre-election promises, Tsipras reiterated his decision on the one hand to seek a better financial deal for the country that would take it out of austerity and recession; and on the other to reform all levels of education necessary for development and prosperity. The inaugural program and the first steps of the government have created great enthusiasm among the Greek population. Those who predicted the Prime Minister and his colleagues would be forced to perform a spectacular about-turn when faced with the realities of government were resoundingly wrong. The Government’s first priority in education is legislation to abolish management councils of universities and to bring back a number of measures abolished under the former regime. But, because introduction of new legislation would take time, Education Minister Professor Aristides Baltas said the current situation would have to remain temporarily as it was.
Access to universities ‘Our immediate concern is to decide on the number of students able to enter university but we cannot do that without taking into consideration the capacities of the institutions,’ Baltas said. In doing so, he was expressing his scepticism regarding the government’s plans to permit students to enrol in tertiary education without having to pass prerequisite examinations – while also signalling he did not favour making one-sided decisions. ‘We would like to give access to as many students who wish to study at a university but we have to examine carefully whether the institutions can respond to the demand,’ he said.
The ministry’s approach is entirely different to that of the former government regarding so-called ‘permanent students’, who had started their studies and, for some reason or another, were not able to continue. The previous government had intended to prevent them re-enrolling by deregistering them. ‘We will attempt to have personal contact with these students and discuss with them what they intend to do,’ Baltas said. ‘We will give them ample time to decide for themselves and we will try to facilitate either their de-registration if they wish, or the continuation of their studies.’
Yanis vs Europe Yanis Varoufakis, Finance Minister in the newly elected Greek government, is a former Lecturer at the University of Sydney and NTEU member.
Another subject of great concern for the government is the transfer of students to universities other than the one they first enrolled in. This year the institutions have been inundated with transfer demands, bringing their services almost to a standstill. The current situation will have to remain as it is during the academic year 2015-16, but for subsequent years the ministry is examining a 15% transfer ratio within the total student population, Baltas said.
Consultation committee He announced that the necessary decisions have been taken for the formation of a special committee to carry out consultations with the academic community prior to introducing new legislation. This may take up to two years while, in the meantime, things will remain as they are – apart from interventions that have been announced and are necessary for the smooth operation of schools and universities. The Government’s immediate priority is to convince its partners in the EU to approve a financial program that will allow Greece to put behind it the horrendous inadequacies of the austerity measures and embark on a course of development that will bring prosperity to the Greeks. It also hopes to show the way towards greater democracy as well as greater equality among Europeans. Makki Marseilles This article appeared in University World News, 20 Feb 2015 Issue No:355. www.universityworldnews.com
Varoufakis widely recognised as one of Greece’s most prominent and respected advocates for change in European economic policy. Since the outbreak of the Euro crisis, Varoufakis has taken his pedagogic skills outside the classroom into the world’s leading news media outlets and think tanks to promote a different way to handle Europe’s woes: from fervently criticizing the bailout programs in Greece, which he describes as ‘cynical attempts to shift losses from private banks to the weakest shoulders of the weakest taxpayers in Europe,’ to co-authoring A Modest Proposal, a toolbox of economic guidelines aimed at overcoming the Euro crisis. Varoufakis was inspired to study economics after he met Andreas Papandreou, an economist who founded PASOK and became Greece’s first socialist prime minister. After training in mathematics and statistics, he received his economics doctorate in 1987 at the University of Essex. From 1989 until 2000 he taught as Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Sydney. In 2000, he moved back to his native Greece where he became Professor of Economic Theory at the University of Athens.
Sources: Opendemocracy.net, Wikipedia
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International
Academic freedom defended in Canada In Australia, at times, we toss around the expression ‘academic freedom’ rather loosely and at others we are not vigilant enough to name decisions and behaviours of universities as violations of academic freedom. Would you be prepared to challenge what a department is or is not teaching as a violation of academic freedom? Our Canadian counterparts have taken this on.
The Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has a constant eye on academic freedom. Their Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee set up an independent committee of inquiry last year in response to allegations of efforts in the University of Manitoba’s Economics Department to reduce or eliminate approaches and views outside of mainstream economics. The Department had a previously enjoyed a reputation for making room for both mainstream and heterodox views in appointing staff and in the curriculum. The three person committee of prominent academics found serious violations of academic freedom and a workplace climate that has become ‘corrosive and dysfunctional to the point of crisis’. They noted that ‘a change in direction or emphasis within an academic unit does not intrinsically implicate academic freedom. However, it is our conclusion that decisions and actions within the Department cumulatively constituted violations of academic freedom by producing an environment within which scholarship of heterodox colleagues was undermined.’ The Committee found evidence of poor treatment and undermining of staff and postgraduate students pursuing heterodox teaching and research including attempts to re-assign courses and doctoral supervision to the orthodox proponents. The University administration dismissed the Committee’s report as biased without even bothering to undertake their own investigation. The University President claimed that the Committee had misused the term ‘academic freedom’. CAUT responded with, ‘The greatest threat to academic freedom in Canada comes from senior managers’ attempts to reduce its scope and discourage its exercise. The reckless endangerment of academic freedom derives from administrative preference for a cowed collegium, not from academic staff and their local and national associations.’
