Advocate 24 02, July 2017

Advocate vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au • ISSN 1329-7295

#PayMoreGetLess

#SecureJobs

t, Tues 8 Aug s te o r P f o y a D l a Nation

Pay more, get less ɓɓ8/8 – National Day of Protest ɓɓBudget targets women unfairly ɓɓNo positives for A&TSI staff/students ɓɓStudents & staff suffer in VET wash up ɓɓWorkforce feminisation & job security ɓɓWorth 100% – Bluestocking Week 2017

ɓɓWin for Vet Hospital members ɓɓPeople over property at UTAS ɓɓAfter the Uluru Statement ɓɓRestoring the Wave Hill Bedford truck ɓɓNinth in Eurovision, first in uni fees ɓɓTrump’s hair raising higher ed agenda

ɓɓMurdoch fight continues ɓɓState of the Uni survey ɓɓCelebrating IDAHOBIT 2017 ɓɓExploiting the refugee crisis ɓɓWomen’s Conference 2017 ɓɓ... and much more.

Contents 2

Principled advocate and quiet achiever

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 Anastasia Kotaidis Feedback, advertising and other enquiries: advocate@nteu.org.au All text and images © NTEU 2017 unless otherwise stated.

p. 9

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

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From the General Secretary Cover image by Shane Wales

3

Students pay more + Universities get less = More job cuts Editorial, Jeannie Rea, National President

CORRESPONDENCE 4

Copyright law and the future of education

UPDATE 5

Interventions in bargaining over A&TSI claims

May Day marchers in Darwin

2½ minutes to midnight

6

People over property!

Bargaining all done at Deakin

7

Move to terminate Murdoch Agreement is “un-Australian”

8

Selling students short

9 March for Science rallies resonate worldwide 10 UC pay ‘experiment’ continues

State of the Uni survey 2017

11 NTEU continues support for UA’s anti-sexual assault campaign

Video explains bargaining

SECURE WORK NEWS 12 Job security win for members at Melb Uni Vet Hospital

I’m in the dark

13 Heading towards a lack of discipline A&TSI NEWS 14 After the Uluru Statement, what now for Recognise?

Environment ISO 14001

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.

15 No positives for A&TSI staff or students in Budget 2017 FEATURES 16 The Great Higher Education Swindle: Pay more, get less The Government claims its new reforms are “fair, reasonable and necessary”, but its Budget 2017 measures will still see students pay more and universities get less.

23 Worth 100%: Bluestocking Week 2017 Why is there still a 10% gender pay gap in education, when women and their unions have organised so successfully so long for gender equity?

24 Workforce feminisation and job security in our universities Between 2005 and 2015, the Australian university workforce has become more feminised and more reliant on insecure forms of employment.

26 Preserving the Wave Hill Walk-Off Bedford truck An important piece of Aboriginal land rights and Australian union history embarked on what’s likely be its final journey.

28 Ninth in Eurovision, first in uni fees Australia may have come 9th in Eurovision 2017, but compared to the other finalist countries we rank number one in the amount our students pay to study at a public university.

29 Intergenerational warfare There has never been a worse time to be a young person in Australia.

30 NTEU celebrates IDAHOBIT 2017 NTEU held events around the country on 17 May 2017 to support International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.

31 CDU’s inaugural IDAHOBIT marks new era of acceptance 32 Students & staff suffer in VET wash up During the fevered height of VET FEE-HELP rorting by unscrupulous private providers, the true scale of the costly debacle proved hard to keep up with.

33 Quality public education for refugees needed more than ever There is an urgent need for investment so millions of refugee children can access education.

33 Exploiting the refugee crisis Nearly half of private enterprise involved in Syrian refugee education are supporting some form of educational technology.

34 Trump’s hair raising higher ed agenda The implementation of Trump’s higher education agenda has caused some concern.

COLUMNS 36 Twitterography

News from the Net, by Pat Wright

37 Marching for science, and for our society Lowering the Boom, by Ian Lowe

38 Academic escape fantasies

Thesis Whisperer, Inger Mewburn

39 To market we go, again: Government legislative plans for tertiary education Letter from NZ, Sandra Grey, TEU

YOUR UNION 40 Women’s Conference 2017 42 Delegates are the backbone of the Union 43 Scholarships call for applications 44 NSW GAPS Conference 45 Battling cancer as a family 47 New NTEU staff

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p. 30

20 Budget targets women unfairly Yet again there was no statement in the Budget on its impact on women, so NFAW has helpfully filled the gap.

Advocate is available online as a PDF at nteu.org.au/advocate and an e-book at www.issuu.com/nteu

21 8/8 National Day of Protest

NTEU members may opt for ‘soft delivery’ (email notification of online copy rather than mailed printed version). Details at nteu.org.au/ soft_delivery

22 Liberals lifting higher learning out of reach for poorer Australians

NTEU has called a National Day of Protest on 8 August under the banner of “Pay More, Get Less”.

In championing the neoliberal maxim of privatising profits and socialising losses, the Government is driving the transfer of costs for education from the state to the “consumer”.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 1

From the General Secretary Grahame McCulloch, General Secretary

Principled advocate and quiet achiever Adrian Ryan, foundation Secretary of NTEU NSW Division, died in early June. His passing marks a generational moment in the history of the Union. Adrian was representative of the activists who built the foundations of academic unionism in the 1970s.

Adrian was a highly significant figure in the politics and industrial relations of the university sector from the late 1970s onwards at local, State and national levels. He was a fearless and principled advocate for the interests of university staff and the university sector more generally with a sharp intellect, insightful tactics and measured pragmatism when necessary.

At the University of Sydney he was a longstanding office holder of the Sydney Association of University Teachers (SAUT) as well as a member of the University Senate for nearly a decade. He was a staunch defender of academic freedom and the need for university staff to be involved in and consulted about key policy decisions. He was also deeply compassionate, particularly when members faced difficult personal and professional issues.

At a State level, Adrian was a leading figure in the first university State-registered trade union in Australia, the University Academic Staff Association (UASA) of NSW. At the time of its registration in 1977, UASA was an unusual body amongst what were then very conservative academic associations across the rest of Australia. It had a strong and explicit trade union identity and independently affiliated to the ACTU, at a time when the national university staff body, the Federation of Australian University Staff Associations (FAUSA), declined to identify as a trade union. Together with

other academic staff leaders in NSW, Adrian was an early and articulate advocate for academic staff trade union organisation in a way which blended the professional and intellectual concerns of university staff with the increasing need for a more explicit industrial perspective. He was farsighted enough to see that the emerging financial pressures on universities in the late 1970s would inevitably mean that university staff would be confronted with the same workplace and wage pressures faced by other professional and non-professional workers in the economy as a whole.

Adrian served as President of FAUSA from 1981-1983 and was part of the national planning group responsible for advocating the cause of academic labour at the Academic Salaries Tribunal. His ability to integrate professional and industrial concerns was underlined by his appointment as a staff representative on the Universities’ Council of the Commonwealth Tertiary Education Commission from 1983-1986.

Adrian’s farsightedness was confirmed in 1983 when the High Court declared the right of academic staff to form national trade unions (which they had been prevented from doing since 1929). He was a significant actor in creating a new trade union for traditional university academics, the Association of Australian University Staff (AAUS), nationally registered in 1986.

AAUS was responsible for the first national industrial awards on pay and conditions for Australia’s university staff.

The ink was barely dry on the new awards when the biggest single change in the sector’s history occurred in 1987-88 when Education Minister John Dawkins abolished the distinction between traditional universities and the colleges of advanced education (CAEs). What had been 19 universities became 37 universities in a new national system.

NATIONAL EXECUTIVE

NATIONAL OFFICE STAFF

National President Jeannie Rea Vice-President (Academic) Andrew Bonnell Vice-President (General Staff) Jane Battersby

Industrial Unit Coordinator Senior Industrial Officer National Industrial Officers

General Secretary Grahame McCulloch National Assistant Secretary Matthew McGowan Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) Policy Committee Chair Terry Mason National Executive: Rachael Bahl, Stuart Bunt, Damien Cahill, Sarah Kaine, Gabe Gooding, Andrea Lamont-Mills, Colin Long, Virginia Mansel Lees, Michael McNally, Kelvin Michael, Felix Patrikeeff, Catherine Rojas, Melissa Slee, Ron Slee, Michael Thomson, Lolita Wikander

Policy & Research Coordinator Policy & Research Officers

National A&TSI Coordinator National A&TSI Organiser

Sarah Roberts Linda Gale Wayne Cupido Susan Kenna Paul Kniest Jen Tsen Kwok Terri MacDonald Adam Frogley Celeste Liddle

National Organiser Michael Evans National Publications Coordinator Paul Clifton Media & Communications Officer Andrew MacDonald National Membership Officer Melinda Valsorda National Growth Organiser Rifai Abdul

page 2 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Unlike some of his more hidebound colleagues Adrian could see that this change raised the need for one bigger industry union to represent the old and new universities’ academic staff, but also to represent professional and general staff workers in universities as well. This was not a popular view amongst many of his colleagues but, together with a small group of NSW colleagues, Adrian patiently made the case for a new national trade union.

His quiet but firm advocacy prevailed and in 1993 the new trade union, the NTEU was formed. Adrian became the first fulltime Secretary in NSW, leading the NSW Division for nearly a decade.

He overhauled the finance and administration of the new Division, which became the engine room of the national union’s industrial and professional work.

In combination with the Union’s national leadership, Adrian helped oversee the biggest improvement in university staff employment conditions in over 30 years with salary rates being restored to their mid-1960s position and a host of new employment conditions, including 36 weeks maternity leave at the University of Sydney. Adrian also worked and travelled around NSW tirelessly to encourage and ultimately succeed in attracting large numbers of general staff into NTEU. The scale and magnitude of Adrian’s achievements was underlined when he was awarded a Centenary Medal for Services to Education. As a high achiever in academic teaching and research, trade union advocacy and politics, and policy lobbying at the highest levels of Commonwealth decision-making, Adrian was unusual for his self-effacement and lack of ego. He was interested in the message and the results, and not in his role as messenger and advocate. gmcculloch@nteu.org.au

Education & Training Officers

Ken McAlpine, Helena Spyrou

Executive Manager

Peter Summers

ICT Network Engineer Database Programmer/Data Analyst

Tam Vuong Uffan Saeed

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

Editorial Jeannie Rea, National President

Students pay more + Universities get less = More job cuts reJobs #PayMoreGetLess

The Coalition Government has given up trying to deregulate domestic undergraduate fees, but that does not mean it’s had a change of mind and heart.

While calling upon university students and staff to perform for the good of the ‘economy’, the latest Federal Budget cuts higher education spending and makes students pay more for their Commonwealth Supported Places (CSPs). The Government intention is to further withdraw from funding public higher education.

NTEU responded to the pre-Budget announcements explaining that $2.8 billion of cuts, which includes two efficiency dividend cuts equal to 2.5 per cent in the Commonwealth Grants Scheme over the next two years, will have immediate impacts upon students’ learning conditions and staff working conditions.

This was confirmed by our employers. In contrast to their stand in 2014, Vice-Chancellors are making public statements and advising their staff that the announced cuts are too much for a university system that has already absorbed $4 billion in cuts. In a media release on 6 June 2017, Universities Australia Chief Executive, Belinda Robinson, said that “careful analysis had confirmed how deeply the funding cuts would force universities to cut staff jobs and student support services.”

NTEU Policy & Research Coordinator Paul Kniest comprehensively unravelled the budget data (see p. 16) and found that the real cut to public investment is actually around 10 per cent when the cut in the government funded proportion of the CSPs is added to the direct cuts to university funding through efficiency dividends.

It is indeed the great higher education swindle. Students will pay more, but this is just to offset the government contribution to their CSP. It is not passed on to the universities.

Enterprise bargaining is underway at the majority of universities and now, of course, management is arguing that the Budget cuts undermine our claims for

#Secu

otest, Tues r P f o y a D l a n io t Na

8 Aug

salary increases, conversion of contract and casual positions, creation of new teaching positions, equal superannuation and implementation of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander employment targets. As usual though, there is a great difference between capacity to pay for secure jobs with decent conditions and willingness to prioritise and do so. The first response of university managements is to cut secure jobs, despite the impact upon the university’s ability to then fulfil the contracts made with students, researchers and engagement partners.

As an example, a number of universities are apparently trialling or have contracted the services of a private company and their online student support products.

There are many issues to be considered in this development, but one is probably the loss of jobs covered by the Enterprise Agreement. We also understand that the services of this company can be paid for using Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP) funds.

This is yet another instance of creeping privatisation and, in this case, the transfer of public funding to a private company.

Government funding to universities must increase. Higher education funding must not continue to be treated as some sort of luxury or extra that can be cut whenever there is yet another call to trim the Budget.

Equally, however, university councils and management have been complicit for far too long in continuing to accept cuts and take this out on staff – and students. The consequences have included bigger classes, contracting course and subject choice, along with online substitution for face-toface classes and contracting support services. One lesson students are clearly learning is that their higher education is now seen as a commodity, the price (as opposed to value) of which is increasingly viewed in market (and not public good) terms.

For all of these reasons and more, NTEU National Executive has called a National Day of Protest on Tuesday 8 August 2017 under the banner of “Pay More, Get Less” to protest the Government’s planned changes and to highlight the impact on staff. “Get Less” puts the focus on the reductions to student learning, support and services that will follow these cuts, because there will be cuts to staff jobs.

These issues directly link to our priority of job security in enterprise bargaining.

This commodification was the subject of a recent NTEU forum at Adelaide University, which grappled with the ‘’hollowing out of what we know as education,” as put by Heather Fraser (see p. 8). Glossy marketing and shiny facilities are no substitute for students’ thorough immersion in their learning, where becoming critical citizens is an integral part of the content covered in their course and also acquired through their university experience. Graduates do more than just contribute to the ‘economy’, they live in a society.

Skating around the edges rather than deep engagement with students in their learning is becoming the usual practice at too many universities. At the same time, there is a constant focus upon restructuring and redundancies as though the problem is always the staff and their salaries.

The Day of Protest may involve a variety of activities, including students, staff and the university community. The highlight will be a lunchtime open meeting at each university. It is an opportunity to encourage engagement, participation and union membership, and focus upon the issues that matter to university staff, while being part of a national union action.

The significance of the date is that the report of the Senate Inquiry into the Higher Education Reform Package will be tabled the following day, with the legislation expected to be debated in Parliament shortly afterwards. It is time to send a message to the politicians and to our university leaders that higher education does matter, and our internationally highly regarded public system cannot sustain further cuts in public investment.

Students and staff should not have to pay for government failure to prioritise investment in higher education funding.

Jeannie Rea, National President jrea@nteu.org.au

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 3

Correspondence Seen something in Advocate you’d like to respond to or comment on? We welcome and value your feedback. Please send letters to the Editor via email to advocate@nteu.org.au.

Advocate is published 3 times a year, in March, June/July and November.

Copyright law and the future of education As authors, teachers, experts on intellectual property law and champions of public education, we were saddened and dis-appointed to read NTEU promoting costly, anti-competitive parallel importation restrictions (Advocate, Feb 2017).

These laws hurt students, academics, and other members of the education system. We are also concerned that the NTEU has provided an unbalanced account of the Productivity Commission report on Australia’s intellectual property arrangements.

Rather than being a measure for the protection of local culture and local jobs, parallel importation restrictions on books were actually introduced into Australian law in 1912 to help consolidate the Empire market as the international book trade expanded.

The provisions prevented Australian booksellers from importing English language books from America. In noting the requirement to only source books from Commonwealth countries, Tasmanian Senator John Keating observed, the law “as it stands, affords [opportunity] for blackmail.”

The restrictions facilitated global price differentiation and monopolistic behaviour that supported the dominance of British and American multinational publishers. Australian readers, consumers, and citizens have paid dearly for such parallel importation restrictions.

Repeated independent inquiries and investigations, including the Prices Surveillance Authority (1994); Ergas Competition review (2000); the IT Pricing Inquiry (2013) and the Productivity Commission (2016) have all came to the same conclusion. Parallel importation restrictions allow copyright owners to manipulate the Australian market. The main beneficiaries are foreign multinationals and their local agents – not local authors or other skilled Australian workers.

The Productivity Commission has highlighted that Australian consumers were paying much more for books than elsewhere.

Commissioner Karen Chester commented: “The Commission purchased data on book prices, compared more than a thousand like-for-like titles in Australia, the UK and the US, and found that books were indeed more expensive – by around 20 per cent on average – than in those other jurisdictions like the UK.” The Commission noted that the evidence of the publishing industry was unreliable (with comparisons of paperbacks with hardbacks, and skewed samples). The Commission also found that there was no evidence that extra profits given to multinational publishers were passed onto local authors or local industries.

Moreover, the Productivity Commission rejected assertions that the removal of parallel importation restrictions had destroyed the New Zealand publishing sector and decimated New Zealand authors. Commissioner Karen Chester noted: “Data on the number of authors shows that, following the reform, the share of authors in overall employment has increased in NZ.”

page 4 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

The main defender of Australia’s parallel importation restrictions has been the subsidiary of News Corp, HarperCollins. This is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies. The largest education publishers in the Australian market are affiliates of British or US multinationals – Pearson Australia, Penguin Random House Australia, and Scholastic Australia.

It is perplexing why NTEU has been so receptive to industry propaganda. NTEU asserts: “The consequences of PIR go beyond job losses in publishing and printing and profits going overseas but also to a ‘brutal reduction’ in the range of commissioned Australian literary and scholarly works which will directly impact on NTEU members.”

There is simply no evidence to substantiate such extravagant claims. What job losses? Books are rarely printed in Australia. How will the commissioning of Australian works be impacted, by which presses? And as a net importer of copyright works, significant profits are already channelled through local branch offices and sent overseas. These profits for book sales go overseas along with a substantial proportion of the fees generated by the compulsory licensing for educational works, paid by publicly funded schools and universities to the one Australian copyright collecting society, the Copyright Agency.

The Australian school sector currently spends upwards of $665 p/a on purchasing educational resources for Australian schools, in addition to over $80 million spent on fees paid to collecting societies. Commissioner Karen Chester commented that “the higher costs of books are borne by all Australians from the bibliophiles, to the students as they (or their parents) are forced to pay more for Harry Potter, Diary of a Wombat and the dreaded text books.”

The reality is that the nature of educational publishing is changing in response to funding shifts that seek to drive improvements in student learning outcomes. Education publishing comprises around 40 per cent of the entire publishing market in Australia. It is the largest sector of the market. All NTEU members will be well aware there is significant pressure for teachers to master blended learning, produce online resources and MOOCS. Large publishers are also well on the way of transitioning their business models to capture this new market. Rather than publishing text books they are already moving to hard copy/ebooks hybrids, online learning platforms and teaching support materials.

The chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Rod Sims, has expressed concerns about restrictive copyright laws adversely affecting education. He has called for policy-makers to embrace the suite of copyright reforms proposed by the Productivity Commission: “The world is now moving too fast for Australia to get left behind, again.”

Instead of defending dated British imperial parallel importation restrictions, the NTEU should instead be supporting efforts to provide open, accessible, and affordable educational resources.

The recent Creative Commons Summit in Toronto showed how students and educators alike could benefit from the open dissemination of education, science, and research.

NTEU should be honouring its policy platform and supporting copyright laws which promote access to knowledge, open education, and freedom of speech.