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US academic freedom advocates have also noted with alarm the increasing trend by university managements to both more narrowly and wrongly define academic freedom. A recent article by Professors Michael Schwartz and William Bowen, authors with Lisa Camp of End of academic freedom: the coming obliteration of the core purpose of the university, drew attention to recent examples of the rubbishing of areas of teaching and research as arcane and irrelevant by state governors. We are familiar with this from some commentators and politicians in Australia. Mostly what they do is expose their own ignorance. Schwartz and Bowen argue that academic freedom is done a disservice when used loosely to defend any actions by someone in an academic position. They cite an instance of someone arguing that teaching their classes was interfering with their academic freedom to focus on their professional growth and development. They argue that we must take care that defence of academic freedom is not about protecting some notion of academic privilege but ‘it is the protection of the idea generation process and the development of human knowledge in all its forms’. And the ‘idea generation process’ is what universities are expected to do, creating environments for pursuing new knowledge, while verifying, preserving, transmitting and challenging knowledge. You would have to worry about an economics department that seems to be closing down the challenging of economic orthodoxy. Jeannie Rea, National President www.caut.ca
Sources: CAUT/ACPPU Bulletin, vol. 62, no. 2, Feb 2015 University World News, no. 355, 20 Feb 2015.
International
US adjuncts stage Walk Out Day Thousands of adjunct academic staff in US universities walked off the job on 25 February in the first National Adjunct Walkout Day. Organised by a loose coalition of activists using social media to get their message out, many universities and colleges were impacted particularly when students and other staff backed up the adjuncts by participating in meetings and rallies. Academics employed casually do much of teaching in US universities and are only paid for a few hours a week over a semester. They have few employment rights and no say in the development and evaluation of courses. They are rarely invited to participate in staff meetings or governance bodies. Yet they are responsible for teaching and assessing millions of students. Sound familiar? This could be a description of what is happening in Australian universities, except for the sheer scale of the issue. In the US ‘adjuncts’ are a longstanding academic underclass and have been around for generations. They have generally been unorganised and not picked up by academic-focused unions. More recently other unions, like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) interested in organising precarious workers have noted and responded to
the rise in insecure work amongst highly qualified and, if in secure jobs, relatively well-paid professionals particularly across health and education. These are also the employment growth sectors in the OECD countries. There are further familiar characteristics with what is happening with the American adjunct academic workforce. As higher education expands it is also growing; new jobs are predominantly insecure, and previously secure or tenured positions have become untenured and adjunct. As in Australia, adjunct staff are largely physically invisible around the edges of universities and colleges, especially once their links to a particular institution as postgraduate students are severed. Like in Australia, they are increasingly working online from home utilising their own facilities. One difference to Australia is that being an academic adjunct is often seen as a long term career. Many thousands of adjuncts are resigned to precarious employment and make minimal claims upon their employers. We do not want to find ourselves
in this position. We welcome the signs of adjuncts organising. Unionisation is on the increase and where this has happened significant wins on salaries and conditions have been successful. This first National Adjunct Walkout Day is a start and at this early stage of reporting it is hard to measure the magnitude of the protest. It would have been difficult to walkout in many places, not just because of the risk of being sacked, but as unions advised workers they could be prosecuted under the prevalent state anti-strike laws. However, the organisers and participants must be congratulated for starting this mobilisation despite the many obstacles. This will have repercussions amongst precarious workers in other US industries sick of poverty level wages and no recognition – and will bolster casual academics organising in Australia and other countries. Jeannie Rea, National President
Above: Celebrating National Adjunct Walkout Day with the St. Precaria Procession in Santa Cruz, California. (Photo: NAWD Facebook) www.facebook.com/pages/NationalAdjunct-Walkout-Day/340019999501000
M#NAWD
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News from the Net Pat Wright
Queensland votes: SM 1, MSM 0 The recent state election in Queensland was remarkable in many ways: it was the first time in Australian history that a woman led a political party from Opposition to Government; it led to the first Australia government to have women as Premier and Deputy Premier; it saw the largest twoparty-preferred swing in Australian history; and, consequently, it was the greatest surprise to most of the professional pundits in the Mainstream Media (MSM) and somewhat less so for the professional pundits and citizen journos on Social Media (SM). Of course, many in the MSM of press, radio and television were a little inhibited by the wish-fulfillment biases of their employers, and some were eventually dragged by the late polling evidence to admit to the remote possibility that Labor might form a minority government, however remote such a possibility might be. However, the MSM conveyed the general impression throughout the election campaign that the LNP would not be thrown out after just one term, even if they lost their leader. Certainly, the LNP spend on posters, hoardings, billboards and advertising in the MSM indicated that they would be returned for a second term, given that the LNP had a 70-seat majority from the previous landslide election. Annastacia Palaszczuk and the ALP, on the other hand, ran a relatively low-key campaign centred on teams of volunteers door-knocking and telephoning, often coordinated through SM and targeted
with electoral database software. Volunteers maintained their esprit de corps through gathering community intelligence and sharing it on SM. Such volunteers were so effective in house-to-house, face-to-face and telephone canvassing that one frantic LNP member on MSM on election night was driven to claim that 40 CFMEU volunteers from Victoria had stolen the election. Meanwhile, coverage and analysis of the election campaign was clearly pro-LNP in the MSM and somewhat pro-ALP in SM. Of course, a growing number of journos are published in the MSM and publish on SM, so it is a false dichotomy for them, but there are many other commentators, and citizen journalists, who publish only online, although the print media are beginning to re-publish some of them. In general, however, SM provided a wider, more balanced, and more accurate coverage of the election campaign than the MSM. One of the more interesting explanations for the unexpected outcome, for example, is Peter Brent’s ‘Queensland: Why the Pollsters [and most Pundits] were Wrong’ in Inside Story (insidestory.org.au). On Twitter, for example, most journos and some political cartoonists have a handle which one can follow. Often they just provide a link to their articles already published in the MSM, but sometimes they provide additional material associated with the article or responses to criticisms of it. Foremost among Twitter commentators during the Queensland election campaign was Margo Kingston, @margokingston1, who also compiled an 8-part campaign commentary blog on her No Fibs website (nofibs.com.au), provided a forum for citizen journalism, and, with John Quiggin, was one of the first to predict a minority Labor Government in Queensland. Margot also uses The Tweeted Times website (tweetedtimes. com), which provides an app to create a personal newspaper based on the topics, interests, newspapers and journos you follow on Twitter. Even without a Twitter account, one can still be selective about what one reads from the overwhelming mountain of information available in the MSM and on SM – if one starts with the news aggregators on SM. Worthwhile news aggregators include PoliticOz from The Monthly, Dragonista’s No Crap App (nocrapapp.com), the satirical website The Shovel (theshovel.com.au), tertiary education blog The Scan (the-scan.