Professor Kathy Bowrey, UNSW Professor Matthew Rimmer, QUT

Update Interventions in bargaining over A&TSI claims NTEU Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) Unit and the A&TSI Policy Committee have been involved in negotiating the A&TSI claim at a number of sites during this round of bargaining.

While a small number of institutions have indicated they want to substantially soften or remove their A&TSI employment, leave and language allowance clauses, the A&TSI Unit and Policy Committee members continue to assist bargaining teams to prosecute the agenda.

aspiring to remove or soften their A&TSI clauses, negotiations for A&TSI employment (including numeric targets), cultural/ ceremonial leave and language allowance clauses will be pursued at all sites.

While some universities may challenge the negotiation of employment targets, there have been changes to the funding guidelines for the new Indigenous Student Success Program (ISSP), where the Government has detailed that a 3 per cent A&TSI employment target must be incorporated.

Very simply, if universities are willing to set employment targets as part of their funding requirements, then our members see no issue in having those same employment targets written into their new Collective Agreements.

The table details the sites where bargaining assistance has been provided by the A&TSI Unit and Policy Committee.

The A&TSI Unit will continue to assist Branches and Divisions in their negotiations to secure numeric employment targets, cultural/ceremonial leave and language allowance in this round of bargaining.

While it has been somewhat disappointing to see a small number of institutions

Adam Frogley, National A&TSI Coordinator

Branch/Institution

Assistance provided

Outcome (to date)

University of Tasmania Bargaining to negotiate the new A&TSI clause.

In final stages: • Confirmed 60 (headcount) by 2020 • 4 days additional cultural leave

Deakin University

Provision of assistance to the Chair of the A&TSIPC in negotiating the Deakin A&TSI employment clause.

In final stages: • Confirmed employment target of 50 • Heads of agreement to be reached.

Griffith University

Assistance with provision of statistical staffing data and trends, and assistance in bargaining (meeting with the Bargaining team).

Ongoing to meet with the Bargaining Team on 21 June.

Swinburne University

Meeting to discuss the A&TSI employment claim for Round 7.

Meeting held with Swinburne University management and NTEU Branch President to progress claim development.

James Cook University

Advice on incorporating A&TSI traineeships and cadetships into the next Agreement.

Ongoing.

2½ mins to midnight The second hand on the Doomsday Clock shifted 30 seconds this year to 2½ minutes to midnight. Since 1947 members of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board have set the clock as an analogy of the threat of nuclear war.

In 2007 they added consideration of climate change and new developments in the life sciences and technology that could inflict irrevocable harm to humanity. For the last two years, the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock stayed set at three minutes before the hour, the closest it had been to midnight since the early 1980s. The Science and Security Board warned, “The probability of global catastrophe is very high, and the actions needed to reduce the risks of disaster must be taken very soon. In 2017, we find the danger to be even greater, the need for action more urgent.”

On 15 June, a majority of the world’s governments resumed negotiations at the United Nations on a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons. Australia was not represented. The US and UK boycotted. But most countries are there and serious about reaching an outcome. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) remains confident that a categorical ban is possible. thebulletin.org/timeline, icanw.org

May Day marchers in Darwin

May Day in Darwin is celebrated with a public holiday. NTEU members marched with hundreds of others through the CBD and gathered for a concert on the Esplanade.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 5

Update People over property!

People over Property is the catch cry of the campaign to support NTEU bargaining at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). Members are unhappy that management has rejected many of the claims at the table, in particular superannuation equity, improved job security and relief from unreasonable workloads.

After some frantic activity in late 2016, bargaining resumed in March 2017 at much reduced pace – management offering only one day of meetings each fortnight. At the time of writing, meetings have dried up; there have been none in June 2017.

With management clearly taking their foot off the accelerator, our focus needed to shift gears to apply pressure outside the bargaining room. The NTEU bargaining team felt management had shown next to zero

willingness to commit to any extra spending on staff in the next Agreement. No pay offer had been tabled, nor were management committing to any improvements in superannuation for fixed-term or casual staff. However, in recent years UTAS management have been spending up big on property in Hobart, Launceston and Burnie – all part of a vision to shift the University of Tasmania into the central business districts of Tasmania’s cities. Our estimates suggest more than $25 million of property purchases in Hobart alone. At the same time increasing the employer superannuation contribution to 17 per cent for all fixed-term and casual staff had been costed by UTAS management at $3.5 million per year. It appears clear that UTAS management are quite prepared to invest in their property portfolio, but much less willing to invest in their staff.

Thus our campaign was inspired to draw attention to the fact that a university is built of people, not bricks and mortar. We printed a few thousand “people” stickers so that members could write a message about management’s spending priorities, and arranged member BBQs at the two main campuses to apply

the stickers to cardboard houses – representing the University’s growing real estate footprint. We also attracted a lot of passers-by and many students (free sausages will do that!). We had many good conversations with potential members and the students about our belief that UTAS management could value people over property.

The media were up for it – with commercial TV covering both the Hobart and Launceston BBQs, and an article in the Launceston Examiner. Is this enough pressure? Not by a long chalk. Members have spoken, passing a motion calling for a protected action ballot. The struggle continues, but we are in for the long haul, thanks to our committed membership.

Kelvin Michael, Tas. Division Secretary

Bargaining all done at Deakin Going first in a bargaining round means you have no option but to hold your nose and just jump in, as no-one else has tested the water first.

The Deakin bargaining team (pictured) included Kerrie Saville (Academic), Katrina Fleming and Steve Davis (Professional), supported by Division Secretary Colin Long as Lead Negotiator and industrial support from the Victorian Division.

In a round characterised by aggressive approaches by university managements, the outcome is impressive. Highlights of the new Agreement include improved academic workload rights and conditions for casual staff, increased security of work and improved access to flexible work arrangements. Once it is approved by the Fair Work Commission and has application to staff, an initial payrise of 2

per cent plus $1000 on salary rates will flow to staff.

Improvements to other conditions don’t always flow as a result of approval of an Agreement, but require campaigning and implementation measures. For Deakin members, there are two key areas where the changes to the Agreement are significant enough to require this.

New provisions have been introduced allowing academic staff to collectively request a review of their Work Allocation Model which includes a review of the time for undertaking teaching and service activities and a review of the research expectations for a faculty.

page 6 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Casual academic staff can express interest in Teaching Scholar roles which will initialy be advertised internally. Professional casuals will be advised of their entitlements to convert, and casual academic staff now have access to an annual four hour payment to cover compliance training and professional development.

Having rested (briefly) after completing the bargaining negotiations and campaign, the Deakin Branch is now preparing to campaign in both of these areas and will be starting implementation of the Agreement soon.

Miranda Jamieson, Deakin Branch Organiser

Update Move to terminate Murdoch University Agreement is “unAustralian” In a move described by ACTU Secretary Sally McManus as “un-Australian”, Murdoch management have ignored widespread calls to drop their application to terminate their University’s Enterprise Agreement. Instead, they have pressed ahead with its attempt in a hearing which started in Perth’s Fair Work Commission on Tuesday 4 July.

This follows an earlier decision by management to walk away from bargaining assistance in the Commission, despite provisional agreement by NTEU to a number of the University’s bargaining claims and offers to compromise on others.

The application to terminate the Enterprise Agreement is coupled with Federal Court action being brought against NTEU and two officials alleging misrepresentation in communications to members that described the management’s bargaining position. It is an action described by

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam as setting a terrible precedent.

In what appears a concerted and aggressive strategy, management has also threatened other litigation.

While a decision on Murdoch’s termination application is not expected until mid-way through the second half of the year, the consequence of termination, if ordered, will be profound and have significant implications for the entire trade union movement. It is the first time in the university sector an employer has attempted such a move, and there has been no other Enterprise Agreement terminated in any sector of the economy which affects such a large number of staff (over 3,000).

If successful, more than 70 of 110 conditions of employment at the University would be left without any form of statutory protection and others would be left with only the minimum, inferior, safeguards provided in modern awards and the National Employment Standards.

That means, over time, salaries at Murdoch could fall by between 20 and 39 per cent, the employer superannuation contribution could slide from 17 to 12.5 per cent, redundancy payments could drop by up to 33 per cent for academic staff and 80 per cent for professional staff, and personal leave could be cut from 12 days to 10.

Those are just a few examples; misconduct and unsatisfactory performance provisions could disappear completely as could the regulation of workloads, protection of academic and intellectual freedom, and targets for the employment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff. There are dozens of others.

While Murdoch management has given an undertaking that some conditions, such as salaries, would remain protected for six months, there are no guarantees beyond that leaving staff entirely at the behest of management. Condition and policies

governing employment conditions could be changed at a moment’s notice on no more than a whim and without any form of justification or explanation.

It appears evident that management have little notion of the intrinsic value and purpose of a university. They persist with a prehistoric attitude towards industrial relations and appear to have little grasp of the effect on staff of years of poor management at the University.

The previous two Murdoch University Vice-Chancellors left under less than satisfactory circumstances, the last having been subject to investigation and found to have engaged in serious misconduct by the Corruption and Crime Commission.

Yet despite this, Murdoch staff had the highest productivity gains of 37 Australian universities between 2007 and 2013, and so it seems incomprehensible that University management would to try and remove long-established conditions of employment, that apply at almost all other universities nationally, and offer a salary increase of only 3 per cent over 4 years.

While the current focus is on Murdoch University, the broader implications of the ease with which employers can terminate enterprise agreements are alarming. It is a failure of the Fair Work Act and we can only agree with Labor’s Federal Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Brendan O’Connor who recently decried the “nuclear” option of employers terminating enterprise agreements in growing numbers as a tactic to reduce take-home pay.

It shouldn’t be allowed to happen at Murdoch University and it shouldn’t be allowed to happen elsewhere.

Marty Braithwaite, WA Senior State Organiser

Below: Delegates at the NTEU Women’s Conference 2017 hold signs declaring that they “Stand with Murdoch Uni staff.”

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 7

Update Selling students short On the night after the Federal Budget was handed down, NTEU University of Adelaide Branch hosted a panel discussion on higher education policy “Australian Universities: Selling Students Short?” It aimed to show that budget cuts are not just headlines, but have real impact on staff in Australian universities, who will see jobs disappear and workloads further stretched.

The panel, chaired by National President Jeannie Rea and co-hosted by NTEU member Dee Michell, was a welcome wake-up call for the 80-plus people who attended.

Speakers were Richard Hil (whose 2015 book inspired the title of the panel), Nik Taylor, Heather Fraser, Mark Pace and Robert Simms – each offering unique insights into the state the higher education system.

Education as a commodity A major theme that emerged on the night was the role that the move to a user pays market model for education has played in the decline of teaching quality in Australian universities. Robert Simms, former Greens Senator and Spokesperson for Higher Education, argued that the move to the HECS-HELP system has led to a key shift in the debate around tertiary education. It has gone from being a public good to being a private good primarily delivered as a service to the individual and for the benefit of the individual. With this key premise in place, governments, one after the other, have been able to justify reduced public funding for universities on the grounds that they exist only to serve a specific group of individuals who choose to attend them.

learning experience. Education is not a product.”

On a similar note, Taylor went on to tell the audience “we sell students short in so many ways... we offer students sanitised knowledge, because our universities are so keen on marketable information” and as a result we “turn out students who have a very different view of knowledge than we educators want them to have”.

Are students getting ripped off?

Richard Hil (pictured below), touching on the points made in his book, Selling Students Short, argued that students are increasingly being delivered low grade courses, for apparently little benefit to anyone other than the institutions. “Many of the students who graduate will never get a job in their chosen profession. Think about law, nursing, teaching, accountancy... they will be compelled to do yet another degree”, he said.

Mark Pace, president of the University of Adelaide Student Representative Council concurred. He spoke not only about the rapid reduction in contact hours seen across institutions, but also the weaknesses in the broader federal government framework for supporting students. Pace lamented that education was becoming

Heather Fraser and Nik Taylor, authors of Neoliberalisation, Universities and the Public Intellectual: Species, Gender and Class and the Production of Knowledge (2016) agreed that the shift towards the market model since the 1980s has had serious impacts.

Fraser argued that: “there has been a hollowing out of what we know as education... they make glossy brochures talking about quality teaching. But they don’t seriously think about how we can create a quality page 8 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

a service for the few, with the maximum student support payment available being less than half the Henderson Poverty line.

Jeannie Rea pointed out that it was the difficulty of balancing the inevitable work with study lifestyle, rather than academic performance, that was causing high dropout rates among students.

Speaking out shouldn’t be this hard While everyone agreed there are major problems with the direction public universities are going they also shared a concern that it was becoming harder for staff to speak out. Some panellists, reflecting on their own personal experiences, agreed that the environment of managerialism and control had made it harder to criticise or question decisions from above. Nik Taylor, for one, called for more push back from staff: “I’m tired of seeing my friends and my colleagues in tears and suffering all kinds of mental illnesses as they are dealing with the stress and depression that these changes are bringing out.

Those of us who want to voice our dissent are increasingly feeling silenced.

That we can’t do research critical of the status quo. If it’s not funded we can’t progress up the career ladder.”

Hil added: “Academics have a responsibility to collectivise – we need to come together to rebuild the narrative that fights for the public university.”

Jeannie Rea closed, reflecting on the authenticity and openness of the night’s discussion, acknowledging the reality that “the spaces to have these types of conversations have been lost. But we have to keep having them regardless”.

Kieran McCarron, University of Adelaide Branch Organiser

Update March for Science rallies resonate worldwide NTEU members around Australia joined an estimated 1.3 million people in 600 cities around the world on 22 April to rally and march in support of science, advocating for the vital role science plays in our health, safety, freedom, environment, economies and governments, in the face of growing threats.

Science, scientists, and evidence-based policy making are under attack. Budget cuts, censorship of researchers, disappearing datasets, and threats to dismantle government agencies harm us all, putting our health, food, air, water, climate and jobs at risk. It is time for people who support science to take a public stand and be counted.

But scientists need secure jobs so they can spend their time solving problems, not worrying about where their next contract will come from. Job insecurity amongst research staff is rife in Australian universities, with the overwhelming majority employed on fixed term or casual contracts.

NTEU and the CSIRO Staff Association, the two principal unions representing Australian scientists, released a joint statement before the rallies, calling for adequate and stable science and innovation funding.

“The critical area of science and research funding should not be a political football,” said NTEU National President Jeannie Rea. “Stable funding would enable scientists to get on with their important work, helping us understand and solve the wicked problems of our time.”

Rea said there is an epidemic of insecure employment among research staff in Australian universities.

“The Turnbull Government and many university employers purport to appreciate the need for Australia to genuinely embrace innovation and science to improve the ways we live and work,” said Rea. “The damning truth, however, is that four out of five research-only staff in our universities are employed on fixed term contracts, and 50 to 70 per cent of teaching is done by academics employed casually.

“Research scientists’ valuable time should not be spent dealing with the serious financial and personal implications of not knowing if they will have a job in a few months or weeks.

Sam Popovski said: “CSIRO is trusted by the public to solve some of our nation’s biggest problems, from climate change to energy. In reality, CSIRO simply won’t be able to do this with current trends of declining funding and insecure careers.”

“As the unions representing university and CSIRO staff, we are pleased to support March for Science and its championing of education to encourage broad public knowledge and discussion of scientific work, as well as open communication, informed policy and stable investment,” said Popovski. “Secure jobs for scientists is a crucial step in this.”

The ‘March for Science’ rallies were the first step of a global movement to defend the vital role science plays in our health, safety, economies and governments.

Organisers hope that it will develop into an international movement that: • S trengthens the role of science in policy making.

• I mproves science outreach and communication.

“The proliferation of precarious employment has broader consequences. It limits universities’ capacities to attract the very best scientists, and drives promising young researchers into alternative careers. In the end we all lose out.”

• A dvances science education and scientific literacy.

CSIRO Staff Association Secretary

Images: NTEU members at the March for Science in Perth (above) and Sydney (left).

• F osters a diverse and inclusive scientific community.

It’s an attempt to build a broad, non-partisan, and diverse coalition of organisations and individuals who stand up for science. The movement is advocating for evidence-based policy making, science education, research funding, and inclusive and accessible science.

Michael Evans, National Organiser marchforscienceaustralia.org

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 9

Update UC pay ‘experiment’ continues There will be no pay bonus for University of Canberra (UC) staff this year, according to UC’s Vice-Chancellor Deep Saini.

In an email in June, Professor Saini announced that UC had achieved a $4.1 million dollar surplus in the 2016 financial year, but that this was not enough to trigger the pay bonus.

The UC Employee Bonus Scheme was introduced in 2014 to supplement a radical approach to pay rates.

In its last two Enterprise Agreements, UC management demanded a unique approach to setting salary: annual pay rises were linked to the indexation calculation in the Higher Education Support Act 2003.

Until 2017, this was known as the Higher Education Grants Index (HEGI).

NTEU accepted this at the time. It was after difficult negotiations, and we knew the HEGI increase would be 3.9 per cent for 2013 and 3 per cent in 2014: good pay rises, in line with the sector. However, HEGI did not continue at such strong levels. In 2015 staff had a 1.8 per cent pay increase; 2016’s was 1.74 per cent and 2017’s decreased further to 1.5 per cent.

The Federal Government has changed the indexation calculation for 2018 and beyond to the Consumer Price Index, the measure of inflation. What this means for UC staff is that their pay rates will remain flat in real terms unless and until we negotiate ‘proper’ pay rates in the next Enterprise Agreement.

Problems with a pay bonus But what’s so wrong about the pay bonus?

We have no problem with UC giving a bonus to its staff. Who would object to

hard-working university staff having more money in their pockets? But a bonus is at the discretion of the employer and this year there is no bonus to be paid. A bonus cannot substitute for a real pay rise that increases your pay permanently and is reflected in the pay scales on which superannuation is calculated, and which determine your eligibility for bank loans.

This bonus is also deeply unfair in excluding casual staff.

NTEU opposes ‘contingent’ pay rises on principle. UC is welcome to operate a bonus scheme if it chooses. It should not, however, be at the expense of pay certainty and proper pay rises for staff.

Pay is not everything We know that for many staff, pay is not everything. Working conditions are very important. But every other university in Australia has working conditions at least as good as UC. Many universities have better conditions and all provided much higher pay rises over a comparable period.

The average pay increase was 3.11 per cent per year, and all but two universities had increases of 3 per cent or more.

UC has continued its reluctance to set fair and transparent pay rates with the current Enterprise Agreement, which introduced a ‘high performance allowance’. This was a ‘bonus’ of either 2 or 4 per cent of salary based on meeting a range of conditions and achieving a rating of ‘significant’ and/ or ‘outstanding’ respectively. The performance review process is currently under review, after many staff complaints - which included that achieving such ratings appeared much more difficult in 2016 than earlier.

We need to seek fair pay rises for all staff rather than ‘bonuses’ based on un-transparent rating processes.

Please join NTEU to fight for decent pay outcomes for UC staff in the next Enterprise Agreement. Pay outcomes that are competitive in the sector, clear and transparent, and appropriately reward staff for all that they do.

State of the Uni survey 2017 concludes We’ve had an overwhelming response to the second State of the Uni Survey, with 13,586 people completing the survey, almost double the number of respondents to the 2015 survey.

Email invitations were sent to about 182,000 email addresses for higher education staff, including over 26,000 NTEU members.

Respondents were split almost 50/50 between union members (6,718) and staff who are not union members (6,435).

The survey is part of an ambitious project to build longitudinal information about university staff attitudes to: • The higher education sector.

• Their university.

• Their conditions at work.

• Unions in the university workplace.

The survey is now being analysed and a report on the results will be included in the next Advocate.

Michael Evans, National Organiser

2017 NTEU

STATE OF

THE SURVEY UNI Have your say!

Rachael Bahl, ACT Division Secretary

Prepared by Teacher Tax specifically for NTEU members

NTEU Tax Guide 2017

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Download your copy now

www.nteu.org.au/tax nteu.org.au/tax

page 10 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

2017

Update NTEU continues support for UA’s anti-sexual assault campaign NTEU continues to actively support the Universities Australia (UA) Respect. Now. Always. campaign, which is aimed at preventing sexual assault and harassment on university campuses.

Commencing in 2016, UA partnered with the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) on a national survey of students to collate data on sexual assault and harassment. Pending the results of the survey, UA also committed to a review of all university policies and processes.

The AHRC survey closed on 2 December 2016, with the Commission’s public report now slated for release in August 2017.

Around this time, all universities will also release the survey results from their own institutions, having committed to being part of a transparent and accountable process that will prioritise both acknowledgment and action.

NTEU has consistently highlighted the need for universities to be proactive on issues around safety on campus, stress-

ing throughout this process the need to already have in place strategies and infrastructure to improve safety for both students and staff. We have also been very vocal about the need to address the toxic attitudes to women and minorities that are embedded in campus culture, particularly within university colleges.

To assist, the Union has provided UA with our current policy platforms on sexism, sexual harassment, gendered violence and sexual assault to assist with definitions, language and approaches to these issues. We will continue to work with both UA and student representatives to ensure that universities respond appropriately to this very serious and widespread problem on our campuses.

While the Respect. Now. Always. campaign is focused on student experiences, the NTEU has long been concerned about the impact of sexism, sexual harassment, sexual assault and gender violence on staff working on our campuses. While we have strong Union policies around these issues and there are processes to deal with

grievances in our Agreements, public comments made by the Commission regarding the results of the student survey indicate that the levels of sexism, sexual harassment and assaults on university campuses are shocking.

The Union is therefore in discussions with AHRC on including university staff in the fourth national survey on sexual harassment in the workplace to take place next year.

Terri MacDonald, Policy & Research Officer

Video explains bargaining The words ‘Enterprise Bargaining’ are being heard with increasing regularity on university campuses around the country as the latest round of negotiations pick up momentum.

While the term may be familiar to many university staff, the same may not necessarily be true about its precise meaning.

In an effort to explain the importance of both the bargaining process and member involvement in it, NTEU has produced a new infomercial-style video.

While the brief clip is intended as an accessible and light-hearted look at the bargaining process for members and

potential members, its key message is a serious one.

If university staff care about their working conditions, then they need to be NTEU members and they need to be engaged in the bargaining process.

After all, our working conditions don’t just appear out of thin air.

The video is available to view on the front page of the NTEU website, and our national Facebook and YouTube channels.

Please share it widely with your colleagues, particularly those who are not yet NTEU members. www.nteu.org.au/bargaining_video

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 11

Secure Work News Job security win for members at Melb Uni Vet Hospital With job security continuing to be a major issue at the University of Melbourne, members have successfully won conversions to more secure jobs for every one of the members involved in a recent campaign at the Werribee campus, home to the U-Vet Animal Hospital.

Over a period of time members at the site have raised concerns about the injustice of being employed on fixed-term employment year after year, and in one case for 20 years. The site primarily employs women and has some of the lowest paid workers at the University. This has led to difficulties such as securing loans, feeling anxious as

to whether they would receive another contract and not receiving the same superannuation contributions as their on-going colleagues. Many were receiving 9.5 per cent contribution as compared to the 17 per cent of on-going staff.

From conversations with members, the Union took the opportunity to assess the usage of the fixed-term contracts against what is allowed in the Enterprise Agreement.

From an enforcement perspective, we believed that the members were incorrectly employed on fixed-term and should be converted to on-going. Not surprisingly, it was HR’s opinion that they were correctly applying the fixed-term category. We sought to resolve the issue with HR with little success until we lodged a dispute.

The University never conceded that the staff were improperly employed on fixedterm but instead converted the members to on-going without admission of fault.

The win means the staff previously employed on fixed term contracts at the Vet Hospital have been converted to ongoing positions and have had their superannuation increased.

Our campaigning included systematically contacting members employed at the site and inquiring as to their employment status. We we asked them to speak with their colleagues about why they are participat-

I’m in the dark RMIT University Branch has kicked off “I’m in the Dark”, a casuals campaign.

With bargaining soon to commence at RMIT, the campaign aims to give casuals the opportunity to engage and start thinking about the issues they would like to campaign around in the upcoming negotiations. nteu.org.au/rmit/inthedark

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ing in the collective claim and to explain that strength comes with numbers.

Our mapping indicated that there were 150 staff who may be impacted, so in addition to the conversations we contacted each staff member and engaged in targetted messaging on social media. This action saw an increase in both membership and participation.

Upon the success of the conversions we were able to further celebrate the win.

Our Branch President Steve Adams was promoting the success and the Union’s work on a local Melbourne radio station and the local state Labor member, Joanne Ryan MP, mentioned the success on her social media. These were opportunities to highlight to the local community the importance of being member of the Union, as this was an outcome that only members received.

We are now involved in enterprise bargaining negotiations with the University senior management over new employment terms and conditions for staff. Improving job security and closing structural disadvantage for groups of workers will be a key focus during bargaining negotiations.

Corey Rabaut, Branch Organiser, University of Melbourne

Secure Work News Heading towards a lack of discipline Almost 45 per cent of academic full time employment (FTE) in the broad Field of Education (FoE) of Society and Culture is insecure, according to the staffing data categorised by Academy Organisation Unit (AOU). In Teacher Education and the Natural and Physical Sciences, almost 50 per cent of staff are insecurely employed. In Medicine it is over 50 per cent.

Over 40 per cent in Management and Commerce and Information Technology are employed precariously, as are nearly 40 per cent in Engineering and Related Technologies.

Connections between the ongoing persistence of occupational gender segregation and employment insecurity and consequent income security for women compared to men is also demonstrated in this data. For example, women are the majority of academics in Nursing and nearly two-thirds are insecurely employed, while amongst the few men insecure employment is lower. It is similar in education. In Civil Engineering there are few women, but still two-thirds are insecurely employed, while men are much more likely to have secure jobs. In Medical Studies the proportions are more equal by FTE, but women still more likely to be in insecure positions, as they are in Dentistry and Vet Science.

NTEU recently purchased this AOU data from the Department of Education and Training (DET). This is the official Higher Education Statistics collection as reported by universities. Fields of Education (FoE) are refined to three levels based not just on groupings of courses and specialisations but also similar potential vocations, unlike units of study which are coded on likeness of subject matter. This data collection is the Australian Standard Classification Education (ASCED). It gives a reasonable and relied upon picture of academic employment by FTE within FoEs. However, it is better for some fields, disciplines and courses than others, usually because

the area is readily defined such as in courses leading to professional registration like medicine or education.

However, where the data falls down is when it has been harder to code particular academics to a field. There are one third appearing as “unformatted code”. This particularly distorts the picture in small disciplinary fields.

However, overall the statistics do confiirm what looks to be happening on the ground.

Increasingly, both students and academics will speak of the narrowing of choice in units of study, of potential supervisors, of colleagues with whom to teach and research, and of a diminishing voice in university decision-making.

In the March edition of the NTEU’s academic casuals’ magazine Connect, I mused: A professor retires at the end of a long and distinguished career, but she is not replaced by the promotion of one of her colleagues, nor an appointment from outside. Instead her teaching is casualised. A post doc is appointed parttime to add to her ARC project team, while she continues to lead the project in an unpaid adjunct position until its completion. She also agrees to supervise her current doctoral candidates to completion on casual rates.

With her departure there is only one professor left in the discipline group and he too is looking to leave soon.

Enrolments are solid, but constant restructuring of the degree program means that the discipline needs consistent advocacy to maintain the major, and frankly the undergraduate program is cross subsidised by the high fee post graduate coursework program, which is fully taught by casually employed staff.

And there is pressure to put it all online, while still recruiting onshore international students.

There are several level B lecturers who cannot break through to level C because they cannot get the ‘research points’.

Despite promotion criteria supposedly valuing teaching and engagement, strong teaching candidates are not really encouraged. The only associate professor does no teaching, but takes much of the supervision load and brings in funds through consultancies that do not add to the research profile.

In reality most of the actual teaching is done by casually employed staff, several of whom are women who have been teaching in the program for over five

years. This latter group have given up on ever getting an academic job and instead focus on research and writing in their own time, glad they do not need a laboratory or equipment to undertake their research. The university though keenly counts their research outcomes.

The younger women and men wonder if they should hang around much longer or just move out of higher education all together, as they defer life decisions like having children. Another review has just been announced and the discipline has been named on a list of those to be cut altogether. The university is arguing that it is not sustainable.

Many readers will have nodded along to this scenario. The rising tide of insecure employment is narrowing opportunities for the current and next generation of academics of getting on to a career path. If discipline and course fields continue to be eroded, there will not be any new jobs or replacement positions.

Attention must be focussed towards the impacts of diminishing academic disciplines not just upon the academics and students but also upon the pursuit and application of knowledge. We already have a scenario where languages other than English are taught at a narrower range of universities, but now in core disciplines like Philosophy and even Maths and History academic appointments are contracting. How many economic historians are there across Australian universities?

Fortunately, some academic disciplinary organisations are starting to focus upon the impact of ongoing casualisation, as well as the separation of research and teaching, on the health of disciplinary fields. NTEU will continue to interrogate the data and we are always keen to hear from members.

Jeannie Rea, National President www.unicasual.org.au

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 13

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander News After the Uluru Statement, what now for Recognise?

Strait Islander community for a treaty/treaties, but also as being a last ditch attempt by the Recognise campaign to flog a dead horse and achieve what it believes is a path of palatability and least resistance to constitutional recognition; implementing symbolic change only for a conservative Australian population.

National Sorry Day – 26 May – a day of sorrow for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, was the date chosen by the Referendum Council at the recent Constitutional Convention to release the Uluru Statement – From the heart.

The one page statement was an attempt to draw consensus from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander delegates and their communities on the issue of constitutional recognition.

The Uluru Statement, while not overwhelmingly strong in its intent, does detail the beginning of a process that places us closer to toward the path of a treaty/ treaties.

The Uluru Statement essentially details statements of fact pertaining to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ continued sovereignty, connection to country, culture and community. It recognises impacts of colonisation including escalating incarceration rates and the removal of our children from their families.

While media outlets across the nation proclaimed that the Uluru Statement clearly detailed the desire of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to achieve treaty/treaties, a careful reading of the Statement makes clear that the focus remains upon substantive constitutional change and establishing a Makarrata or treaty/treaties Commission.

Many in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community view the final one page statement as not only recognising the wishes of the Aboriginal and Torres

Many major corporations, business and sporting codes had readily signed on to the Recognise campaign, sold to them as an easy road of symbolic change that would not upset the majority of constitutionally conservative Australians.

The issues stemming from the outcomes of the Uluru Statement are multifactorial.

First and foremost is how do we as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples progress toward the establishment of a Makarrata Commission while combating conservative federal governments that previously wanted nothing more than a sentence in the preamble to the Australian Constitution that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were in fact here prior to colonisation.

Strident conservatives and moderates in the Turnbull Government may be wishing now they could still hang their hat on the terra nullius argument.

There is a need to combat the media hype that is coming from this Statement. Looking back to the Native Title debate where fearmongering was the vehicle of choice.

It can only be assumed that media outlets will climb aboard this bandwagon, causing the wider Australian population to be nervous about supporting any measures that will ensure the continued sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples through a treaty/treaties.

NTEU has never supported the notion of constitutional recognition and continues to advocate for a treaty/treaties between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Crown. The recent anniversa-

page 14 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

ry of the 1967 Referendum amplifies a very important point. Aboriginal sovereignty has not been ceded and legitimate and responsible governments must recognise this.

If we are to achieve anything we need to act and not wait fifty years for another symbolic date to implement a sound process for negotiating treaty/treaties.

This issue will not go away. While Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples know how to wait, we have been waiting long enough and if we as a society want to see a change in the educational, health, and incarceration rates for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, then we all must change and embrace treaty/treaties as unfinished business.

For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples the Uluru Statement is only the beginning of a process. and while the Recognise campaign still seeks relevance their work in attempting to move Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples toward constitutional recognition has failed dismally.

As for the future of the Recognise campaign, the major flaw in their process was the lack of genuine consultation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. They sought to push people towards supporting something that would bring very little in the way of tangible outcomes for the communities they purported to be representing.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been recognised in many Australian state constitutions. In Victoria we have been recognised since 2004 but the question must be asked, how has this assisted Aboriginal peoples residing there?

With a myriad of evidence proving that Close the Gap has failed, constitutional recognition can only be seen for what it is – words on a piece of paper.

Adam Frogley, NTEU National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Coordinator and Taungurung man www.referendumcouncil.org.au/event/ uluru-statement-from-the-heart

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander News No positives for A&TSI staff or students in Budget 2017 The 2017-18 Federal Budget has seen the continuation of major change to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) supplementary funding for the higher education sector. These funding changes have seen extraordinary cuts to A&TSI student support, tutoring and scholarships.

From 1 January 2017, the Indigenous Support Program (ISP), the Commonwealth Scholarship Program (CSP) and the final iteration of the Indigenous Tutorial Assistance Scheme – Tertiary Tuition (ITASTT) were consolidated and rolled in to the Indigenous Student Success Program (ISSP).

As the key funding allocation supporting A&TSI Support Centres and their staff, the ISSP gives funding allocations to all Table A and B higher education providers to provide A&TSI students with culturally appropriate support and places of cultural safety on campus.

Efficiency dividends, cuts to service & ISSP The ISSP allocations for the current financial year and forward estimates to 2020-21 show it has been subjected to the Government’s 3 per cent ‘efficiency dividend’ with a total of $2.1 million removed this year and into the forward estimates.

While this loss is a worse-case scenario, when examining total funding allocations

Additional performance criteria

2016-17 2017-18 2018-19 2019-20 2020-21 expected Target Target Target Target

Number and proportion of Indigenous students in higher education at funded institutions

17,400 1.7 per cent

18,900 1.8 per cent

20,400 1.9 per cent

22,100 2.0 per cent

23,900 2.2 per cent

Number of Indigenous completions at funded institutions

2,330

2,520

2,730

2,950

3,190

from the former A&TSI student support programs (ISP, CSP & ITAS-TT) in comparison to previous and current years, the reality is that a total of 31.6 per cent or $23.2 million has been cut from all A&TSI student support programs from the 2015–16 forward estimates to the 2017–18 Federal Budget.

Less for A&TSI staff & students Funding cuts of this magnitude will only result in a reduction of support services for A&TSI students and reduced employment opportunities for academic and administrative staff. While there has been a turn-around from 2015 where a reduction in the number and FTE for A&TSI staff was recorded, currently the total number of A&TSI staff remains at 1.0 per cent of all university staff (1.1 per cent FTE).

To ensure universities can achieve the goals of the Universities Australia Indigenous Strategy 2017-2020, the need to maintain and grow the number of A&TSI staff employed is paramount, particularly with the ongoing growth of commencing and all A&TSI students.

Targets for A&TSI student numbers & completions As part of the Budget announcement, targets to increase the number of A&TSI students have been detailed. Supported by Universities Australia, the targets expect to see an average year-on-year growth in A&TSI enrolments of 1.92 per cent with total student enrolment and completions growth for period 2016-17 to period 202021 expected to reach 37 per cent.

Targets for A&TSI staff While not directly stipulated in the Budget, a 3 per cent target for A&TSI

staff employment has been detailed as a funding requirement under the guidelines for the ISSP. On current A&TSI staffing levels, achievement of this growth would require the appointment of a minimum additional 2,372 (1,986 FTE) A&TSI staff nationally.

This figure assumes no additional growth in the employment of non-A&TSI staff.

NTEU welcomes the inclusion of Indigenous Workforce Strategies and a 3 per cent employment target in the ISSP Guidelines, although relying upon internal university policy mechanisms exclusively to drive A&TSI employment growth will simply not work.

In reality, the majority of Australian universities and higher education providers will not achieve this level of employment growth, due in-part to apathy, indifference and a lack of understanding on how to target and attract A&TSI peoples.

The use of university Collective Agreements and specific A&TSI employment clauses and targets are the only mechanism by which universities will have any hope to achieve the Government’s 3 per cent A&TSI staffing target.

Put simply, there are no positives in this Budget for A&TSI university students or higher education staff. Those staff and students will only suffer under the fiscal pressure imposed by this Federal Government: a government that would seem to have little care or concern for those particular constituents and their communities.

Adam Frogley, National A&TSI Coordinator www.nteu.org.au/atsi

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 15

Pay more, get less When the Minister for Education and Training, Simon Birmingham, released the Government’s latest package of higher education policies on 1 May 2017, he wanted everyone listening to be in no doubt that he was abandoning many of zombie measures that the Senate had refused to pass over the last three years.

He emphasised that he understood that stakeholders (Vice-Chancellors aside) and the broader community had thoroughly rejected the radical deregulatory policy agenda of his predecessor, Christopher “the Fixer” Pyne, and that he was starting from a “clean slate”.

The Minister said he believed, presumably in contrast to those of Pyne, that his set of “reforms” were “fair, reasonable and necessary”.

Paul Kniest Policy & Research Coordinator

page 16 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

The Government’s package of policies include a number of very important changes to way higher education will be regulated and funded, some of most significant of which include: • The imposition of two 2.5 per cent efficiency dividends to Commonwealth contributions for these supporting CSPs. • Changing funding of Commonwealth Supported Places (CSPs), including a cumulative 7.5 per cent increase in real student contributions over four years.

• Making 7.5 per cent of Commonwealth Grants Scheme (CGS) funding contingent on universities meeting certain performance criteria.

• Changing the income threshold and repayments reschedule for the Higher Education Loans Program (HELP).

• Expanding the demand driven funding system to include sub-degree (diplomas, advanced diplomas and associate degrees) qualifications offered by universities.

• Changing the allocation and funding arrangements for enabling courses and postgraduate coursework qualifications.

• Changing the regulation of the Higher Education Partnership and Participation Program (HEPPP).

While the Minister continually uses adjectives such as fair, reasonable, balanced and measured to describe his policies, it remains the case that they are still expected to make a major contribution to budgetary saving. The Budget Papers (Overview, p. 35) show that Higher Education Reforms are by far the largest source of saving in the 2017–18 Budget ($3.8 billion in fiscal balance terms over the forward estimates) followed at a considerable distance by Funding Jobs for Families ($2 billion) and Improving Access to Cheaper Medicines ($1.3 billion).

tion toward the education of CSP students will not only be reduced by the increased value of the student contribution, but also through the imposition of two efficiency dividends equal to 2.5 per cent of the Government’s contributions (Commonwealth Grants Scheme) in both 2018 and 2019.

While the Minister might want everyone to believe that he has produced a measured, fair and sustainable set of higher education policies that improves accessibility and makes providers more accountable, we should not discount the fact that these policies mean higher education is once again being asked to be a major contributors to the task of budget repair.