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com), and the week’s best stories from the ABC in their new multi-media tablet app, The Brief (search abc.net.au). Another great source of information and analysis of the Queensland election campaign was The Conversation (theconversation.com), which established a Queensland Election 2015 topic thread with several academic expert contributors and a facility for comments on each of the 65 articles. Presumably they will do the same for the forthcoming NSW election, though that is very unlikely to confirm a national movement to ALP governments. The return of a minority but fourth-term Labor Government in SA (with a little help from an Independent and a renegade Liberal) was surprising. The Labor victory over a first-term Coalition Government in Victoria was very surprising. The Labor victory over a first-term LNP Government in Queensland was astounding. A Labor victory over a first-term Liberal Government in NSW would be apocalyptic. NSW Premier Baird has more to fear from the anti-political movement to ditch first-term governments than any political movement to install Labor governments. The view that Australia (and other democracies around the world, notably the USA) is becoming ungovernable because of oppositional intransigence between the major parties is gaining currency. A proposed solution to the ungovernability problem – in the essay ‘Fixing Politics: how can we put power back in the hands of the people?’ by Tim Flannery and Catriona Wallace in the February 2015 edition of The Monthly (themonthly.com.au) – is to by-pass institutionalised representative politics and its parties and engage in some direct democracy through ‘an internet-based communication platform that enabled you to help craft policy in areas of special interest to you’. The seeds of such a proposal would seem to already exist in such platforms as the Eidos Institute’s Australian Policy Resource Facility on LinkedIn (linkedin.com), the Policy Advocacy and Bargaining sections of the NTEU website (nteu.org.au), and could well be adapted to operate within the structures of a political party close to your heart. Pat Wright is an NTEU Foundation Member. pat.wright@adelaide.edu.au
Lowering the Boom Ian Lowe
‘How could Australia not think of investing heavily in science? This is just insanity.’ With all the dust and smoke in Canberra this summer, it was clear that our politicians weren’t paying much attention to research and innovation. It probably wasn’t getting much public attention either. If it had been, the public discontent with the present government would probably have been even stronger. With all the attention on who was sitting in which deckchair, few noticed that the vessel was listing heavily to starboard and taking water at an alarming rate. Reversing the brain drain As the fur flew in Canberra, two reports that attracted little public attention caught my eye. One told of a high-flying researcher, currently working overseas, who was keen to get back to Australia – partly for family reasons, with her first baby imminent, and partly because her research interest is particularly relevant to Australia in the twenty-first century. Dr Danielle Edwards studies how reptiles and amphibians evolve, so her work is important to understanding how local species will respond to accelerating climate change. She was invited to apply for a post in CSIRO, but before the interviews could be conducted, the latest round of budget cuts saw the position abolished. So Dr Edwards applied for an ARC Discovery Early Career Researcher Award. These prestigious awards are worth $385,000 and the selection process is consequently very competitive, with a success rate only about 14 per cent.
That is a real worry in itself: the best and brightest early career researchers apply for these awards, and only one in seven gets funding. It is a clear indication of her research standing that Dr Edwards was offered one of the DECRA positions. But when she looked critically at the conditions, she decided that she could not accept the offer.
Financial Review recognising the economic damage that will result from failing to invest in research and innovation. Four Nobel Prize winners – Elizabeth Blackburn, Peter Doherty, Barry Marshall and Brian Schmidt – did not mince their words. Blackburn said, ‘How could Australia not think of investing heavily in science? This is just insanity.’
One reason is that it was a three-year position. Dr Edwards thought that the chances of getting a permanent job, or even an extension, at the end of the three years was not good in the present climate. She also worried that the threat of deregulation and consequent escalating fees would discourage potential PhD candidates from working with her. Dr Edwards said that it was very hard to be optimistic about the future of scientific research in Australia, given ‘the lack of government support and the cuts in funding’ to CSIRO and universities.
She went on to point out that the natural resources boom is petering out and we urgently need to invest in our future. ‘If you look at the track record of countries that have invested in science, it’s obvious, it works’, she concluded.
Catriona Jackson, chief executive of Science and Technology Australia, commented that it was ‘a very sad state of affairs’ when highly qualified Australian researchers saw no future here and opted to stay overseas. Of course, the higher fees that will result from the Coalition Government’s deregulation agenda will provide even stronger financial incentives for Australian PhDs to stay overseas and avoid having to repay their huge HECS debts. We do now at least have a Minister responsible for science. In the December reshuffle, Ian Macfarlane was given the title in addition to his responsibilities for industry, innovation and propping up the collapsing support for Tony Abbott. Asked by the ABC to comment on the parlous state of science when a high-flying researcher decided that she would be risking her career by coming back to Australia, all he could do was quote the total amount spent by the Australian Government on research and innovation, with no reference to the hundreds of millions cut from the budgets of CSIRO, the ARC and the Cooperative Research Centres program.
Nobel laureates speak out In the same week, four of Australia’s most distinguished scientists launched an appeal for proper recognition and funding of research. It even caught the attention of the financial press, with the Australian
Doherty was just as blunt. ‘Basic science is done through public funding. It can’t be left up to the magic of the market. It doesn’t work in innovation.’ He went on to add ‘We still have high quality universities. If we keep cutting back on that sector we’re going to lose it. It’s sad.’ Marshall also lamented the lack of interest by politicians in research and innovation. Living in WA, he is acutely conscious of the approach in countries like Singapore, who correctly see their people as their most important resource and so invest in education and research. Schmidt said that he was ‘scratching his head and losing sleep at night’ over the funding problems. He pointed out that the damage being done at the moment could take twenty years to repair. Importantly, Blackburn argued for a consistent approach to research and innovation that is above day-to-day politics in Canberra. ‘It’s a bigger picture than politics. Prime ministers come and go. National policies can be developed in a much less politicised way and be much more forward looking, whoever the prime minister happens to be.’ The revolving door of Canberra sees Prime Ministers come and go in short order: there had been five in seven years as I was writing, with every chance of a sixth by now. We critically need a long-term approach. Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University. M@AusConservation See also ‘Nobel laureates slam innovation funding’, p.12
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The Thesis Whisperer Inger Mewburn
The sessional generation’s nostalgia for the Australian university of the past To riff on a Douglas Adams’ famous quote: ‘To academics, time is an illusion – and in the case of the due date for a book chapter, doubly so’. Putting together an edited book is a relatively thankless task with a degree of difficulty of at least 10. Marshalling authors, hassling them to submit, editing, polishing, typesetting ... it’s such a labour intensive process that it’s no wonder by the time the book actually arrives on your desk you may well not remember even writing the chapter. Such is the case with Through a glass darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University, a collection of essays put together by Margaret Thornton after an Australian Academy of Social Science workshop on the ‘marketisation of the university’ held in 2012 (you can download a free copy via the link). I might not remember writing the chapter I contributed to, but I do remember the workshop run by the Australian Academy of Social Science that led to the book. Some excellent papers were given about the state of universities today and what might happen in the future. A lot of the talk at the workshop turned on the changes in the academic workforce over the last 20 years: the increase in performance metrics, the push for academics to get more and more funding and the increasing casualisation of the academic workforce. Themes that will no doubt be quite familiar to you. In the book itself all this talk is distilled into sharp academic arguments and couched in sophisticated language, which is an interesting contrast with the event itself. What surprised me most about the day was how emotional it was, especially the reaction to one of the papers, which concerned a faculty torn apart by restructures. The author, with tears in her eyes, expressed her deep disillusionment with the university to whom she, and many others, had given so many years of loyal service. As the academic told her story, the grey heads around the table nodded
in sympathy and started sharing similar stories. The grief around the table for academia lost was palpable. Later, in the tearoom, I discussed the paper, and our older colleague’s reactions to it, with my fellow 40-somethings – all members of the so-called ‘sessional generation’. We didn’t quite know how we should feel about this outpouring of grief. Our older colleagues had memories of an academia we had only ever read about in books: the Australian university in the 50s, 60s and 70s which, so the story goes, well funded and well respected by the government and community alike. It’s impossible to feel genuinely nostalgic about something you have never experienced. It was like being at a funeral for your friend’s great aunt; someone you’d heard a lot about, but never met in person. Your friend is grieving. You know you should be sad, but you can’t really feel what they are feeling. So you just pat your friend awkwardly on the shoulder and say: ‘Well, she had a good innings didn’t she?’
The author, with tears in her eyes, expressed her deep disillusionment with the university to whom she, and many others, had given so many years of loyal service. As the academic told her story, the grey heads around the table nodded in sympathy and started sharing similar stories. The grief around the table for academia lost was palpable.
You see, the sessional generation has been bred to be self-interested. But working in your own best interest should not always be conflated with selfishness. This was the essence of my talk at the workshop and the chapter I helped write in the book. Sharing – a principle on which unionism is built – just makes sense. Sharing makes us stronger in the face of government self interest and declining university budgets. For example, I give away my ideas via freely available slide decks, podcasts, cheat sheets, blog posts and the like. Sharing helps me build my own reputation – a vital career asset. Self interest means actively looking for opportunities to experience collegiality. Sadly, our universities pay our wages, but they don’t really provide our academic home anymore. We have to build those for ourselves. I am grateful to be surrounded by many academic sisters and brothers doing it for themselves on Twitter. I actively look for role models there; people who know how to survive and thrive. My friend Megan is a standout inspiration in this respect. At the moment Megan mostly does research project management work, but she has taught casually for years, makes art, sells it and is in the process of finishing her PhD part time. When I was in a similar situation, working casual jobs at three different universities and trying to do a research degree, I was completely demoralised. But where I only saw lemons, Megan sees lemonade. She has even managed to get a mortgage from a bank. Degree of difficulty on that? Surely an 11. Dr Inger Mewburn does research on research and blogs about it. www.thesiswhisperer.com
Those of us who have entered academia this century have learned that loyalty to an institution is something you can’t afford to feel. The upside to this, if there is one, is not experiencing grief and loss when you leave. So far I’ve survived four restructures at three different universities. I’m not naive enough to think redundancy won’t happen to me too. The prospect doesn’t fill me with joy, but I’m not that afraid of it either. I always have a back up plan – that’s just what the sessional generation has to do.