Universities Australia estimates that higher education has already contributed over $4 billion in savings since 2011–12. But yet again the Government is going back to higher education funding well to find major budgetary savings. These savings, however, are being achieved by asking students to pay more and cutting the level of resourcing universities receive to educate these students.

These are not moderate and measured changes to the funding of CSPs. On average, a university in 2017 receives about $19,700 in total funding per CSP student. This is made of on average, $8,200 student contribution and $11,500 contribution from the Commonwealth. Assuming there is no indexation (holding prices constant at 2017 values) then a 7.5 per cent increase would raise student fees by $615 a year.

The effect of the two 2.5 per cent efficiency dividends is to reduce the Commonwealth contribution by $564 per CSP per year. When combined, the $615 saving from increased student fees and the $564 efficiency, will deliver the Government savings of $1,179 per CSP. This equates to 10.3 per cent of $11,500.

Funding of CSPs Students to pay more The Government is proposing to increase the maximum amount universities will be allowed to charge CSP students by 7.5 per cent, through four annual 1.824 per cent increases commencing in 2018.

These increases are above and beyond any increases that would occur as a result of indexation using the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

However, the additional fees paid by students are not passed on to universities, because the Government will reduce the value of its contribution for these students by an equivalent amount.

The Minister went out of his way to emphasise how moderate and measured these increases were, saying that the cost of a four degree would only increase from between $2,000 to $3,600, or $17 a week.

While such increases might in themselves seem relatively small, Australian students already pay amongst the highest fees in the world to attend a public university.

Therefore, any increases will put our students at even greater cost disadvantage when compared to other similar economies.

Universities to get less At the same time the Government is asking CSP students to pay more for their university education, it is also asking universities to educate and support these students with less funding and resources.

The value of the Government’s contribu-

10 per cent cut to public investment

-25

TOTAL REDUCTION IN PUBLIC INVESTMENT CDU FED SCU ANU CAN MUR UNI’S STUDENT UNE SUN JCU VU USQ CQU CSU WOLL FLI ECU UWA ADE SWI NEW USA MAC UTS UTAS ACU CUR GRI QLD LAT RMIT UNSW WSU QUT DEA SYD MELB MON -20 -15 -10 -5 0 5 10 15 20 $M

25

$M

Figure 1: Impact of Higher Education Reform Package, by University 2021 ($m 2021 values and expected CSP loads)

Source: Australian Govt (May 2017), The Higher Education Reform Package (Table 4)

In other words, the Government is implementing a real cut of around 10 per cent to the level of public investment in the education of CSPs. As demonstrated above, this is being achieved by squeezing more out of students while simultaneously cutting the level of resourcing universities receive. Given that the Government invests in excess of $7 billion per year in the education of CSP students, a 10 per cent cut amounts to a cut in public investment of well over $700 million per year once these changes have been fully implemented in 2021.

Who pays for the cut in investment?

From the analysis above it is clear that both students (through higher fees) and universities and their staff (through less funding) are being asked to bear the burden of the Government’s 10 per cent cut to public investment. A better understanding of the total impact of these changes on both universities and students can be obtained by analysing the Government’s estimates of how much each university would receive in total funding for CSPs in 2021 under current funding arrangements and how much they would receive if the new arrangements were introduced. Using this data it is possible to estimate the approximate student and Commonwealth

contributions under each set of arrangements by assuming average student contributions of 42 per cent and 46 per cent respectively under the existing and new arrangements. The results of this analysis are shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1 shows the aggregate impact of the proposed policy changes on both students (in form of higher fees) and universities (in form reduced funding) which sum to give total level of government savings.

The data in Figure 1 shows that while the total burden of the these policy changes varies significantly between universities (reflecting the differences in the size of their CSP student loads), the burden of the cut to public investment is shared evenly between students and universities and their staff.

The full extent of the financial impact on individual universities, however, is better appreciated by considering the cumulative impact of these funding changes over the four year implementation period from 2018 to 2021. This is shown in Figure 2 (overpage). Monash University is estimated to lose $60 million in Commonwealth Grants Scheme funding over the next four years, while Charles Darwin University is estimated to lose about $10 million. In aggregate, the sector will be about $1.2 billion worse off in terms of the resources they have to the educate CSP holders

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 17

Budget 2017 under the new model compared to what they would have received under existing arrangements.

Again it is worth reiterating that these are hardly the moderate or reasonable cuts that Minister Birmingham would want us to believe. These cuts will not be able to be absorbed by universities as the Minister is suggesting and, therefore, they will have profound impacts on staff and students.

Universities will no doubt attempt to offset reduced level of funding for CSPs by trying to cut costs through staffing reductions, heavier workloads and greater intensification of work. There is also little doubt that they will also become even more reliant on use of casual staff to deliver teaching and other student services.

Students will, in all likelihood, face reduced choice in subject offering, increased class size and reduced duration and frequency of classes. Other student support services may well be discontinued or minimised. Students will be paying 7.5 per cent more and getting less.

Contingent Commonwealth funding for CSPs The Government is also proposing to make 7.5 per cent of Commonwealth Grants Scheme (in the order of $500,000 a year) contingent on each university meeting a predetermined set of performance benchmarks. In 2018 funding will be contingent on making admissions processes more transparent and providing more detailed education and research cost information. From 2019, the funding will be dependent on yet to be determined performance indicators, but which will, in all likelihood include student retention, employment outcomes and satisfaction.

HELP income thresholds and repayment schedules The Government is proposing to change the Higher Education Loans Program (HELP) repayments which involves, from 1 July 2018, lowering the minimum repayment threshold of $51,975 to $42,000 and making other substantial changes to the repayments schedule, including introducing new 8.5 per cent to 10 per cent repayments rates for incomes above $94,957. The changes apply to everyone with a HELP debt, not just new debtors.

The rationale for these changes is to attempt to get the total value of outstanding HELP debt and the costs associated with servicing that outstanding debt (imputed interest and bad or doubtful debt) under control. Currently, total outstanding HELP debt is in the order of $50 billion of which almost one-in-four dollars (23 per cent) is never expected to be repaid.

-10 -12 -14 -16 2018 only first 2.5% efficiency dividend applies -17 -18 2019 -19 -19 2020 -20 2021 Table 4 HE Reform Package -21 -22 -24 -26 -29 -29 Total Reduction in -29 University Funding -30 for CSPs -30 = $1.2billion -32 -34 -35 -35 -38 -38 -42 -43 -46 -46 -47 -49 -49 -49 -49 -51 -51 -53 -62

$M -70

-60

-50

-30

-20

-10

0

Figure 2: Estimated Impact of Higher Education Reforms on Funding per CSP by University 2018-2021 ($m)

Source: Australian Government (May 2017), The Higher Education Reform Package (Table 4) and Education and Training Portfolio Statment (p. 55).

The aim of the proposed changes, therefore, is to increase the proportion of HELP that is repaid and reduce the time it takes to repay it. The irony however is that, the increase in student fees also being proposed will have the opposite effect.

As the Government’s own estimates (see Figure 3) show they are anticipating that

average student debt levels will increase by almost 30 per cent over the next four years (from $20,700 in 2016-17 to $26,500 in 2020-21) and the repayment period will increase from 8.9 years to 9.5 years over the same period.

While greater transparency and accountability and the fact that the Government has emphasised that any benchmarks (such as student retention) will reference each universiAverage HELP debt Years taken to repay ty’s particular circumstances 9.5 9.3 are to be encouraged, there 9.2 9.1 8.9 still remain serious concerns about how the use of such a punitive funding mecha$26,500 nisms could result in perverse $24,900 $23,400 institutional behaviour. What $22,000 $20,700 will happen to the calculation and interpretation of student outcomes? While the details of how this program will actually work are yet to finalised, it should be noted that any funding withheld from an individual university for not meeting its performance 2016–17 2017–18 2018–19 2019–20 2020–21 benchmarks will not be lost, but rather re-distributed Figure 3: Average HELP debts & average number of years to repay within the sector.

Source: Education and Training Portfolio Statment (p. 55). page 18 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

-40

CDU FED SCU ANU CAN MUR UNE SUN JCU VU USQ CQU CSU WOLL FLI ECU UWA ADE SWI NEW USA MAC UTS UTAS ACU CUR GRI QLD LAT RMIT UNSW WSU QUT DEA SYD MELB MON

The proposed changes to HELP debt thresholds are deliberately calibrated (that is, there are no unintended consequences here) to capture graduates (or indeed anyone who has acquired a HELP debt) on incomes between $42,000 and $52,000.

However, as the data in Figure 4 clearly shows, people in this income bracket with HELP debts are overwhelmingly women. In other words, these changes are not gender neutral and will impact far more severely on women. This issue is likely to be further complicated when you take into account some of other welfare changes, especially

Budget 2017 versity is specified in their funding agreement with the Commonwealth.

>$100k

HOUSING

$90–100k Total number of people with outstanding HELP debts

$80–90k

1,008,995

“ YOUNG PEOPLE UNDER ATTACK ” UNDER ATTACK

623,117

$70–80k

PENALTY Under current arrangements, UNIVERSITY NOT RATES FEES universities have a financial AFFORDABLE REDUCED UP incentive to enrol students into Bachelor level qualifications because that is where 61% of Australians agree* the money is. The proposed change is meant remove this HAVE CAUSE TO FEEL THEY ARE distortion and as a consequence reduce attrition rates.

However, restricting eligibility of these courses only to people without any existing In addition, the competitive tendering qualifications limits the ability of process, which will be open to non-unithe system to cater for graduates to versity providers, is also highly troubling enrol in lower level qualifications as because of the danger of replicating way updating or expanding their the disastrous situation in vocational skills or knowledge. education and training. The contestable market model in VET resulted in a race Funding and allocation of to the bottom in terms of quality, forced enabling places many public providers (TAFEs) to shut down programs and cut jobs, and saw The Government’s higher educathousands of vulnerable students being tion reforms are proposing very exploited. Will the Government ever learn significant and troubling changes to that education is far too important to be funding and allocation of enabling left to the market? places.

$60–70k $50–60k

*Source: Essential Media report, 8 May 2017. Authorised by Grahame McCulloch, 120 Clarendon St, Sth Melbourne VIC 3205

$40–50k <$40k 0

200,000

400,000

Figure 4: Number of People with HELP Debts by Taxable Income, Male & Female 2014–15 those around family tax benefits, which mean women in this income bracket will face very high (in some cases above 100 per cent) effective marginal tax rates.

One way to look at the proposed changes to HELP is that they are necessary to try to ameliorate the adverse impacts of fee increases that the Government is also seeking to introduce. Therefore, if the Government was not to proceed with the increases in student fees, then they would not need to offset the impact of these changes on HELP, and thus avoid the compounding negative consequences they will have on low income earners and women.

As NTEU has continually argued, the best way to get HELP debt under control is to reduce student fees.

The demand driven system and sub-degree places The Government is proposing to remove the cap on the number of sub-degree level CSPs that each university can offer and include these places in the demand driven system as currently only applies to domestic Bachelor level places. The allocation of sub-degree places under the proposed program will not, however, be fully demand driven, because eligibility will be limited to students who have not previously obtained a higher education qualification.

At the moment there are approximately 22,000 subsidised sub-degree CSPs allocated across the sector. The number sub-degree CSPs offered by each uni-

600,000

Enabling places are government subsidised places which provide students who do not otherwise qualify to enter university (the majority of whom are from disadvantaged backgrounds) with an alternative entry pathway. The number of places is currently allocated to universities through funding agreements. Over the decades many regional and outer urban universities have invested considerable effort into developing specific programs designed to address the needs of their communities or particular cohorts of students, including mature age and/or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students.

Today’s enabling students are not charged fees because the Government provides universities will additional financial support to enabling places through a loading per student which in 2017 is worth $3,271 per student.

Unfortunately, the Government is proposing to tear up this highly successful program. To begin with, it is proposing to abolish the current loading and allow universities to charge enabling students a fee of up to $3,271 in 2017 values. As if this wasn’t bad enough, the Government is also proposing to replace the current system of individually negotiated funding agreements with a competitive tendering process. Both university and non-university providers will be allowed to tender.

If implemented, these changes would mean that enabling students who currently study for free will now be charged fees.

They will start accumulating HELP debt before they are eligible to enter university.

HEPPP The Government is proposing to secure in legislation (rather current regulation through Other Grants Guidelines) the funding of the Higher Education Participation and Partnerships Program (HEPPP).

Amendments to Higher Education Support Act 2003, will include the allocation of annual funding amounts for HEPPP and specify financial loadings for students from low socio-economic and other equity groups.

Conclusion The Government’s rhetoric about its new package of higher education reforms being fairer and more measured than those initially proposed in 2014 Budget does not stand up to scrutiny. At the heart of the new policy is a plan to make students pay more and give universities less.

The burden of the proposed 10 per cent cut to the level of public investment in the education of government supported students will be shared by both students through higher fees and universities through lower levels of resources. Therefore, given that Australia already has one of the lowest levels of public investment in tertiary amongst OECD countries and the fact that our student already pay very high fees by world standards, NTEU will oppose these cuts to public investment in higher education and the continued shifting of the cost burden of university education on to students. paymoregetless.org.au

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 19

Budget 2017

Budget targets women unfairly For 30 years the Australian Government produced a formal statement on the impact of the Federal Budget on women.

However, in 2014 the Abbott Government quietly dropped the statement.

No explanation was given, but it was soon evident that the 2014 ‘Horror Budget’ particularly targeted women. In 2017, with the statement still not reinstated, the results are the same.

The removal of both the PM and Treasurer, and the subsequent double dissolution election, still did not see the Government garner enough support to pass the majority of the unpopular measures from the 2014 Budget. Long dead, but still shuffled around by a Government looking for to implement both savings and an even more conservative political agenda, these became known as ‘zombie measures’.

Pragmatically, the Government finally laid these untenable policies to rest in this year’s Budget, but in doing so replaced them with others aimed at reducing the budget bottom line. While some political observers were quick to label this year’s Budget as ‘Labor-lite’, the reality is that these are still neo-conservative measures that, again, leave women worse off.

As there is still no statement in the Budget papers on the impact of these policies on women, the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) has helpfully filled the gap, publishing it’s now regular annual report. In A Gender Lens – Budget 2017-18, the NFAW makes the following points about the impact of the Budget on women: • The increase in the Medicare Levy will affect those on incomes greater than

$21,644, but be felt most by those with lower to middle incomes.

• For those with eligible children, Family Tax Benefit A payment rates would be frozen for two years.

Those who pay child care fees will also continue to face very high effective marginal tax rates.

• University graduates will start repaying HELP loans when they reach income levels of $42,000 per year.

The reduction of the HELP repayment threshold to $42,000 will disproportionately affect women (as shown in Figures 1 and 2 on pages 15 and 16, respectively), who earn less over a lifetime of employment and particularly so in the first ten or so years after graduation.

• There are no measures to improve the accessibility of higher education and other post-secondary training. Young people will be paying more for their degrees, and the overall cuts to university funding likely to affect the security of staff who are already highly concentrated in lower-paid and less secured positions.

• The focus of the vocational education and training (VET) measures in the Budget is on apprenticeships and traineeships, with little for the majority of VET students who are studying other programs. Without adequate funding for VET programs other than apprenticeships and traineeships, options for education and jobs are reduced, particularly for women who may find it difficult to secure apprenticeships in skilled occupations in high demand because they are still largely considered male fields.

• The changes to HELP, coupled with the Medicare levy and childcare fees, could lead to effective marginal tax rates of 100 per cent or higher, particularly for those impacted by the decrease in Family Tax Benefit Part A at $51,903.

• The changes proposed to the aged pension will have the greatest impact on

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2017-18 e Budget

Gender lens on th

women retirees, who usually have less superannuation to draw from but longer life expectancy, and therefore rely more on pension payments.

• While there is some money allocated for emergency housing for those impacted by domestic and family violence, there is still much more that needs to be done if we are to really address this issue seriously.

• Although not part of the Budget, the changes to penalty rates will have a significant impact on women workers, particularly if they are extended to the aged and health care sectors as well as the childcare sector, which are all feminised industries.

• There is nothing in the Budget to address the gender pay gap or to promote gender equity more broadly.

Evidently, this Government is still choosing to ignore the impact of its policy decisions on women. It is therefore vital that organisations such as NTEU, NFAW and others continue to highlight the impact these decisions would have if implemented, and lobby for the rights of women and others that would otherwise be disregarded this Government.

Terri MacDonald, Policy & Research Officer www.nfaw.org/

Budget 2017

8/8: National Day of Protest NTEU has called a National Day of Protest on Tuesday 8 August 2017 under the banner of “Pay More, Get Less” to protest the Government’s planned changes and to highlight the impact on staff.

Protest meetings on each campus will be asked to endorse the following statement: HIGHER EDUCATION BUDGET CUTS: PAY MORE, GET LESS Public investment in tertiary education in Australia ranks amongst the lowest of all developed economies and our students pay amongst the highest fees in the world to attend a public university.

Despite this, the Turnbull Government’s

The protest provides a focus on reduced student learning, support and services that would follow these cuts, which translate into less staff jobs and greater job insecurity.

The National Day of Protest is a chance to make a statement through a series of high-visibility actions and activities on most campuses. By holding the rallies on campus we hope to maximise participation across the country. By holding these protests across the country at the same time, we want to generate a sense of collective action, while maximising participa2017 Higher Education Federal Budget package further cuts public investment and makes students pay more.

Cuts to university funding mean further cuts to staff jobs. The consequence is bigger and fewer classes, deeper cuts to courses and subjects, more casualised staff and less staff support.

We call upon the Australian Senate to reject all cuts to higher education in the 2017 Federal Budget, and increases in the HECS HELP rates and decreases in the repayment threshold.

tion though the local character of events.

Branch activities NTEU Branches are planning and organising their 8/8 events. A full list of events is available online closer to the date. www.paymoregetless.org.au

Below: Members explaining why they’re protesting on 8/8. L–R: Thor Kerr (Curtin), Mike Bianco (UWA), Natalie Lloyd (Curtin) and Hannes Herrmann (Curtin).

Photo: Marty Braithwaite

We call upon the Australian Government to increase funding to public higher education, and to student financial support.

We call upon university management to: • Join with us in actively rejecting the Federal Budget cuts.

• Stop the excessive use of insecure forms of work, and • Negotiate collective bargaining agreements that strengthen job security.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 21

Budget 2017

Liberals lifting higher learning out of reach for poorer Australians The Federal Government’s proposed $2.8 billion cut to higher education over four years is part of its calculated and ongoing attempts to privatise the sector. In championing the neoliberal maxim of privatising profits and socialising losses, the Government is driving the transfer of costs for education from the state to the “consumer”.

While Government was unable push through the front door its earlier plans for complete university fee deregulation, their latest moves appear as a compromise position. With fee payers expected to pick up the tab, it’s lower socio-economic students, who are also often Indigenous, women, as well as regional and remote students who will carry the burden. This is on back of earlier attacks on poor students, including cuts to program funding specifically designed for students from lower socio-economic backgrounds; pointing to the Government’s deliberate attack on students who can least afford to pay.

The Government calls their latest incision an “efficiency dividend” – but it’s actually a euphemism for outright cuts that will further deepen financial problems already basseting many universities, and fuelling structural inequality across the sector.

There are additional measures in the Budget that demonstrate this attack on the poor, including by placing more financial pressure on students by forcing them to start repaying debts once their salaries reach just $42,000, rather than the current $54,126 threshold – in other words, just above the minimum wage. Tellingly, many contracted and casual teaching staff in universities, including large numbers with PhDs, earns little more than this threshold.

They too, may find themselves re-paying debts while subsisting on very low incomes as they educate the next generation of indebted students.

The media’s go-to ‘expert’ on higher education, former Howard Government adviser, and member of Simon Birmingham’s higher education advisory panel, the Grattan Institute’s Andrew Norton, is the chief proponent of the lower income threshold. He has argued – persuasively it seems – that encouraging students to repay their HELP loans will contribute an additional $500 million to government coffers. Norton considers the salary threshold reasonable, and confidently maintains that “no hardship” will be caused to students.

How on earth does he claim to know this?

Is he aware of household costs, rents, and the fact that wage increases now fall below the inflation rate? What does he know about the realities of living on a low income in today’s Australia, including in particular the unique pressures that may face women, Indigenous, rural, remote and poor students living away from home?

The measures announced in the Budget will increase student fees almost immediately, and keep lifting them over the next few years. Despite Norton’s neoliberal proclamation the cuts will be good for students and the university sector, critics have been quick to draw attention to the

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increased burden placed on students and their families, many of whom are already on or below the poverty line.

The rationale for increasing university fees has been that university education delivers higher incomes for graduates, who should therefore contribute individually to the cost. This is a wobbly argument, that ignores changes in the labour market, as well as the way massification of university education diminishes the relative value of a degree. Importantly too, it ignores the public benefit of an educated population.

Despite these flaws, the Government has sought to justify the commercialisation and privatisation of higher education, as well as the narrowing of curriculum, in its bid to make universities more ‘relevant’ to the economy.

This Budget must be read for what it is; an attack on young people and future generations; especially the poor, women, Indigenous and rural and remote students.

In this context, it is little wonder that so many young people are turning away from a political system they understand as failing them.

Associate Professor Kristen Lyons, UQ Adjunct Associate Professor Richard Hil, Griffith University A more detailed analysis can be found in the article ‘The Liberals are Lifting Higher Learning Out of Reach for Poorer Australians’ at New Matilda: https://newmatilda.com/2017/06/13/ the-liberals-are-lifting-higher-learningout-of-reach-for-poorer-australians

Bluestocking Week 14–18 Aug 2017

Worth 100% Why is there still a 10 per cent gender pay gap in education, when women and their unions have organised so successfully over so long for gender equity?

Education unions can proudly claim their credentials as long term and consistent campaigners for equal pay, equal opportunities, affirmative action, and gender inclusive curriculum, and against both explicit and covert discrimination in structures, policies and practices.

So what is the problem? Focussing specifically upon higher education, a component is because women are more likely to have ‘interrupted’ careers, but the main reason is because sexism is real. Not only does higher education continue to be highly occupationally gender segregated, but that even when women and men have the same job there can be different expectations and outcomes. There is also the crass fact that men are the main recipients of bonuses, which are outside of Enterprise Agreement regulation.

Sexism While much is said about the feminisation of higher education in that women are now the majority of staff and students, the trend is that already feminised fields of study have become more so. There has been some balancing out in professional areas like law and medicine, but in the classic STEM areas change is slow. Women are now just as likely to go on to and succeed in higher degrees as men. But the gender pay gap is there immediately at graduation at 3.4 per cent and widens out to 9.3 per cent in just three years according to the Graduate Careers Council (2016).

Within higher education institutions this is reflected in the careers of both professional and academic women. Women seeking career advancement tend to remain concentrated in middle level positions and the funnel through to senior positions continues to be narrow.

Who has not watched as two colleagues on the same classification are treated differently? A woman is praised for her diligence and competence in completing detailed tasks, while her male colleague presents her work at the meeting because he has the time to do so and she is seen as too busy to be invited to the meeting.

With two newly appointed lecturers, somehow resources are found to give him the opportunity to polish those articles for publication, while she gets first year coordination – and does such a great job, she gets allocated it again. Meanwhile he is soon off on study leave and ready to go for promotion.

When women go for promotion, they are criticised for not talking themselves up enough, for example, attributing credit to their colleagues in a team project. Women seek training in how to better position themselves, but are also often uncomfortable with what is required. This raises a key question of whether we seek to fit, or rather should we be changing the way things are?

Deakin Vice-Chancellor Professor Jane den Hollander, at the recent NTEU Women’s Conference, emphasised that the expectations are and should be that universities lead and embody positive change.

It is not that “unconscious bias” or “unintended consequences” are not well recognised. The Science in Australia Gender Equity (SAGE) project, picked up across a number of universities, demonstrates this, as do the Workplace Gender Equity Agency’s reporting requirements. The report of the recent Senate Inquiry into gender segregation in the workplace and women’s economic equality contains details of the problems across the workforce. NTEU submitted and presented evidence at the hearings focussing upon the impact of insecure employment. In our own sector the conclusions are clear in Glenda Strachan and colleagues’ Women, Careers and universities: Where to from here?, the final report of an ARC linkage funded project to which the NTEU was a partner. So with the

gender pay gap still hovering around 17 per cent across the Australian workforce, and at 10 per cent across education, we do need to unpack this within higher education, investigating the impact amongst different institutions and for professional and academic women.

Worth 100% “Worth 100%” is a gender pay gap campaign slogan used by the public sector union in New Zealand, which our Women’s Action Committee considered was worth sharing. “Worth 100%” can though be used as a touchstone to highlight many aspects of gender based discrimination in higher education institutions. The challenge is to run with it in Bluestocking Week this year. The purpose of the theme is to give us a focus. It does not preclude any ideas and plans already in train.

This is the fifth year since NTEU, with NUS, revived Bluestocking Week.

Our objective was and is to make space and time to focus upon what women have achieved, and what we need focus upon now.

Particularly importantly, and a feature of our recent national Women’s Conference, is that the gender lens must be refracted intersectionally (see p.40). We have had many Bluestocking Week events featuring the experiences of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander women on and off campus, of women of colour, of specifically Muslim women. Gender diversity has been a point of intersection and intervention. Class matters, as does ableness. When planning this year’s activities on your campus think widely about whether your events are open and inclusive – can women even get there and feel good when they do.

Jeannie Rea, National President All Branches are expected to organise at least one event in Bluestocking Week; there is no shortage of ideas or previous events to get you thinking. Contact your local Branch to get involved and suggest activities. nteu.org.au/women/bluestockingweek

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 23

Workforce feminisation and job security in our universities Over the last decade the Australian university workforce has not only experienced an increasing reliance on the use insecure forms of employment but has also sustained an increase in the proportion of the workforce that are women.

The total Australian university workforce grew from 93,993 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) persons in 2005 to 124,355 FTE persons in 2015. This is an increase of 30,362 FTEs or 32 per cent. Figure 1 (opposite page) disaggregates this growth into changes in FTE workforce by gender as well as classified by contract of employment. Figure 1 clearly demonstrates that between 2005 and 2015, the Australian university workforce has become: • More feminised, with the female FTE workforce growing at twice the rate growth of the male FTE workforce (42 per cent compared to 21 per cent), and • More reliant on less secure forms of employment with the FTE actual casual and limited term workforces growing at more than three times the rate of the tenurial FTE workforce.

Paul Kniest Policy & Research Coordinator

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The stronger growth in the size the female workforce means that in 2015 female FTE accounted for 56 per cent of the total university workforce compared to only 52 per cent in 2005. This is mirrored by the stronger growth in insecure forms of employment where the share of the Australian university workforce employed on secure ongoing positions (tenurial) fell from 59 per cent in 2005 to 53 per cent 2015.

A more detailed breakdown in the growth of the university workforce from 2005 to 2015 by gender as well as broad function

2005

2015

MALE WORKFORCE

just over 5 per cent (or one-in-five) of the overall increase in the size of the university workforce between 2005 and 2015.

▲21% 44,730 +9,579

FEMALE WORKFORCE

▲42% 49,071

TENURIAL LIMITED TERM CASUAL

+20,781

55,826 +9,697

The data in Figure 2 show, that despite the very low increase in secure forms of employment for males, the proportion of male employees with tenurial employment in 2015 remains higher than that of females for both academic and general/professional employees. Amongst academic men, 45.9 per cent (13,628 out of 19,343 FTE) had tenurial employment contracts compared to 38.4 per cent for academic women.

▲17% ▲52%

24,446 +12,829

▲58%

13,529 +7,834

Figure 1: Changes in Australian University Workforce Gender and Work Contract FTE 2005 to 2015 Source: Department of Education and Training (academic and general/professional) and by work contract is shown in Figure 2. It shows that the categories of FTE employment that grew fastest over the last decade were all insecure forms of employment namely: • Limited term female general/professional (81 per cent) • Actual casual female academics at (66 per cent) • Actual casual female general/professional (61 per cent), and • Actual casual male general/professional (58 per cent).

By contrast the two categories that experienced, by far the slowest growth were tenurial male academics (3 per cent) and tenurial male general/professional (9 per cent).

To understand how different rates of growth in various categories of the university workforce have contributed to a changing higher education workforce landscape, it is worth considering how much they have contributed to overall growth in the workforce.

For example, the data in Figure 2 shows that between 2005 and 2015 general/ professional female FTEs increased from 29,830 to 42,323. This increase of 12,493 FTE positions represents about four-outof-ten (41.1 per cent) of the 30,362 additional FTE positions created at Australian universities over the period. Another 8,283 or just over one-in-four (27.1 per cent) of the new FTEs were academic positions filled by women.

There was however, a stark contrast between academic and general/professional staff in relation to the type of employment contracts on which this new female workforce was engaged. Almost half of the

new general/professional positions (5,602 out 12,493) were secure ongoing (tenurial) positions. By contrast over two-thirds of new academic positions (5,807 out 8,283) were insecure positions, which were shared evenly between casual FTE and limited term FTE. The increase in total male workforce (9,586 FTE) accounted for just under one-in-three of total increase the workforce (30,362 FTE). However, only a very small proportion of this increase was in the form of ongoing or secure work. The additional 419 tenurial male academic positions represent just 1.4 per cent of total increase in the size of the workforce. The additional 1,290 additional tenurial general/ professional male positions represents 3.9 per cent. In other words, the growth in secure (tenurial) male positions represents

TENURIAL

LIMITED TERM

The analysis of employment patterns in our universities raises several intriguing questions including, • Whether the increased feminisation of the university workforce has resulted in lower levels of employment security higher levels? or • Whether the lower levels of employment security has resulted in the feminisation of the workforce?

The analysis of the data presented in this article do not allow us to answer these questions, but they are questions that need and deserve closer examination.

12%

10.5%

2015

42%

34.7%

38.5% 20.5%

2005

34.8%

25,470

19.6%

2005

25.3%

2015

70.6%

46%

30,502

12.5%

9.8%

2015

53.4%

42,323

29,830

19.2%

2005

61.8%

26.2%

27,633

15.8%

2015

69%

34.5%

Total= 19,350

30.8%

Conclusion

GENERAL/PROFESSIONAL STAFF 27%

2005

Even for general/professional positions, where the growth in female and tenurial employment was strongest, the proportion of men with tenurial employment contracts in 2015 at 62 per cent was still marginally ahead of women at 61.7 per cent.

CASUAL

ACADEMIC STAFF 23.3%

While it might be tempting to conclude from the data, that it is men who have been disproportionately affected by the increasing use of insecure forms of employment, this is not the case because the level of secure employment for males started from a much higher base than for females.

19,343

62.5%

23,897

Figure 2: Changes to Australian University FTE Workforce by Gender, Function and Work Contract 2005 to 2015 Source: Department of Education and Training NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 25

Preserving the Wave Hill Walk-Off Bedford truck

Photo: Dexter Daniel annd Robert Tudawuli with the original Bedford truck in 1966.

Late in 2016, an important piece of Aboriginal land rights and Australian union history embarked on what’s likely be its final journey. In a painstaking preservation and transportation operation, a rundown but resilient TJ Series Bedford truck was slowly but surely transported under the watch of conservators from Darwin to Canberra having been passed into the custodianship of the National Museum of Australia.

The delicate journey was a far different one from the 15-odd the Bedford and its owner, Darwin-based Aboriginal rights campaigner and trade union activist Brian Manning made during the Wave Hill Walk-Off. Traversing dirt roads, rough terrain and often travelling at little more the 40kph, Manning and the Bedford completed the gruelling 1200 km-plus round trips, to provide supplies and support to striking Gurindji stock and domestic workers and their families after they walked off the Wave Hill Station, about 600km south of Darwin, in 1966 in protest over poor wages and conditions.

In the process, the Bedford truck, Manning and travelling companions – including a then teenage Kerry Gibbs, and unionists and Indigenous activists, Dexter Daniels and Robert Tudawali – earned a place in history.

Andrew MacDonald Media & Communications Officer M@NTEUNational

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After years of strike and campaigning for land rights sparked by the walk-off, Gurindji land was symbolically handed back to the traditional owners in August 1975, with a famous photograph of then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam and Vincent Lingiari, standing as an enduring image of that moment.

While the achievements and history of the Wave Hill Walk-Off have been well documented, what came next for the Bedford – and the involvement of NTEU members in the process – is perhaps not quite as well known.

In an interview published by Crikey in February 2011, Brian Manning said that after having the truck off the road for a few years he eventually had a steel tray fitted, and rigged the vehicle for sound, for use in union rallies.

Manning said that the truck was also commandeered by the Australian Federal Police in the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy, and, separately, at one point contained a radio transmitter to communicate with resistance forces at the early stages of Indonesia’s occupation of East Timor in the 1970s and 1980s.

The article by Robert Gosford also notes that by 2011, a recommendation from the Northern Territory Heritage Advisory Council that the Bedford Truck be declared a heritage item was passed on to the then Northern Territory Heritage Minister.

Brian Manning’s daughter and NTEU Branch committee member, Louisa Manning-Watson told Advocate that a committee, which included NTEU NT Industrial Officer Heinz Schmitt, had also been formed prior to her father’s passing in 2013, to discuss the restoring the truck.

“I followed in my father’s footsteps with my brother, Brian Manning Jr, to honour our father’s wishes with this project and we even purchased a replica vehicle to assist with a restoration,” said Louisa.

“But after my father passed away, during the process of finalising his estate it was discovered in his will he had actually left the truck in custodianship with our uncle Kerry Gibbs, for the Gurindji people.

“So ownership was passed on and, with our blessing, we supported the Gurindji’s wishes to have the truck placed in the museum.”

1962 J SERIES BEDFORD TRUCK

REPLICA RESTORATION PROJECT ACTIVIST - BRIAN T MANNING 1932 - 2013

With the original truck having now been transported the 4000km from Darwin to Canberra by road, Nathan Pharoah from the National Museum of Australia (NMA) told the ABC last November that the NMA planned to keep the truck in its current condition, but stabilise it from further deterioration.

The NMA now has on display the metal tuckerbox used by Brian Manning on his outback trips, and plans to put the Bedford on exhibit in its main hall in August on the anniversary of the Wave Hill Walk-Off. Back in Darwin, the replica Bedford truck purchased by the Manning family, and used during 50 year commemorations of the walk-off last August remains with Louisa Manning-Watson.

“Presently I have been working with the MUANT (Maritime Union of Australia NT Branch), TWU (Transport Workers Union) and NTEU to gain their support in raising funds to commence the replica’s restoration,” said Louisa.

“MUANT has set up an account for funds to be stored and it is really just about getting the word out there about what we are doing with this project.

“Our intention is to restore the replica truck to the exact colour – racing car green – of our father’s truck, so it serves as a reminder, and can be used as a talking piece of NT history by the unions and for community events.”

Above: The replica Bedford truck in Darwin.

Left: Flyer promoting the restoration project.

For more information or to contribute to the replica restoration effort, email thebedfordtruck@gmail.com MUANT special purpose fund Bedford Restoration: BSB 882-000, acct 100 114 398

Y FOR FUTURE GENERATIONS A TALKING PIECE & REMINDER OF NT HISTOR SUPPORTED BY MUA, TWU & NTEU

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 27

Students

Ninth in Eurovision, first in uni fees Australia may have come 9th in Eurovision 2017, but compared to the other Eurovision finalist countries we rank at the top in the amount our students pay to study at a public university.

Eurovision coincided with the Federal Budget announcement of more cuts to higher education funding and increasing the costs for students. The trend continues of Australian governments expecting more of students and universities, yet continuing to reduce public investment, when we already rank second lowest amongst OECD countries. We also rank in the top half dozen for tuition fees charged.

So when I was watching Eurovision and thinking about what to say to students rallying under NUS slogan, “Make Education Free Again”, I thought rather than the usual OECD comparatives, let’s have a look at Eurovision comparisons.

The top four at Eurovision 2017, Portugal, Bulgaria, Moldova and Belgium all have low or very low fees for students at public universities. While Sweden might have come fifth at Eurovision, their students do not pay tuition fees at public or private universities, and this applies to all EU students studying in Sweden.

Belgium and Sweden are amongst the countries where there has been a steady increase in public investment in tertiary education over the last decade. In Sweden, like Germany the increase exceeded 10 per cent. Germany introduced fees briefly but following public protest quickly abolished them again at all public universities in 2014.

Italy came in sixth at Eurovision, and their university fees are on the rise where they are now ranked around tenth in the OECD. Italy is also keenly developing its international student market. There does appear

to be a correlation between countries treating education as a lucrative source of export income, while simultaneously increasing local fees and withdrawing public funding. Higher education is sold as a commodity for private gain, rather than recognition of public good.

State supported students in Romania and Hungary (7th and 8th in Eurovision) do not pay fees. Norwegian students (10th) do not pay fees, nor do EU or international students studying in Norway. In the Netherlands (11th), fees are on the rise as they also tap into the international market, but are still low for local and EU students. Fees are still kept low in France (12th) in most courses at public universities and public investment has increased.

Other popular Eurovision competitors, including Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Ireland, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia all offer tuition fee free public university education to domestic and EU students. Turkey abolished fees in 2014. And although Scotland is not (yet) an individual Eurovision entrant, Scottish students who study elsewhere in the UK can get fee remission, as UK university fees have skyrocketed.

It is not just about fees though, and what is significant in many of these countries is that they offer decent levels of student income support. Fee free places and financial support often apply to first degrees, but this does not mean that second degrees or specifically postgraduate courses are treated as deregulated money making cash cows as is often the case in Australia, the US and the UK. In Canada and also the US, along with greater public investment, tuition fee

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freezes and even free places particularly for lower income students are becoming more commonplace at the provincial/ state level public institutions.

President Obama tried to pass federal laws to abolish community college fees and rein in outrageous loans. In Australia loans may be government controlled, but as we are well aware they continue to mount up and can derail options after university.

Like trying to pick the winner of Eurovision, comparing just tuition fees can be too simplistic as other considerations including financial support, other fees and charges, the availability of public higher education places, as well as course quality and graduate career outcomes all impact upon the value of any degree. But even this light touch survey confirms that higher education tuition fees are a touchstone issue and both a real and symbolic emblem of commitment to increasing social and economic equity.

Jeremy Corbyn’s policy to abolish fees was as popular with parents and grandparents as it was with potential university students.

The abolition of fees at public universities in Argentina was the outcome of concerted student and faculty mobilisation. Korea has reduced fees because of student protests.

Even the right-wing Philippines Government has increased funding so as to make public colleges free in response to the popular call to reduce inequality.