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M@thesiswhisperer Download Through a glass darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University http://press.anu.edu.au/titles/ through-a-glass-darkly/
Letter from Aotearoa/NZ Sandra Grey
A dirty international deal that could harm education Governments in New Zealand and Australia are currently negotiating an international agreement that could have a major effect on tertiary education. The Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA) has been under negotiation now in various forms since 2005 and multinational companies are desperate to see governments conclude discussions and sign the agreement in the coming months. The TPPA involves 11 Asian and Pacific-rim countries, including New Zealand and Australia, as well as economic powers the United States and Japan. Critics of the agreement, including many unions like ours, have consistently highlighted problems with it, including that it is being negotiated in secret. While we do not know the details of the agreement because of all the secrecy, it is likely that the TPPA will give unconstrained powers to multinational companies over government decisions. In a large part, the power is due to the TPPA having provisions that allow companies to sue those governments they perceive as harming their business. It will undermine public health by making medicine more expensive and ruling against public health measures that are deemed ‘anti-business’. It will limit freedom of speech by imposing draconian standards on copyright law. From what little we do know of the TPPA’s secret negotiations we also suspect they could have a significant impact on tertiary or higher education too. There is a serious risk that the TPPA will limit the freedoms of publicly owned tertiary education institu-
tions to operate in the best interest of their students and the public.
The right to sharing information and scholarship freely We believe that academics and institutions should be able to access important information for their research and scholarship without financial or legal constraints from multinational companies. Tertiary education libraries should also retain the right to share information with staff and students, as they are currently able to under New Zealand’s existing Copyright Act, and not be penalised for circumventing regional technology protection mechanisms on legally purchased digital products. The TPPA could make this illegal - giving multinationals ‘ownership’ of knowledge we believe should be in the public domain.
The right to distinguish between public and private We are also concerned that the TPPA could remove democratic right of governments to distinguish between public and private education institutions. Governments can currently put in place policies that treat public institutions more favourably than private training organisations. The TPPA could treat this as a restraint of trade and thus give those private companies the right to sue for loss of anticipated income. It is essential to a healthy democracy that future governments should have the freedom to treat public tertiary education institutions differently from locally-owned tertiary education institutions, and both of those differently from large multinational providers such as Phoenix University if they wish to. Any international agreement should not bind future governments to restrict them from taking a position that favours public education.
The right to buy from whom we respect The TPPA could make it impossible for tertiary institutions to place expectations on providers from whom they buy goods or services. We believe, for instance, that tertiary education institutions should have the right to express a preference in their procurement policies for living wage
employers, for local providers who employ New Zealanders (or in your case Australians), and for providers that maintain higher environmental or social standards. The TPPA could view such policies as a restraint on trade and thus illegal.
Our laws belong to us, not overseas companies International investment agreements like the TPPA are notorious for including clauses that require governments to liberalise their trade policies continually - only permitting governments to adopt rules and regulations that favour light-handed and pro-market policies, rather than rebalance them to recognise there are diverse and equally important objectives. The ratcheting effect that locks in each new regulatory measure is anti-democratic. Not only does it limit the scope of a current government to govern, it places increasing restrictions and pressure on all future governments, particularly those that favour local businesses and public services ahead of multinational businesses. In effect, it limits the democratic choices of future governments and the people they serve. TEU has long advocated to our government that where the TPPA affects tertiary education it should be negotiated by tertiary education experts and agreed democratically by Parliament rather than negotiated secretly by trade experts and the trade minister, and signed off only by Cabinet. The overriding priority of any international agreement that affects education should be quality public education for the long term good of the nation, not private profit. Sandra Grey is National President/Te Tumu Whakarae, New Zealand Tertiary Education Union/Te Hautū Kahurangi o Aotearoa www.teu.ac.nz
M@nzteu Above: New Zealanders protest over secret TPP negotiations.
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My Union NTEU Branch Presidents Conference NTEU Branch and division Presidents gathered with the members of national executive including the division secretaries and national officers for an elected officers education and development conference in February. The conference provided the opportunity to compare and contrast experiences and expectations of the role of elected leaders in our union. The National President opened the conference focusing attention upon the NTEU 2015 national priorities, which are, rather obviously, to: • Implement and enforce the current enterprise agreements. • Continue public advocacy and campaigns to defeat the Coalition Government’s higher education agenda and promote well-funded, high quality and inclusive public higher education. • Increase membership numbers and activism. • Strengthen NTEU structures and systems. Following leading researcher and commentator from the University of Sydney, Professor John Buchanan’s provocative address on the implications for workers and unions of what is happening in the labour market, participants worked at identifying the big challenges facing our union.
Vigorous discussion identified common and differing perspectives at the campus to state to national levels of the Union, but the group agreed upon a set of challenges: • Developing internal structures that work in the current higher education and industrial environment. • Establishing greater clarity in decision making and communication across and up and down the levels of the Union. • Increasing social relevance and influence with a coherent narrative to a fractured external audience. • Ensuring the Union keeps up with the workforce of the future Participants were very focussed upon the changes in the higher education workforce particularly in terms of job security and the implications of precarious employment for those in insecure jobs and upon the Union’s power and capacity to effectively organise. We were also very cognisant of the impact upon the ‘mission’ of universities in creating knowledge and challenging prevailing ideas. Margaret Thornton, Professor of Law and Public Policy at ANU, challenged us to pay greater attention to the demise of participatory university governance with the corporatisation of university management and of the discourse about the purposes of education and research. The aim of the conference was to develop a shared culture of leadership across senior elected officers. The objectives were to reflect upon our practice; address contentious and difficult
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issues; develop a common understanding of the issues facing the Union over the coming years; and improve formal and informal communication. At the beginning participants considered what they wanted to get of their time together. Many responded with the perennial issues for unionists of how to get more people to join up and then how to get more people actively involved, to both share the work around and increase our influence in the workplace. Others also focussed upon how to get the most out of the opportunities at the Branch level with dedicated staff, a committee, activists and delegates. As at many gatherings of union leaders, participants wanted to develop their delegate structure and train delegates to be confident and effective in their workplaces as the key to increasing union capacity and effectiveness. One participant encapsulated the aspirations of most: to make the Union a ‘lively presence’ in the workplace. Practically participants wanted to discuss how to make the national focus and priorities, particularly implementation of agreements and political campaigning locally relevant so that their members become more actively involved. Information and discussion sessions on these two core topics enthused and focused attention.