Jeannie Rea, National President

Image: Australia’s Isaiah Firebrace at Eurovision 2017.

Credit: Roger Dewayne Barkley/Eurovisionary.

Students

Intergenerational warfare There has never been a worse time to be a young person in Australia. We will see a generation of working poor, walking around with price tags of debt on our shoulders for the rest of our lives.

While our mates in Canberra paid either nothing or very little to go to university, young people today walk away with debts reaching the $100,000 mark. The value of high quality, face-to-face learning has been beaten down and replaced with the churning through of consumers. Our universities are turning into technical colleges, as students grapple to balance part-time work, dodgy unpaid internships, and still getting to class on time.

But beyond education cuts, this Government has a broader agenda against young people. We’re calling it intergenerational warfare. The Government has failed to do anything on climate change and have instead taken steps backwards. But it’s no

skin off their backs because at the end of the day, climate mismanagement won’t be felt by Malcolm Turnbull, it will be felt by this generation of young people.

new labour force, but instead we have a government that is more concerned about billion dollar tax breaks for multi-nationals than educating its young people.

Then there’s housing. There’s been a 62 per cent increase in housing prices since 1992.

News is no better for renters, where we’ve seen been a 45 per cent increase in prices.

Higher education is arguably the most widely used government service in the country. With almost 50 per cent of 18-34 year olds completing some form of higher education or vocational training, it is necessarily becoming a universal good.

They’ve failed us on jobs and wage growth, too. Which, given the Liberals favourite slogan ‘jobs and growth’, would almost be laughable if not for the serious repercussions it is already having for everyday Australians. Wage growth hasn’t moved over the last two decades. We are experiencing one of the most uncertain and unsafe job markets and soon our penalty rates will be cut, too.

Our welfare system is more likeable to a school bully than a system designed to lift people up until they can get back on their feet. Newstart and Youth Allowance are well below the Henderson poverty line and yet the Government still thought using a robotic debt recovery scheme to make $4 billion in savings was a good idea.

This country needs ambitious leadership as we move into a new economy and a

Australia needs to be an educated nation.

ABS data found that in the next 10–15 years 40 per cent of existing jobs will be replaced by computers. A Cadence report found that for every 1000 graduates, an additional 120 jobs are created for people who never went to university at all. But beyond the obvious benefits to the economy and to industry, being an educated nation has unwavering social benefits for all citizens.

The Government has called for intergenerational warfare, and this generation is ready to fight back.

Sophie Johnston, National President, National Union of Students

Below: NUS protest rally in Sydney, 17 May 2017.

Source: NUS Facebook

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 29

NTEU celebrates IDAHOBIT 2017 Why is there a worldwide day recognising LGBTI rights?

Millions of homosexual, bisexual, transgender and intersex people around the world live in a constant state of fear.

INTERNATIONAL DAY AGAINST HOMOPHOBIA, TRANSPHOBIA AND BIPHOBIA

Photo: University of Adelaide members at an IDAHOBIT event.

IDAHOBIT

17MAY

A WORLDWIDE CELEBRATION OF SEXUAL & GENDER DIVERSITIES

At least 81 countries in the world criminalise same-sex relationships.

In 10 countries the death penalty can be applied for same-sex acts.

Many countries offer no legal recognition of transgender or gender variant people’s true gender. Forced psychiatric treatment and even sterilisation are expected in many countries to have one’s true gender recognised.

Across the world, sexual and gender minorities face public stigmatisation, police violence, state repression, attacks and murder. Their most basic human rights are denied daily.

LGBTI rights are a workplace issue Despite significant gains for LGBTI people in Australia, such as legislation and changing community attitudes, LGBTI Australians continue to face discrimination when seeking work and once they are in a job.

53% of lesbians and gay men experience workplace harassment and discrimination.

95% of transgender workers transitioning in their workplace leave their job.

Unemployment for transgender people is about four times that of the general population and eight times for gender diverse people.

41% of intersex workers were in the lowest income bracket, earning less than $20,000 per year.

NTEU members advocate inclusive workplaces for LGBTI workers that:

NTEU held events around the country on 17 May 2017 to support International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia (IDAHOBIT). IDAHOBIT is an annual opportunity for communities to reflect on the past and present experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people throughout the world, to celebrate these communities and contribute to change for LGBTI people.

• Provide equal opportunities.

• Address workplace harassment.

• Provide appropriate consultative mechanisms with LGBTI workers.

• Support individual needs such as transition support and inclusive parental & personal leave provisions.

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Left: NTEU distributed flyers and posters prior to IDAHOBIT to explain why the day exists and why we need to support it.

“IDAHOBIT is a chance for NTEU members to continue our advocacy for LGBTI workers, as the Union’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex caucus, Queer Unionists in Tertiary Education (QUTE), hosts events nationally for the first time,” said NTEU National President Jeannie Rea in a media release promoting the day’s events.

“Despite significant gains for LGBTI people in this country, such as legislative reform and changing community attitudes, LGBTI Australians continue to face discrimination when seeking work and once they are in a job.

“NTEU has and will continue to advocate for inclusive workplaces for LGBTI staff that provide equal opportunities, address workplace harassment, embrace appropriate consultative mechanisms and support individual needs.”

IDAHOBIT falls on 17 May each year, the anniversary of the day in 1990 the World Health Organisation removed the classification of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

While some advances have been made since then, millions of homosexual, bisexual, transgender and intersex people around the world still live in fear, with sexual and gender minorities facing public stigmatisation, police violence, state repression, attacks and murder, as basic human rights are denied.

“Unions have worked hard to eliminate discrimination in employment legislation, to recognise LGBTI issues in workplace agreements, while challenging homophobia, biphobia and transphobia and exposing inequalities that still exist in communities throughout the world,” said NTEU QUTE Caucus Coordinator Virginia Mansel Lees.

“IDAHOBIT is an opportunity for NTEU to ensure LGBTI staff in universities are supported, valued and visible in their workplaces. This is core work for any union.

“NTEU remains strongly committed to these values, and encourages members to support IDAHOBIT events being held today.”

CDU’s inaugural IDAHOBIT marks new era of acceptance IDAHOBIT@CDU has come and gone, but the strength of the local community shone through with their support on 17 May 2017. There was so much love and acceptance displayed by all who attended.

It was an historic day at CDU as it was the inaugural IDAHOBIT and a successful beginning to a new era in LGBTI recognition and acceptance. This recognition will ensure that the voices of the LGBTI community will continue to emerge and grow here, not only at CDU, but in the wider NT community.

Organisers Dr Belinda Chaplin (a woman of trans experience) and Louisa Manning-Watson (an LGBTI ally) took the challenge on at the 11th hour and managed to bring it all together with the help of local NT community. Belinda made it quite clear in her closing speech that “this celebration of genders and sexualities just doesn’t happen without the support of the fabulous people who have given their time, energy and resources to make it happen.”

Seven local organisations helped make this event a success. Family Planning Welfare Association of NT Inc, NT AIDS & Hepatitis Council, Rainbow Territory, Headspace Darwin, Drag Territory, Northside Health NT and the NTEU’s Women’s Action Committee filled the Mal Nairn Auditorium at CDU Casuarina Campus with colour and imagination (loved the Rainbow Couch from Headspace Darwin), offering their family-based resources to the staff and students who came along on the day.

Besides the stalls, there was an inspiring presentation from Ira Racines, the Community Engagement and Youth Participation Worker from Headspace Darwin. Ira came with his own fan club of young teens who also talked about what family meant to them. An equally inspiring impromptu talk by Dr Danielle Stewart, who operates a monthly LGBTI clinic in Coconut Grove. Danielle recognised the need to provide services to the LGBTI community in 2016 and arranges interstate doctors who understand the issues faced by trans people especially to attend the clinic.

And let us not forget the entertainment! Local drag entertainer, Vogue MegaQueen from Drag Territory wowed the crowd with legs that went forever and stylish costumes and make-up.

Belinda and Louisa are also thankful for the support and funding by NTEU and they are already talking about next year’s event. As Belinda said, “this is just the beginning of LGBTI representation here at CDU for staff and students alike; so let’s get together, form some networks, be actively supporting each other, and provide feedback to NT QUTE and CDU about a fairer, more inclusive university for all sexualities and genders.”

Louisa said, “We need more rainbow cupcakes.”

Read Dr Belinda Chapman’s full IDAHOBIT Day address at: www.nteu.org.au/qute/idahobit/belinda_chapman

Below: IDAHOBIT organisers, Dr Belinda Chaplin and NT Division executive member Louisa Manning-Watson.

NSW members at Charles Sturt University’s Albury campus hosted a pop-up drop-in stall with information, rainbow bunting and cupcakes for morning tea, while members in the Northern Territory hosted lunchtime stalls and entertainment at Charles Darwin University. Members in South Australia wore rainbows in their workplace, while the ACT’s University of Canberra Branch, and Victoria’s RMIT University Branch hosted seminars investigating the 2017 IDAHOBIT theme of ‘families’.

David Willis, Virginia Mansel Lees, Andrew MacDonald For more information about QUTE, email Dave Willis, dwillis@nteu.org.au www.nteu.org.au/qute

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 31

Private providers

Students & staff suffer in VET wash up During the fevered height of VET FEE-HELP rorting linked to unscrupulous private for-profit providers, the true scale of the costly debacle proved hard to keep up with.

On an almost weekly – if not daily – basis, fresh horror stories emerged involving the scamming of millions in taxpayer dollars, recruiters targeting the vulnerable, and students being stranded with half-finished, or useless, qualifications and significant debts.

Last October, in what NTEU described as a long overdue admission that education is too important to leave to the market, federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham announced the scrapping of the disastrous scheme. In its place, a new tightly-regulated and capped-loans program aimed at finally ending the rip-offs was unveiled.

But whether the new VET Student Loans program protects future students and government funding from the unconscionable behaviour of dodgy for-profit providers remains to be seen.

While we can only hope the party is over for the shady operators who cashed-in so comprehensively at taxpayers’ expense, recent events suggest it is students who could be left nursing the hangover.

As the tougher federal measures take effect, reports continue emerging of

thousands of staff and students being left high-and-dry, as for-profit providers, stripped of accreditation and starved of federal funding, shut up shop.

In recent weeks we’ve witnessed the collapse of Careers Australia, which in late May was placed into voluntary administration, leaving 15,000 students stranded and 1,000 staff facing unemployment, according to media reports.

The fall came just six weeks after Careers Australia was told it was among 150 private colleges that would lose accreditation under the Turnbull Government’s new scheme, reported Fairfax Media.

Around the same time, The Australian reported the Royal Gurkhas Institute of Technology, a private college that increased its training loans revenue by more than 100,000 per cent in one year, was also facing closure following a series of audit examinations.

It was understood the chain had more than 200 staff and over 1,400 students, for whom the future was now uncertain, according to the report.

Much as it proved difficult to keep track of the full extent of rorting linked to private for-profit providers during the VET FEE-HELP debacle, the precise number of students caught up subsequent collapses has so-far been hard to pin down.

In an op-ed published by The Australian on 6 June this year, the Chief Executive of TAFE Directors Australia, Craig Robertson, made referenced “rumours in the sector” which had “the count of stranded students at about 45,000”.

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Whatever the actual figure, the fact remains huge numbers of people have been lumbered with significant debts, part-finished or worthless qualifications and uncertainty about their futures, through no fault of their own.

On 30 May, in the wake of the Careers Australia collapse, a news.com.au article reported students would get a refund under a ‘tuition insurance scheme’ covering vocational students in the private sector.

In the article, Senator Simon Birmingham was quoted as saying options under the insurance taken out with TAFE Directors Australia were now being worked out with his department.

NTEU has maintained that stranded students, as innocent victims, should have their debts wiped, and the chance to complete their studies. If a tuition assurance scheme offers that opportunity, it is welcome.

However, should the system become bogged down in legal wrangling between the providers, insurance schemes, the regulator and government, students still face the risk of being left out in the cold.

For stranded students and staff facing unemployment, the uncertainty must be frustrating.

But not nearly as frustrating as the knowledge that the whole thing could have been avoided if the Government had just admitted earlier that education shouldn’t be left to the market.

Andrew MacDonald, Media & Communications Officer

Refugees

Quality public education for refugees needed more than ever With the number of forcibly displaced people at its highest in history, World Refugee Day on 20 June revealed the urgent need for sustainable investment in public education to see that millions of children can access quality learning.

Major conflicts raging around the world have driven 65.6 million from their homes, according to the UN Refugee Agency in its latest report for 2016. Of them, 22.5 million are refugees, half of whom are children.

Exploiting the refugee crisis A new study launched by Education International found that nearly half of private companies involved in Syrian refugee education are supporting some form of educational technology, which is often decontextualised from the reality on the ground, in terms of content, form, delivery, and needs.

“It is imperative that we take pause to acknowledge the harsh reality facing millions of people around the world,” said Education International (EI) General Secretary Fred van Leeuwen, stressing that the education of refugees requires strong, concerted, consistent and enduring action by governments. “Although we realise that education is not the only solution to this continuing humanitarian crisis, there is no solution without education.”

EI and its affiliates are encouraging governments to ensure access to quality education for all refugee children and to help educators and education support workers to create quality learning environments.

In Europe, EI has called for the improvement of the regulatory and educational environments for refugees. EI will continue to advocate for: • The achievement of the right to education for all forcibly displaced children, youth and adults.

The report by Francine Menashy and Zeena Zakharia (University of Massachusetts Boston) explores the complex interrelationship between conflict and private sector participation in education through a case study of the education of Syrian refugees.

The research findings reveal the growing role of corporate actors in the education of refugee children and highlight the ethical tensions between humanitarian and profit motivations in the context of crisis and displacement.

According to the research, 144 nonstate actors are currently involved in the education of Syrian refugees in Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, of which 61 are businesses and private foundations, the majority based in the Global North.

Private actors can have different aims and priorities and include not for profit NGOs, but some are explicit and unashamed that they are motivated by the opportunity to make big profits.

• Measures enabling refugee teachers, academics, researchers and education support personnel to resume their profession in their host countries.

• The establishment of education targets enhancing open, democratic, multicultural and inclusive societies.

As part of EI’s long-term work the organisation and its affiliates have supported professional development for teachers as well as local initiatives in nine European countries. In addition to the hands-on programs, five research cases were launched in Italy, Spain, Sweden, Poland and Germany. Collectively, the studies aim to identify human rights gaps in legislation and practices, share potential good practices, highlight challenges in the classroom, make recommendations for education unions to advocate at the local, national, and European level, and seek to promote advocacy with the ILO, OECD, and European Union.

The results are also fragmentation of response. Coordination is deemed insufficient by many stakeholders on the ground, resulting in duplicated, disorganised or imbalanced interventions.

Without consulting local stakeholders, including Ministries of Education, educators and their unions, private actors also lack an adequate awareness of the issues at play for successful implementation of initiatives at a classroom level.

Finally, the collected evidence indicates a worrying growing role of private actors as key decision-makers in the field of education policy, at the expense of democratic, transparent and accountable decision-making processes.

The researchers identified a number of recommendations emphasising the duty of the State with respect to rights of Syrian refugee children including the provision of free quality public education. www.education4refugees.org

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 33

Photo: Donald Trump caricature. Credit: DonkeyHotey/Wikipedia Commons

Trump’s hair raising higher ed agenda Suggestions of Russian interference, military posturing, a sacked FBI Director’s testimony to the Senate Intelligence Committee and speculation about ‘secret tapes’. Given these are among the dramas which have beset the presidency of Donald Trump, it is perhaps understandable that the international media has been kept enthralled by plotlines which wouldn’t be out of place in a spy thriller. Yet while the Administration’s higher profile scandals have hogged most of the headlines, the implementation of President Trump’s agenda domestically has also caused some concern, including in relation higher education.

As the 2014 film Ivory Tower starkly conveyed, the cost of higher education, and associated student debt in the United States has reached crisis point. Internationally, the USA’s higher education system is regularly pointed to as an example of the risks of exposing education to the market, and the inequality and inaccessibility which can eventuate, particularly when for-profit providers enter the equation.

An editorial published by Bloomberg on 20 June this year observed that: “of the roughly 8.6 million US students who receive federal loans each year, one-quarter attend colleges or career-training programs run by for-profit companies.

Such students account for 35 per cent of all defaults on federal student loans, in part due to the collapse in recent years of several large for-profit college chains.”

The editorial continues that under Barack Obama’s administration, the US Education Department made some efforts to impose greater accountability on the for-profit industry.

Andrew MacDonald Media & Communications Officer M@NTEUNational

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“The ‘borrower defence to repayment’ rule establishes federal guidelines under which students who believe they were victimised by fraud can have their loans discharged.

The ‘gainful employment’ rule, which took effect in 2015, requires all for-profit institutions – as well as career-training programs at non-profit schools – to demonstrate

that their graduates are earning enough money to pay back their student loans.

Programs that fail to meet the government’s debt-to-earnings benchmarks risk losing their eligibility for federal student aid – which would, in most cases, put those programs out of business,” read the editorial.

Expectations are now mounting that the Trump administration will seek to overhaul these measures. Bloomberg notes that while the regulations cannot be immediately repealed and that the review and revision process is a lengthy one, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has not committed to enforcing existing rules in the meantime.

An article published by Inside Higher Ed on June 14 went a step further reporting: “The US Department of Education is hitting pause on two of the Obama Administration’s primary rules aimed at reining in for-profit colleges.”

“Department officials said they will block a rule, set to take effect next month (July) that clarifies how student borrowers can have their loans forgiven if they were defrauded or misled by their college.

The Trump Administration will pursue a do-over of the rule-making process that produced that regulation, known as borrower defence to repayment, as well as the gainful-employment rule,” read the report.

“While parts of gainful-employment had already gone into effect, borrower defence was scheduled to become active on July 1.”

The Bloomberg and Inside Higher Ed reports both acknowledge the Obama measures were by no means perfect, with the latter referencing several voices from the sector in support of pause and revision.

However, Massachusetts Attorney-General Maura Healey is also quoted saying she plans to sue DeVos and the Department over the suspension of the borrower defence regulations, which she called a violation of federal law.

“Once again, President Trump’s Department of Education has sided with for-profit school executives and lobbyists who have defrauded taxpayers of billions of dollars in federal loans,” Healey said in the article.

“This is a betrayal of students and families across the country who are drowning in unaffordable debt.”

Meanwhile, Persis Yu, director of the National Consumer Law Center’s Student Loan Borrower Assistance Project, is quoted as saying starting over with the rule-making process “wastes taxpayer money and creates uncertainty for students who are wondering how to protect themselves from being ripped off by predatory schools.”

While both articles suggest the Trump Administration will seek to revise regulations, the lengthy rule making and consultation

process required, means it’s unclear just what the end-result will be. Even under the most optimistic of predictions, it is unlikely replacement regulations would be in place before 2019.

As the complex machinations play out, it appears most of the burden of uncertainty of will be carried by students.

“In announcing the changes to the borrower defence rule... the department restated its commitment to discharging loan debt held by students who were already promised relief by the previous administration. And staff will continue to review pending applications for loan discharges,” reported Inside Higher Ed. “Nearly 16,000 borrower-defence claims are currently being processed by the department, and as I have committed all along, promises made to students under the current rule will be promises kept,” DeVos is quoted as saying.

“We are working with servicers to get these loans discharged as expeditiously as possible. Some borrowers should expect to obtain discharges within the next several weeks.”

However, the article also notes: “suspending the new borrower defence rule removes a tool designed to help expedite processing of those claims. It’s not clear whether the department under DeVos will be open to granting discharge to groups of students or will insist on processing those claims individually.”

Given the uncertainty and length of the review process, the Bloomberg editorial states DeVos has “an obligation” to enforce the existing measures in the meantime.

“For one thing, there are an estimated 68,000 alumni of failed for-profit schools whose applications for loan relief under the borrower defence rule are still pending. As a rule, large-scale student loan forgiveness is bad policy. But borrowers who have legitimate reasons to believe they were defrauded deserve to have their claims evaluated in a timely manner,” read the Bloomberg editorial.

Throughout the lengthy review and consultation process there also remains significant scope for the Trump Administration to further impose its agenda.

As Inside Higher Ed notes: “negotiated rule making gives the secretary considerable influence in shaping the eventual outcome. DeVos will appoint the negotiators of each committee and their recommendations will ultimately be nonbinding if they fail to reach consensus, allowing the department to make the final call.”

An inkling of what that agenda might look like may be present in article published by Buzzfeed USA on June 21.

“When the Trump Administration announced its pick to run the $1.3 trillion federal student loan system on Tuesday, there was one notable thing about the candidate that wasn’t mentioned in the press release: he’s the CEO of a private student loan company,” the article read.

A further, and potentially more significant, sign of what may be to come can also be found in a June 21 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education which reads: “For the second time in as many months, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has suggested that it’s time to scrap the legislation that governs federal higher-education policy and to start afresh. During a speech... to the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, Ms DeVos said the Higher Education Act of 1965 may have outlived its usefulness.”

“For me, and I suspect for most Americans, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to simply amend a 50-year-old law,” she continued.

“Adding to a half-century patchwork will not lead to meaningful reform. Real change is needed.”

Perhaps not quite the stuff of spy thrillers, but ominous nonetheless.

Above: Teachers protesting against the appointment of Betsy DeVos as Education Secretary. Source: Wikipedia Sources https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-06-20/devos-should-stick-to-therules-on-for-profit-colleges https://www.insidehighered.com/ news/2017/06/15/education-department-hit-pause-two-primary-obama-regulations-aimed-profits?utm_source=Inside per cent20Higher per cent20Ed&utm_campaign=767d6dbf62-Breaking per cent20News per cent20Update per cent2020170614&utm_ medium=email&utm_term=0_1fcbc04421-767d6dbf62-197786573&mc_cid=767d6dbf62&mc_eid=15e9919899 https://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/betsy-devos-picked-a-student-loanceo-to-manage-your?utm_term=.jbZdLBrDJ#. qo8ADazgE https://www.buzzfeed.com/mollyhensleyclancy/betsy-devos-picked-a-student-loanceo-to-manage-your?utm_term=.jbZdLBrDJ#. qo8ADazgE

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 35

News from the Net Pat Wright

Twitterography Hardly a week goes by that some elderly sage doesn’t condemn social media for shrinking the brains of the young. Twitter comes in for more than its fair share of the criticism because of its apparent limit to 140 characters – almost as though multiple tweets and embedded links to webpage documents and images were not possible.

True, a single, isolated tweet requires a very short attention-span, but to blame Twitter for shrinking attention-spans in Millenials puts the cart before the horse and misconstrues the way in which Twitter is best used.

Social media in general is often criticised as just such an echo-chamber, but it is the intellectual laziness which leads people to construct their own echo-chamber that is at fault, rather than the social media in which they construct it.

A stream of multiple tweets with embedded links to articles and documents can be scanned over an extended attention-span to identify those articles most relevant to one’s line of enquiry, much like an annotated bibliography. It is virtually impossible to get such a coherent stream of related tweets in the usual torrential feed of unrelated tweets, but greater coherence can be constructed by using the search facility, a dedicated Twitter-handle, or a hashtag (#) for collaborators to include in their tweets.

For some of us, Twitter’s 140-character limit is a blessing – after all, brevity is the soul of wit, as the Bard said. Sure, brief statements can become simplistic slogans, but they can also be neat turns of phrase which expose the nub of a problem or provide a quintessential insight into a complex issue and become a viral meme in political discourse. Such memes are particularly significant at keeping politicians “on message” during election campaigns, as acknowledged by Paul Keating in congratulating Jennie George on the part she played in the “unwinnable” 1993 Federal election campaign, well before the first tweet was published in 2006.

Imagine what Keating might have done with Twitter?

Of course, all this takes some intellectual effort, but the payoff is a better-informed understanding of a topic or issue. This approach to using Twitter is particularly useful in analysing contentious issues or debates – scanning a wide range of views expressed in tweets and their links to supporting articles gives one a comprehensive understanding of an issue, rather than the echo-chamber effect of only ever reading views with which one agrees.

It is possible, of course, to use Twitter unintelligently – one need only bring to mind some of the inane musings of US President Donald Trump to be aware of that – and millions do, but there are thousands of smart twitterati, too. The world-renowned ABC journalist, Mark Colvin, who died recently, was an avid fan with the Twitter-handle Colvinius and used it to check out a wide variety of differing perspectives on multi-faceted issues before producing one of his succinct gems of assessment.

Some tweets nutshell an issue with such potency as to be regarded as a form of poetry – much like the aphorisms of Alexander Pope or the 17-syllable haiku of Japanese poetry. The discipline required to fit in with the form intensifies the content.

Some tweets nutshell an issue with such potency as to be regarded as a form of poetry – much like the aphorisms of Alexander Pope or the 17-syllable haiku of Japanese poetry. The discipline required to fit in with the form intensifies the content.

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Consequently, the twitterati elite are aghast at attempts by the Twitter authorities to relax the 140-character limit and exempt images from the count. This would fundamentally change the character of the medium, they say, making it a kind of Facebook Lite. Such changes might well enhance the Twitter Inc business model with some colour, light and movement to grow the number of followers, but would add little meaningful content to the twittersphere.

As it stands, the millions of followers immersed in the Facebook pool vastly out-number the users of Twitter tools, with a consequent differential in the average IQ between the two news and social networking services. Undoubtedly, Twitter is more demanding to use effectively, so its users need to be smarter – smart enough to use both services through automatic mirroring of their tweets on their Facebook page.

Innovative use of social networking services such as Twitter for educational purposes is growing, even in higher education. There is a growing trove of refereed articles on such innovations in academic journals, particularly online journals, of course. An interesting use of Twitter in conjunction with lecturing displays a twitter-feed of comments and questions from members of the class during the delivery of a conventional lecture. In this scheme, misunderstandings, mis-heard words, missing links in arguments and eureka moments can be shared and dealt with immediately – strictly for those who can walk and chew gum at the same time only.

Other uses of Twitter in education continue to evolve. The basic bibliographic function outlined above can lead students on to the effective use of specialist bibliographic software such as Zotero and EndNote, and the length limitation militates against verbosity. Consequently, criticism of, and disdain for Twitter is somewhat misplaced, and usually comes from people with little or no experience of using it.

Pat Wright is an NTEU Life Member. pat.wright@adelaide.edu.au

Lowering the Boom Ian Lowe

Marching for science, and for our society The March for Science was an amazing development.

It began in the USA as a response to the attacks by the Trump administration on science in particular and evidence-based policy in general. But the problem is not confined to the US, although it is obviously an extreme example.

We have seen enough instances in Australia since the 2013 election of the Abbott Government for researchers to be worried about both funding and treatment of results. The widespread relief when Turnbull removed Abbott from the top job is now seen as a false dawn, with the new PM trapped by the lunar right of the Coalition into the same misguided approach.

So scientists and those who value research took to the streets in large numbers, in Australia as in other countries all around the developed world. There were about 600 events overall. Here marches or demonstrations took place in the major cities. I waved my placard at the Adelaide event, among a few hundred people gathered outside the SA Museum.

The questioner was clearly unimpressed with this answer. It reminded me that the 1976 Fox Report, which began as an inquiry into the environmental risks of the NT Ranger uranium mine, noted exaggerated claims about the hazards of nuclear energy, but went on to question the objectivity of some of its supporters, “including distinguished scientists”. I agree with those observers who believe accidents show there will always be serious risks with nuclear power, but I know others believe they were isolated events that don’t demonstrate a fundamental problem.

There is clearly no objective truth in this area. We are all affected by confirmation bias and tend to see what we want to see when we observe complex and uncertain situations.

The Whitlam view was that educating our young people to the limits of their ability is an investment in our collective future, arguably the best possible investment we can make. Forward-looking countries like Sweden, France and Chile have free university education for that reason...

There was an interesting contretemps after the opening presentation by Dr Paul Willis, a geologist and experienced science communicator who heads the Royal Institution. He made a passionate call for policy to be based on science and hard evidence, rather than ideology. Then the woman chairing the meeting called for questions.

Unfortunately, there is no complexity or uncertainty in the Australian Government’s attitude to science, research and the whole question of higher education.

Before the May Federal Budget, a carefully orchestrated leak suggested that university funding would be cut again, with the expectation that student fees would be increased to cover the shortfall.

Dr Willis had, perhaps unwisely, cited the possible use of nuclear power as a response to the need for low-carbon energy systems, arguing that opposition to its use was not based on evidence. Predictably, a questioner reminded Dr Willis of the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents and said there are good reasons to be hesitant about assurances that nuclear power is safe. His response was to say that the science of nuclear power was solid, there were only problems with human factors affecting management of the installations.

We have already moved a long way from the Whitlam Government’s bold decision to abolish university fees and remove that financial barrier for potential students.

The Dawkins reforms reintroduced fees, softening the blow by calling it HECS and allowing students to repay a debt after graduating rather than paying for their education in advance.

they responded to the government policy by going overseas. Now the Government wants to tackle these issues by lowering the income threshold for repayments and considering ways to recover the HECS debt of those who stay overseas, or even of those who have died. It proposes dramatic fee increases, creating a greater obstacle for students from low-income families.

The whole debate is based on a perverted view of education, largely attributable to the flat-Earth economics which has infected public policy. The Whitlam view was that educating our young people to the limits of their ability is an investment in our collective future, arguably the best possible investment we can make.

Forward-looking countries like Sweden, France and Chile have free university education for that reason, seeing it as the key to economic progress and social harmony to have an educated community.

Those obsessed with individualism and market forces instead see education as a personal investment in our future earning capacity. They believe we sacrifice time and money in the short term to earn a formal qualification, expecting that we will be wealthier in the long-term because the degree allows us to get a better paid job.

There is an element of truth in that belief.

When medical qualifications became seen as a licence to print money, we saw intense competition to gain entry to those courses. But no rational person would do a higher degree in science with an expectation of becoming wealthy. For that matter, very few would gain advanced qualifications and become academics in any field for the money on offer or the poor job security now provided.

If our politicians succeed in reframing higher education as being driven by greed rather than vocation or intellectual curiosity, the future for our universities is grim.

We won’t just be marching for science. We will be marching to retain a civilised society where learning is valued and academic expertise is respected. I have just bought a new pair of stout walking shoes...

Ian Lowe is Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University.

M@AusConservation

It was, of course, predictable that some graduates would not repay their HECS debt, either because their income didn’t reach the specified threshold or because NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 37

The Thesis Whisperer Inger Mewburn

Academic escape fantasies I’ve been thinking a lot this last two months about leaving academia. For some years now, I’ve planned a series of romantic novels set on Australian university campuses, with characters and situations based on my everyday life.

I must confess I’ve only got as far as generating a series of provocative book titles like Unsatisfactory peer review and n=1 is the loneliest number, but my campus romance novel writer fantasy has certainly kept me amused during boring committee meetings. In a small corner of my soul I imagine these books, should I ever get around to writing them, would help me transition into an academic afterlife as a best-selling romance writer. To be honest, this seems like a natural next step after being a celebrity blogger.

I once confessed this dream to a colleague, who laughed and said: “We all need an academic escape fantasy”. After gigging around in the Academic Hunger Games for years, the irony of needing an escape fantasy is not lost on me. I’m a member of the precariat generation who has ‘made it’. Don’t get me wrong, some days in academia are wonderful, but other days... well, you know.

from the university with background IP negotiations, NDAs and all manner of complicated collaboration agreements. We even had the chance to enter the CSIRO OnPrime program, an excellent professional development opportunity that didn’t cost us a cent – in fact, the CSIRO paid us for completing the program successfully.

In fact, he can’t wipe the shit eating grin off his face. When I asked him what was so great about industry compared to academia his answer was revealing: “They can’t afford for me not to research.

Filling out forms or sitting in committee meetings is just not be an efficient use of my time”.

The contrast between this work and my previous experiences with funded research projects is stark and I am still reeling. I have a lot of feelings about it, but the most surprising one is that commercialisation is really … fun?

For years now I have been trying to tell the PhD students I teach that they are too good for the perilous career paths they are being offered by the academy. But many have been so indoctrinated in the idea that if you want to do research, universities are the only game in town. I know leaving academia is considered by many supervisors as a form of failure, so they encourage people to stay, but what happens if research supervisors start to leave too?

The process has brought me into close contact with people who have left academia for the commercial world for one reason or another. The one thing all these people have in common is a happy enthusiasm for their work that, to be frank, is often missing on our university campuses.

For years now I have been trying to tell the PhD students I teach that they are too good for the perilous career paths they are being offered by the academy.

But many have been so indoctrinated in the idea that if you want to do research, universities are the only game in town.

It’s complicated.

I guess I have been thinking more and more about leaving academia because for the last couple of months I have been working on a commercialisation project. I’ve never had the slightest desire to make money from my research, but unexpectedly, one of our most promising research projects hit a dead end. There was no obvious way to take the research forward with conventional money, so I reached out to our technology transfer people to see what we could do. I was nervous to head on a commercialisation path, but what a revelation the whole experience has been.

Finding money to support a commercial research venture was not really that difficult, at least compared with my usual experience of government grant applications. We were offered unstinting support

Take my friend Paul as just one example.

Last year Paul got sick of being jerked around by his university with back to back short contracts offering no long term security. For many years Paul had worked with industry partners to place his students into intern positions, so he merely let them know he was available for hire. They jumped at the chance and he left, much to his department’s surprise.

They shouldn’t have been surprised – you can only treat talented people like shit for so long before they will leave. As I’m fond of saying, good people always have options. The change in Paul – for the better – is remarkable. He’s lost weight, has a spring in his step and, more importantly – he seems happy.

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Universities are now facing serious competition from industry for talent. The machine learning scientists I work with get calls from recruiters all the time. The story of Carnegie Mellon losing their best robotics lab to Uber, is just one example of how devastating this can be to a university’s teaching and research mission. Universities need to really think about whether they are in a buyers’ or a sellers’ market.

They are not the only, and certainly not always the best, game in town for our PhD students, and maybe, for us.

Universities are pushing us towards working with industry more and more – and if my experience is anything to go by, they should be worried. However, I fear I am too far gone down the academic rabbit hole.

Romance-writer-escape-fantasies aside, I don’t yet have a serious desire to leave.

But on those days where I am behind in my paperwork and pointless academic political games seem to be setting off burning garbage fires left and right? Yeah – on those days let’s just say I have new escape fantasies. Especially now I know how fun it can be on the outside. Universities beware: exposing your academics to industry might be just be showing them how their escape fantasies can become reality.

Dr Inger Mewburn does research on research and blogs about it. www.thesiswhisperer.com

M@thesiswhisperer

Letter from Aotearoa/NZ Sandra Grey

To market we go, again: Government legislative plans for tertiary education Education is nothing like chocolate or cheese, as my colleague tells her students, but this point doesn’t seem to have been grasped by the New Zealand Government which is rushing through with plans to further open up the country’s ‘tertiary education market’.

This proposed new law will allow a watering down of obligations for the tertiary education sector to act in the broad public interest. For a start, private companies will be given taxpayer money at a rate equivalent to public providers with no requirement to meet critic and conscience responsibilities.

NZ Tertiary Education Union (TEU) members and friends have spent the last month submitting to parliament on the Education (Tertiary Education and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The Government’s objectives are:

Like over 2000 people who submitted to the NZ parliament, we think taxpayers should be able to keep a strong oversight of where and for what purpose their public funds are spent. Added to this the role of critic and conscience of society is threatened by this proposed law change which further shifts NZ’s tertiary education sector into a competitive market.

• To increase funding flexibility so the sector can respond quickly to changes in student demand and government policy.

• To beef up accountability & monitoring.

• To “ensure consistent treatment of public and private tertiary education providers to encourage performance and innovation”.

Two of these core policy objectives, increasing flexibility and ensuring equitable funding, threaten core mission of universities, polytechnics and wānanga as set out in the Education Act. Included in this core mission is equity of access, developing our cultural and intellectual life, strengthening New Zealand’s knowledge base, and acting as the critic and conscience of society.

How will these aspects of the core mission of tertiary education be advanced by a more market approached?

How will the education mission benefit from a law change which allows funding to be shifted around rapidly to meet government whims (whims that change every three years with a new government taking office) or student demand? How will the core education mission be served by giving our taxpayer dollars to private companies who earn a profit off education?

Quite simply, they won’t.

We will lose oversight of what some parts of the tertiary education ‘market’ are doing. Our public providers lay it all bare in council meetings open to the public. There the public, staff and students can keep oversight of the quality, goals and mission for the organisation. We would not be afforded an oversight of goals in a private company, as they would see that as their commercially sensitive business.

The ability of our public institutions to be the critic and conscience of society, and for staff and students to exercise their academic freedom is already being constrained in New Zealand and other English-speaking nations by tight auditing and ongoing marketisation.

Staff are finding it increasingly difficult to critique their institutions publicly over matters such as the pressure to amend grades to meet government completion targets, or the stress which comes from a sector that is underfunded, due to ‘brand protection’. Vice Chancellors have been known to phone staff and ask them to explain their public commentary. One wrote to critics correcting public commentary academics had made, copying in their managers, and yet another dismissed criticism as coming from a few aggrieved employees. Such actions have a chilling effect on staff acting as the critic and conscience of their own institutions.

The proposed changes to the Education Act will exacerbate this trend. In a heightened market-model of provision our publicly owned universities, polytechnics, and wānanga will need to ramp up protection of their ‘brands’.

These rules aimed at protecting the brand of a tertiary educations institutions frequently cut across the responsibility of staff and students to act as critic and conscience, as the brand must be protected at all costs it seems to many staff.

Finally, the law change will see the focus of education more tightly focused on narrow government objectives rather than the broad social, human, and environmental goals of education.

Over the past two decades the purposes and outputs of tertiary education have been narrowed by governments to ensuring the sector contributes to economic growth and labour market productivity.

This narrowing has negatively impacted on institutions meeting the broader aims of tertiary education such as the social and environmental objectives set out in the Education Act. Our tertiary institutions need to regain their autonomy from government if we are to maintain our strong international reputation in further and higher education.

As such we need parliament to reject any changes that give governments greater ability to change funding mechanisms based on short term goals or student demand.

So given the negative impact this bill could have why is it being pushed through? It is clear that the changes proposed by the National-led Government are based on an ideological belief that market provision is superior to public provision.

Staff know this isn’t true. They know that further marketisation of education will focus providers on ‘profit’ not students.

They know that further embedding of market principles is bad for students, bad for teaching and learning, and as such will further push tertiary providers away from key parts of their core mission such as equity of access, developing our cultural and intellectual life, and acting as the critic and conscience of society. That’s why we’ve made the case that when it comes to education we should #KeepItPublic.