My Union
The exchanges between newer Presidents and more experienced were particularly important in learning and reflecting upon how to be an effective, and not just burnt out, Branch President trying to take it all on your shoulders. In the final reflection where participants consider what they had got out of the conference this sharing of experiences and networking across the country was identified as very helpful. Some intense discussions on how to work with staff and committees and the other levels of the Union had also been helpful in clarifying what was expected – and what is possible. Finding and developing delegates is critical, and even more so when Branches are spread across campuses. Focusing upon the issues of casualised academics and fixed term contractors, as well as others in precarious employment modes was identified by many as a major commitment. Getting into areas of low union membership, such as research staff, was identified as key, along with making the Union relevant to members and potential members who have particular interests, that may not be the major foci of union campaigns. Initiatives like Bluestocking Week were agreed to assist, but developing local initiatives and sharing the news of good ideas is also really important. Communication throughout the Union always needs work, and participants were clear in wanting both communication channels and the skills to be more effective communicators. The National Union Education team of Ken McAlpine and Helena Spyrou took note
of all the areas that participants identified where specific education and training are wanted, and will be working with Divisions on the best ways to organise education and training activities including at different levels and places and online. Those Branch Presidents who were unable to participate will get the opportunity to participate in follow up activities. Jeannie Rea, National President Conference website: www.nteu.org.au/eoedc_2015
Opposite page, clockwise from top: Conference in session; Bill Blayney (CQU) and Carolyn Cope (QUT); Grahame McCulloch, General Secretary. This page, clockwise from top: Brad Astbury (USQ); Ron Slee (Flinders), Michael Thomson (Syd), Lolita Wikander (CDU) and Cathy Rytmeister (Macquarie); Vince Caughley (UTS) and Felix Patrikeeff (Adelaide); Ken McAlpine, Union Education Officer; Stuart Bunt (UWA). Photos by Helena Spyrou and John Sinclair.
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My Union Farewell Stephen Darwin Stephen Darwin, the NTEU ACT Division’s first full-time and paid Division Secretary, resigned from his position in January. Stephen’s tenure as Division Secretary was the indirect result of the sad loss of the ACT Division’s senior industrial officer Peter Davidson to cancer. Following discussion and consultation, it was decided to replace Peter’s position with a full time paid Division Secretary. Stephen Darwin, then Education Advisor in the ANU Faculty of Law and a former ACT TAFE Division President of the Australian Education Union was elected unopposed to the new position. The NTEU thus gained a strong, experienced negotiator to lead our enterprise bargaining at the ANU and the University of Canberra.
ly, he has said he will be writing up his doctoral thesis, on student evaluation in Australian higher education, into a book. We congratulate Stephen and Malba and send our best wishes with them to their new home.
What came as more of a surprise from this apparently easy-going man was his fiery oratory and fighting leadership of the Union through a period when managements at both UC and the ANU were seeking to cut jobs and make radical changes.
It has been a pleasure and a learning experience to work with Stephen, who thinks clearly, incisively and from a long-term perspective about education, union strategy and the struggle for a just society.
La lucha continua Stephen is among the many who know the struggle is worth the effort. He leaves many union members with new courage and confidence that we have the strength to fight both for our rights as workers in universities and for the university sector itself.
Jane Maze, Division Organiser
Above: Peter and Malba in their academic gowns.
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Intelligence and integrity
He has often quoted Lenin’s essay, ‘LeftWing’ Communism: an Infantile Disorder’, to point out that building a strong movement of people fighting for a better world takes much work and time.
An election for the position of Division Secretary will be held in March.
@NTEUNational
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Stephen has moved with his wife Dr Malba Baharona to Chile, her homeland. Malba has won the Chilean equivalent of a Future Fellowship, while Stephen has just been awarded his doctorate by the ANU. At his farewell Stephen joked that he was going to Chile to take on its 95% privatised higher education system. More serious-
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My Union NTEU art show celebrates CDU’s anniversary The NTEU’s NT Division celebrated a working partnership with the Territory’s own university – Charles Darwin University (CDU, previously NTU) – in the 2014 anniversary celebrations with a show of photographs and posters from the Union’s archives. Officially opened by National President, Jeannie Rea, the art show was curated by NTEU Life Member, Janie Mason. With the Unified National System under John Dawkins, the Northern Territory University (NTU) was formed in 1989 by the merger of Darwin Institute of Technology (DIT, formerly Darwin Community College (DCC)) with the private NT Government-funded University College NT. And the Union grew to play a significant role in the University community. Janie Mason joined DCC in 1983. Being a long-time unionist and at that stage a delegate to the NT Trades and Labor Council for the Nursing Federation, she quickly became the local secretary. Trish Crossin was appointed to the joint (with the NT Teachers Federation) union industrial officer position in 1991. Trish was instrumental in bringing previous college academic and university academic local unions together. She left to become NT Labor Senator, 1998-2013 Steve Shanahan, who had joined University College NT and as FAUSA President led that Union into a cooperative working relationship with UACA, the college academics union, and into the new union of the NTEU in 1993. Steve lead the NTEU NT Division and Janie Mason served as Secretary. Over the next few years, they worked to settle the sometimes combative cultures of the two former academic unions, to recognise and establish the role of TAFE within the new university, and to
gain acceptance of TAFE academics and general staff as equal partners in the new Union and in this pioneering university. Together, the NTEU team with active support of the NTEU National Office, worked towards a single award for all academics and general staff. The team worked to establish cooperative working relationship with other campus unions as the NTEU membership grew to cover many TAFE academic staff and most general staff. Janie gave credit to the local NTEU team of the 1990s with its strong leadership providing the base structure for a continuing and growing Union. This made the basis of what today is a significant part of the CDU community. The Union has played a significant role in various of the University’s activities such as the early university quality processes under the national AUQA system and through the University Council. With the formation of NTEU, active support for Indigenous education and staff aspirations has been a significant part of the Union’s purpose and in its structures. It led the five campus unions in a single bargaining unit in recent bargaining and has achieved important clauses for Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander staff in recent Enterprise Agreements.
NTEU members in Australia Day honours NTEU congratulates three members honoured in the 2015 Australia Day awards. Professor Ken Hillman (UNSW) was honoured with an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). He was recognised for distinguished service to intensive care medicine as a clinician, educator and researcher, as a pioneer in the introduction of the medical emergency team system, and as an advocate for the critically ill. Professor David Hill (Murdoch) was honoured with a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to international relations, as an advocate of Australia-Indonesia cross-cultural understanding, and as an educator. Professor Linda Tapsell (UoW) received a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for significant service to health science as an academic and clinician specialising in diet and nutrition.
The NTEU is now also the lead union in salary and conditions negotiations for Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education. NTEU has funded a Morning Star scholarship for a CDU Indigenous student since 2009. Over recent years, in the tradition of its first affirmative action for women in the NT, the Division has held a Bluestocking Day. The recent focus is to increase participation in local campus workplaces and engage with general staff delegates. Today, Unions NT organises a march followed by a concert on the Esplanade on the May Day holiday. A feature of May Day is the May Day poster each year as well as a newsletter usually under the letterhead of the NAWU’s Northern Standard which had been the only local newspaper prior to the NT News starting up. This is an edited version of Janie Mason’s report. The full report is available on the NT Division website
Left: Darwin May Day rally poster from 2000. Above: Michael Thomson, Sydney University Branch President, at the opening.
www.nteu.org.au/nt/publications
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 49
My Union New NTEU staff Welcome to three new staff, all in NSW.
Martin Cubby Branch Organiser UOW Martin is the new Branch Organiser for the University of Wollongong. He brings over 10 years’ experience as an organiser from his previous job at the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) the union for performers, arts industry production crew and journalists. With his young family, Martin has moved from Sydney to the Illawarra and is back working at the university he graduated from as a professional actor back in 2002. He still maintains his craft as a performer with The Lurkers (www.lurkers.com.au). He keeps fit on the soccer field and likes wearing tight pants. Martin works in the union movement because everyday union members around the world are actively involved in improving our world for all. Martin can’t think of a more exciting, useful and important way to be employed. He looks forward to working with all the great members at UOW to build our union’s power in ‘the Gong’.
Vera Babicheva Industrial Officer NSW Division Vera has recently taken up the Industrial Officer position in the NSW Division. A proud NTEU member herself, Vera comes from an academic background, with her previous role being as a sessional academic position as a Macquarie University. She has a combined total of almost 5 years academic experience, having also previously taught at Sydney University. Being from an industry background, Vera has had first-hand experience of the industrial
problems in the tertiary sector including casualisation, workloads and a lack of job security. Vera has completed two Bachelors’ degrees in Commerce and Law at the University of Sydney and also has three graduate Diplomas: Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice (PLT) from the College of Law, Graduate Diploma of Labour Relations Law from the University of Melbourne and most recently a Graduate Diploma of Work Health and Safety from TAFE Western NSW. Vera is an admitted legal practitioner at the Supreme Court of New South Wales. As well as working an academic Vera has also maintained a professional industrial relations career, starting out in the Australian Public Service in 2006 as an Advisor at the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) and then becoming a Legal Officer at the Workplace Authority (now known as the Fair Work Ombudsman). Following this, in 2010 Vera worked in the union movement as an Industrial Officer at the Finance Sector and as a Campaign Organiser the Australian Council of Trade Unions. Vera has also worked in the private sector as an advisor and consultant.
Erin Chew Branch Organiser Sydney University Erin recently joined the NTEU as a part time Branch Organiser at the University of Sydney. Erin comes from a strong community organising background, and currently also joined Unions NSW as a field organiser organising union affiliates and community members for the NSW State Election, 2015. Erin has previously worked as a TAFE Trainer, specialising in Human Resource Management and in Training and Assessment. Being employed as a casual trainer, Erin understand the stress and insecurity which comes from a job based on a casual work load. Erin also comes from a strong advocacy and campaigning background, and together with her co-convener ran Project
vol. 56,
18C which achieved in getting over 80 local councils nationwide to pass resolutions opposing changes to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. In August, when the Prime Minister announced the changes were not going ahead, the media credited the work of Project 18C in stopping the changes from moving forward. As a community organiser, Erin has established the Asian Australian Alliance which aims at organising the Asian Australian community as an advocacy group. She also organises university students in her Young leaders Program and has created a leadership and political training platform for Asian Australian women. Erin loves writing and dreams one day to be another JK Rowling, but that is still a distant dream to be reached. Erin looks forward to contributing her skills to the role of Branch Organiser and looks forward to continue to develop her learning and organising skills.