Sandra Grey is National President/Te Tumu Whakarae, New Zealand Tertiary Education Union/Te Hautū Kahurangi o Aotearoa www.teu.ac.nz

M@nzteu

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 39

My Union NTEU Women’s Conference

Women and Higher Education: Refracted by the Gender Lens With over seventy participants, this year’s biennial NTEU National Women’s Conference was the biggest for years.

Almost all Branches were represented and delegates confirmed that they expect our union to be a strong and consistent voice for gender equity and women’s rights across all of our activities.

The Union’s policy is that all our industrial, organising and policy work must be scrutinised through the gender lens. We should not tolerate so called ‘unintended consequences’ and ‘unconscious biases’.

So it was disappointing that delegates reported having to often put and keep ‘women on the agenda’ even within our own meetings and activities.

Shining the gender lens One delegate talked of the expectation that she would deal with any gender issues, but not interrupt the main game in bargaining negotiations. What seems to have been missed by her colleagues is that our core claims seek to remedy deeply gendered injustices. This was picked up in a number of presentations and discussion including that by National Industrial Officer, Susan Kenna who subjected our bargaining claims to gender analysis, as did National Policy & Research Coordinator Paul Kniest on the Federal Budget’s higher education plans.

Women are more than two thirds of university professional staff, but are disproportionally more likely to be in part time and insecure jobs, not by their choice. It is the same story for academic women, where women are more likely to

be in insecure jobs both in the feminised disciplines and even where they have broken through into the male dominated fields. All the research on women’s career advancement in the university sector concludes that insecure work is the major impediment to gender equity, as the differential working conditions and remuneration render largely ineffective or non-applicable equalising policies and practices.

and the impact upon unions’ appeal and effectiveness, noting that lack of reflection and normative assumptions can undermine policies and campaigns. In discussion it was wryly observed that when we are told that something that women want is very difficult or complicated, what that means is that the speaker does not want to do it.

More than half of the NTEU’s membership are women, so showing the clear correlation that the gendered interests of women can be positively impacted by our collective bargaining agenda and outcomes is a key message to women in the Union and the sector. We must never forget that paid parental leave was won by persistent women in determined unions well before any government policy, and that NTEU is recognised as the leading Union in setting the high bar on leave entitlements.

In the plenary I called for the unravelling of Harvester Man. Noting that intersectionally framed critiques of constructs of western knowledge and education talk of shifting the upper class, pale, male from the centre and the need to stop referencing everyone else to him, I contended that we also have a straw man who continues to frame Australian labour relations.

Refracting So the theme of this year’s conference took the gendered lens to the next level and sought to refract the lens by focusing on intersectionality. The opening plenary squarely focussed upon challenges of intersectionality in unions, with provoking addresses from the ACTU National Campaigns Director Kara Keys, a descendant of the Yiman and Gangulu peoples of central Queensland, and Victorian Trades Hall Lead Women’s Organiser Lisa Heap.

Both Kara and Lisa addressed the issues of sexism in trade unions

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Harvester Man

We are still trying to fit women and others into a paid workforce that still has not departed from that laid down over a century ago in the infamous Harvester

My Union Judgement that determined the basic wage, but defined it as that which a man could keep himself, his wife and children in ‘frugal comfort’. While an key win for the labour movement, the consequence of this composition of the basic wage was that it sanctioned unequal pay for women as it assumed single women didn’t have dependants and that married women had husbands to support them. Women were specifically excluded from many jobs including the well unionised trades and this has contributed to the persistence of occupational gender segregation. Many jobs were closed to married women and when they could hold onto a job they lost permanency. This helps explain why it took so long to gain support for paid maternity leave. Women were relegated as a reserve workforce.

Noting our intersectional lens, Harvester Man is also a white man, as the judgement also shut Indigenous and non-white men out of decent jobs and organised labour as it was used with other exclusionary labour, race and immigration laws.

Harvester Man is a convenient straw man for shining a torch onto the very assumptions within which we construct and reward paid work. Much of what we do in gender equity policy and campaign work is about making women fit into structures and practices we cannot and often do not even want to sanction.

Concrete action at Deakin Deakin University Vice-Chancellor Professor Jane den Hollander’s speech reinforced the ongoing frustrations of making women fit into a university structure and practice which rewards (literally) men over women. She is taking this on at Deakin by challenging senior men to recognise and own up to their own biases, while also intervening through concrete actions like including issues of diverse genders, sexualities and cultural backgrounds in senior managers’ KPIs, reviewing bonuses

and loadings and examining biases in the language and practices in job section and promotions.

Importantly, Professor den Hollander emphasised that universities have an obligation to lead the way in making change.

Calling out sexism Dr Emily Gray shared some direct actions we can take to call out ongoing sexism in universities. With Mindy Blaise and Linda Knight, Emily founded the Feminist Educators Against Sexism (#FEAS) feminist collective, which is dedicated to developing interventions into sexism in the academy and other educational spaces.

As Emily noted “a mix of humour, irreverence, guerrilla methodology and collective action make up the tools to interrupt and disarm both every day and institutional sexism within higher education”.

Gendered violence and sexual assault A key focus of the conference was upon gendered violence and sexual assault. Despite decades of calling it out and taking action, the pervasiveness and persistence of gendered and sexual violence in workplaces, including in higher education, remains a major impediment to women‘s and gender rights.

In the plenary, chaired by NTEU National Policy & Research Officer Dr Terri MacDonald, Universities Australia Director Strategic Initiatives Dr Renee Hamilton addressed the student survey part of the Respect.

Now. Always. campaign, with CAPA Women’s Officer Alyssa Shaw and Anna Hush from the University of Sydney Staff Against Rape Campaign providing student and staff perspectives. Jodi Peskett

of the Victorian Trades Hall Women’s team explained their campaign against gendered violence, while Dr Shannon Hyder spoke to Deakin University’s Intimate Partner Violence Research Project, which is investigating the efficacy of workplace actions to support those dealing with such violence.

Ongoing networking and evaluation As usual, we spent so much time in plenary sessions there was not enough time to do justice to the workshops, but at least we started conversations and gathered up many concrete proposals to continue in other union forums. We connected up a group of women in each division who will continue to network together, focusing equally upon academic and professional women, and also keeping that refracted lens open.

Participants are providing feedback to assist the national Women’s Action Committee (WAC) and in structuring the next conference. Thank you to all delegates for your passionate participation and to the staff involved in the conference.

Jeannie Rea, National President To see presentations, readings and more about the conference go to: nteu.org.au/women/conference/2017

Opposite page, top: Lisa Heap (VTHC), Kara Keys (ACTU), Jeannie Rea and Sarah Kaine (NSW Division President) present the “Unravelling Harvester Man” plenary. Bottom: Emily Gray (#FEAS).

This page, top: Conference delegates Louise Fitzgerald (UNSW), Rena Stanton (Batchelor), Elise Howard (JCU) and Donna Cook (ACU).

Left: WAC representatives Kate Borrett (SA) and Sylvia Klonaris (NT).

Credits: Helena Spyrou, Paul Clifton More photos at www.flickr.com/photos/nteu

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 41

My Union Delegates are the backbone of the Union

Associate Professor Ben Wadham Delegate, Flinders University At Flinders University there is major restructuring occurring. This is generating significant trepidation among professional and academic staff. When the management agenda comes down the line people can withdraw. I see the Delegate as being a source of information and support. I approach the delegate role with a sense of community and the belief that we are stronger together.

Workplace Delegates are critical to the organisation of the Union and its members.

Delegates are more than just the “eyes and ears” of the Union; they are the activists who generate engagement with members, and play a valuable role as recruiters.

When management decisions hit the floor and jobs start being disestablished and real people experience real loss, we are stronger together. I ensure that my colleagues are furnished with the knowledge of where staff can get advice and support – the NTEU.

They are also important conduits for information and communication between the Union leadership and its members in each workplace. They are the first union representative many staff will meet when they are employed.

So, lots of conversations, the provision of NTEU information and the clarification of the role of the NTEU are my main daily activities - we can build solidarity and work together but the NTEU staff can only do so much. The protection of our labour rights and protecting higher education as a public good, rather than a market opportunity, is up to all of us.

Over the next 12 months NTEU will be focusing heavily on expanding and developing our Delegates networks at each university. We have developed a new comprehensive Delegates Handbook and resources kit; our university Branches will be inviting interested members to consider becoming a Delegate, with the support of other members in their workplace.

Comprehensive training around how to do it is available.

Jo Merley Delegate, Griffith University As a Delegate I try to inform my colleagues about the Enterprise Bargaining Agreement and about the support available from our union Industrial Officer and our Branch Organiser. I feel very indebted to both of them for the support that was given to me and more recently to my comrades experiencing workplace bullying and other issues.

If you’re interested in getting a bit more involved in your Union, think about taking the next step and becoming a Workplace Delegate. Contact your local Branch for more information.

I look forward to meeting and working with other members and Delegates over the coming years and growing a stronger union movement. We’re going to need to grow in size and power to combat eroding work conditions and the increasing inequity of wealth leading to a more unjust society.

Michael Evans, National Organiser

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

vol. 56, no. 1, 20 14 NTEU

Published by

AUR is published twice a year by the NTEU.

ISSN 0818 –8068

AUR

Australia n Unive rsities’R eview

AUR is listed on the DEEWR register of refereed journals.

NTEU members are entitled to receive a free subscription on an opt-in basis .

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

www.aur.org.au

NTEU 2016-2017 WGEA Report In accordance with the requirements of the Workplace Gender Equality Act 2012, on 30 May 2017 NTEU lodged its annual compliance report with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency. The report is at www.nteu.org.au/wgea_2017 page 42 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

My Union

Some of the NTEU members and staff who braved the rain in Melbourne at the 2017 Palm Sunday Walk for Justice for Refugees. The Union distributed 31 t-shirts for the rally, raising over $800 for the cause (so far). Images: Toby Cotton

Scholarships call for applications NTEU is again offering two scholarships in 2017, the Carolyn Allport Scholarship and the Joan Hardy Scholarship.

The Carolyn Allport Scholarship is available for a woman undertaking postgraduate feminist studies, by research, in any discipline, awarding $5000 per year for a maximum of 3 years to the successful applicant. This scholarship has been created in recognition of Dr Carolyn

Allport’s contribution to the leadership and development of the Union in her 16 years as National President. Applicants must be currently enrolled in postgraduate studies, by research, in an academic award of an Australian public university.

The Joan Hardy Scholarship for post-graduate nursing research is available for any student undertaking a study of nurses, nursing culture or practices, or historical aspects of nursing as a lay or professional practice. The student need not therefore be or have been a nurse and can be undertaking the study in disciplines/schools other than nursing.

A sum of $5000 will be paid in two instalments; half on the awarding of the Scholarship and the remainder on evi-

dence of submission of the thesis.

Applicants must be currently enrolled in an academic award of an Australian public university, and expect to submit the thesis within one year of being awarded the Scholarship. This scholarship recognises the contribution the late Joan Hardy made to higher education and higher education unionism in over 30 years of activism.

The application deadline for both scholarships is Friday 28 July 2017. A decision will be made in late August 2017. For information contact Helena Spyrou hspyrou@nteu.org.au.

For more information: nteu.org.au/myunion/scholarships

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 43

My Union Valuing our Professionalism: NSW GAPS Conference All Branches were represented at annual NSW General and Professional Staff (GAPS) conference held in late May. Of the thirty delegates, many were at their first NTEU conference. The perspectives and experiences of these first time delegates added much to the discussion, and feedback confirms that they certainly took some organising tips away from the conference.

The conference was organised around three themes, which were: • General and Professional staff centralisation and restructuring: their agenda, and our agenda.

• Organising to win: how do we improve conditions and defend what we’ve got?

• Making our voice stronger: building our union.

NTEU National President, Jeannie Rea, opened the conference focusing upon the increasingly insecure nature of general and professional staff work, and emphasised that the scourge of precarious work in higher education is across the board.

The casualisation of academic teaching has been a headline issue because it is so extreme, but what the universities’ own data submitted to the Department of Education reveals is that only two out of ten newly appointed staff are employed on a permanent basis (about three out of ten on an FTE basis). Sixty-four per cent of the total number of staff in universities are employed insecurely.

Delegates also drew attention to the spreading practice of outsourcing general and professional staff work. Rea noted that this distorts the data and hides the extent of precarious work in the sector.

The conference themes reflected that, for many universities, the latest hobby is to attack general staff jobs. The practice of ‘spill and fill’ is a sector wide curse: as well as destroying jobs, it means those that are left have even heavier workloads.

to our bargaining campaign and also intersect precisely with the NTEU’s three year national secure jobs campaign, which is focused upon two core strategies of enforcement of existing Enterprise Agreement provisions and improving these through the current bargaining round.

But it was not all gloomy. The good news shared was that many delegates have experience resisting these attacks, and some Branches have successfully pushed back and retained decent and secure jobs. Most sessions were introduced by delegates who were able to provide local input, which then shaped the discussion.

Swapping stories of successful tactics and campaigns would have emboldened delegates when they returned home and reported on the conference.

The conference ended with a session discussing what resources Branches and delegates needed to organise general and professional staff.

Michael Thomson, NSW Division Secretary

Conference delegates were pleased with the Union’s response to these realities in our latest Enterprise Bargaining log of claims. Claims for secure work are central

We know asbestos kills.

In some countries asbestos is still used extensively. Everyday hundreds of thousands of people in workplaces and communities around the world are still exposed to deadly asbestos.

While some people profit, other people die.

The World Health Organisation says the most efficient way to eliminate asbestos-related diseases is to stop the use of all types of asbestos.

As long as Asbestos is being used anywhere, it remains a risk, everywhere.

Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA is building a movement of people in Australia to join with movements of people in South East Asia in their efforts to see asbestos banned and eradicated. Asbestos. Not here. Not anywhere.

Join Union Aid Abroad-APHEDA, get more information and take action at www.apheda.org.au/asbestos page 44 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

My Union Battling cancer as a family NTEU Tasmanian Division Secretary Kelvin Michael recounts almost seven years of dealing with his son’s leukaemia and the invaluable assistance provided by the Leukaemia Foundation.

The story starts in Germany in 2010, one month into a long-awaited study leave.

My wife Louise, two-year old Lachie and I were preparing to leave Hannover to travel around Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands visiting collaborators and past students, before flying to the UK for the main collaboration.

As the day of departure approached, Lachie had been a bit unwell – pale and listless. We sought medical advice, and the outcome was rapid and unexpected.

Within hours he had been admitted to hospital, transfused with blood, and we were told that he probably had leukaemia, a diagnosis confirmed the next day after bone marrow analysis. Our plans were immediately changed. Lachie commenced chemotherapy in Hannover.

Two weeks later we flew back to Australia for the balance of the intensive chemotherapy (about 10 months). This was followed by two years of maintenance treatment. Lachie was able to start schooling as normal, and continued to do well with no lingering effects of his illness. Still, we visited the clinic at our local hospital on a regular basis for a health check. We anticipated that these visits would stop five years after the end of treatment. In 2016 we were approaching that milestone.

In August 2016, lightning struck for a second time. Lachie had been tired, wan and worried by sore legs. We visited the hospital for a review and blood test, and our specialist told us that Lachie had relapsed.

The next day we flew to Melbourne for Lachie to commence 8 months of intensive treatment at the Royal Children’s Hospital (RCH).

For the first five weeks, Lachie was an inpatient – one of us slept at his bedside while the other parent slept in a small hotel room close to the hospital. After this initial phase, Lachie was discharged and the treatment regime became a mix of short stays in hospital and periods as an outpatient. On the same day as his first discharge, we were very fortunate to be provided with a modern apartment in the Leukaemia Foundation’s Victorian Patient Accommodation Centre, a clean, secure, quiet environment close to RCH for patients/ families from many regional areas.

We stayed for seven months in this apartment, and eventually were able to return home in April 2017. Lachie’s maintenance phase will last for a further two and a half years, but the key is that we are now back home amongst family and friends, Lachie is able to attend school, and we see the local specialist regularly.

Cancers are fundamentally unfair and indiscriminate. Louise and I have been saddened by having met hundreds of children and their families struggling to cope with the treatment and its consequences. Many families are placed under immense stress:

psychological, financial etc. as a result of illnesses.

We are grateful to the Leukaemia Foundation for providing us with well-designed accommodation for the bulk of our time in Melbourne. The Leukaemia Foundation receives no ongoing government funding and relies on the generous support of the community to fund their Vision to Cure and Mission to Care. We will continue to support the Leukaemia Foundation with fundraising efforts, and urge you to consider giving some money to this worthy charitable foundation.

Kelvin Michael, Tas Division Secretary Donate to Leukaemia Foundation at: www.leukaemia.org.au

Above: Lachie, Louise, Kelvin and their dog Blizzard in Melbourne in 2016.

Help families like Kiaan’s who’ve been devastated by blood cancer.

Donate today at leukaemia.org.au

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 45

The CapsTone ediTing

Early Career Academic Research Grant for Women $5,000 for one female academic to assist with the costs associated with a research project leading towards a publication.

The CapsTone ediTing

Carerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Travel Grant for Academic Women $3,000 for a female academic to assist with childcare costs in relation to travel to conduct research or present a paper at a conference.

Applications for both grants are open annually from 1 July to 30 May. Each grant is awarded on 30 June every year.

For more info or to apply, please visit capstoneediting.com.au/scholarships

My Union New NTEU staff Robert Rule Industrial Officer Qld Division Robert Rule joined the Queensland Division in December 2016. Formerly a senior HR and IR practitioner at Queensland Health, Rob’s experience also includes five years as industrial advocate for Together/ ASU negotiating Enterprise Bargaining Agreements with a diverse range of businesses, public sector entities and not for profit organisations.

Delia Lawrie Branch Organiser NT Division Delia Lawrie has been recruited as an Organiser to work across Charles Darwin University, Batchelor Institute and Menzies School of Health and Research.

Delia is Darwin born and raised. As a former Labor politician, she has extensive experience in government and is also a qualified journalist. Her previous union experience includes four years as an Industrial Officer with the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.

Amity Lynch Branch Organiser UTS Amity Lynch is filling in for Richard Bailey at UTS while he takes extended parental leave.

Most recently Amity has been in an Administration and Publications role with the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association (SUPRA) and has been an NTEU member for several years.

Previously she worked with Asian Women at Work as FairWear NSW Campaign Coordinator, organising and campaigning with migrant women workers in the textile, clothing and footwear industry.

Hani Masri Branch Organiser UNSW Hani Masri will be joining the UNSW Branch as the part time organiser whilst Roberta is on six-month leave.

Hani had been working as a Growth Recruitment Officer with NTEU for the past few months. She has also worked as an organiser with United Voice, campaigning for higher pay in the early education and cleaning industries. She completed her undergraduate studies at ACU.

Staff movements Branch Organisers John Pezy and Juliet Fuller have swapped universities in SA; John is now Organiser at UniSA and Juliet has moved to Flinders.

All NTEU members are automatically covered for journey injury insurance.

As an individual you could be paying hundreds of dollars per year to get this valuable insurance cover, but as a financial member of the NTEU, it is absolutely free!

Travel Work insurance Travel Toto Work Insurance

Find out more at www.nteu.org.au/traveltowork

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 47

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For more information, email info@memberadvantage.com.au or call 1300 853 352. page 48 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 24 no. 2 • July 2017 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

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