Staff movements Christian O’Callaghan, an Industrial Officer in the NSW Division, has relocated north to the Queensland Division. Richard Bailey, UNSW Branch Organiser, is now Branch Organiser at UTS. Emma Clancy, Division Industrial Officer in NSW, has been offered the opportunity to work as a political advisor for the left grouping of the members of the European Parliament in Brussels. Given the changes in Greece and Spain this is a very exciting opportunity for her. She will be working with the Employment and Social Affairs parliamentary committee. While we are very disappointed to be losing her from the division, we want to congratulate her and wish her all the best for the future. Emma worked originally for the WA Division of the NTEU, then as Branch Organiser at UTS and had just taken up the position of Industrial Officer in the division when she was headhunted for Brussels. Good luck Emma and we look forward to hearing of your progress!
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no. 1, 201 4 ISSN 0818–80
Publishe d by NTEU
68
Since 1958, the Australian Universities’ Review has been encouraging debate and discussion about issues in higher education and its contribution to Australian public life.
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page 50 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
www.aur.org.au
My Union Professor Graeme Hugo AO (1946–2015) Professor Graeme Hugo was a longstanding NTEU member. His commitment to collective responsibility followed naturally from his working class roots and his PhD at ANU (1972–75) on circular migration in Indonesia.
ia and as a result Australia had become over reliant on importing skills.
ugee intake under the Rudd and Gillard governments.
This dual concern with social inequality and social justice were at the core of his thinking, whether it be in Australia or in developing countries. Graeme was both an eminent geographer and demographer, combining these skills to conduct research on geographical information systems, to the baby boomers generation, then to migration and immigration flows. It was the latter field where he gained world prominence.
Graeme showed how the lost generation of permanent academics in the Howard decade had a deleterious effect on Australian university research, teaching and leadership. His studies on academic mobility led the world in showing that the flow of academic labour is multifaceted and this was especially the case of academics coming to Australia from Asia, now the largest source of academic recruitment in higher education.
In short, Graeme Hugo epitomised public duty where for him evidence was the basis for sound government decision making. He was extremely generous with his time, whether it be colleagues, the public or the 68 PhD students he supervised to completion.
Graeme provided invaluable research information for the NTEU, showing how Australia had consistently used skilled migration as means of filling academic places. While he eschewed overt political statements, his conclusion was that governments had persistently under resources postgraduate training in Austral-
Graeme’s research on refugees was profound in its implication. He showed that the Treasury data on refugees as a burden on society was fundamentally flawed as it excluded the non-rental refugee market; once this data was included refuges became an asset not a liability. This led to a doubling of the ref-
His generosity and public profile was evident at his packed funeral held at Adelaide Oval, it was befitting that the famous Adelaide Oval scoreboard had emblazoned on it ‘Vale Graeme Hugo’ in recognition of public profile and his research for football and cricket, two sports he loved from childhood. The NTEU sends its condolences to his family, colleagues and many friends. He is irreplaceable. Greg McCarthy, University of Adelaide
Your NTEU membership details When and how to update them Have your workplace address details (office, building, campus) changed? Have you moved house?
Required if your home address is your nominated contact address.
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Update online:
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Go to ‘My Home’
Go to www.nteu.org.au Click on ‘Member Login’ ID = Your NTEU membership number Password = Your surname in CAPITALS Select ‘Your Profile’ then ‘View Details’
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Please notify us to ensure you are paying the correct fees.
Deductions will continue until the National Office is notified.
Have your payroll deductions stopped without your authority?
Melinda Valsorda, Membership Officer (03) 9254 1910 mvalsorda@nteu.org.au
Tamara Labadze, Finance Officer (03) 9254 1910 tlabadze@nteu.org.au
Contact your institution’s Payroll Department urgently
NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 51
NATIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION UNION
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page 52 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 22 no. 1 • March 2015 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate
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‡Associated bodies: NTEU (NSW); Union of Australian College Academics (WA Branch) Industrial Union of Workers at Edith Cowan University & Curtin University; Curtin University Staff Association (Inc.) at Curtin University; Staff Association of Edith Cowan University (Inc.) at ECU
MAIL TO: NTEU National Office PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 T (03) 9254 1910 F (03) 9254 1915 E national@nteu.org.au
THEIR FIGHT IS OUR FIGHT.
Dignified and decent work, hard won and defended by Australian workers and their unions, is still being fought for by our partners in developing countries around the world.
Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA needs more new monthly donors in our Global Justice Partner program, to enable people, like the Cambodian beer workers in this image, to lift themselves out of poverty by organising for and achieving decent work.
Become a Global Justice Partner today. Union Aid Abroad APHEDA Call 1800 888 674 or visit www.apheda.org.au The overseas humanitarian aid agency of the ACTU Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA was established in 1984 to express the Australian union movement’s commitment to social justice and international solidarity for human rights and development.
We do this through support for adult-focused education, training and development projects overseas, working in partnership with those whose rights to development are restricted or denied. You can show your solidarity by becoming a Global Justice Partner and making a tax deductible monthly contribution to our work.
30 years
of solidarity
Since 1984
M u rd er n o t t rag edy on 24th april, 2013, 1127 garment workers perished in the collapse of rana Plaza in Savar. this exhibition, Murder, not tragedy, documents that event, and provides a record of protest by Bangladeshi photographers, activists and other artists. Murder, not tragedy confronts us with the reality of the Bangladeshi garment industry. nteU, australian Bangladesh Solidarity network and australia asia Workers Links are working with Bangaldeshi garment workers and union activists to organise workers and communities, both in Bangladesh and australia, to put an end to the gross exploitation of which rana Plaza is a symbol. 18-29 March 2015, Steps Gallery, 62 Lygon Street, Carlton South Opening night Thursday 19 March, 7pm Hours Saturday – Tuesday, 10am to 4pm Wednesday – Friday, 10am to 8pm Further info www.absn.org.au Colin Long 0403 920 361 Josh Cullinan 0416 241 763
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