Advocate 26 02

Advocate vol. 26 no. 2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au • ISSN 1329-7295

Not quite the French revolution

No crisis of free speech But a climate catastrophe arrives ɓɓFrench Review into academic freedom ɓɓInternational student scandal ɓɓHigher education post-election ɓɓBargaining round 7 almost wrapped up ɓɓRamsay Centre at Wollongong & UQ ɓɓWho are the Casualties of Academia?

ɓɓHow healthy is your workplace? ɓɓMillions protest Bolsonaro’s uni cuts ɓɓMajor win for casuals at Melbourne ɓɓNTEU moves to digital member cards ɓɓUpdated Member Advantage website ɓɓRacing towards a climate catastrophe

ɓɓGlobal extinction crisis ɓɓElected Leaders’ Conference ɓɓ73 min stopwork at Monash ɓɓState of the Uni survey ɓɓWomen’s Conference 2019 ɓɓ...and much more.

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Contents 2

Cover image: Writer in chains (Weerapat Kiatdumrong/123rf)

3

Join us on the picket line if you support academic freedom

Advocate ISSN 1321-8476 Published by National Tertiary Education Union ABN 38 579 396 344 Publisher Matthew McGowan Editor Alison Barnes Production Manager Paul Clifton Editorial Assistance Anastasia Kotaidis All text and images © NTEU 2019 unless otherwise stated.

NTEU National Office, PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia ph +61 (03) 9254 1910 email national@nteu.org.au Division Offices www.nteu.org.au/divisions Branch Offices www.nteu.org.au/branches Feedback, advertising and other enquiries: advocate@nteu.org.au

p. 4

p. 22

Editorial, National President

Where now for the union movement?

From the General Secretary

UPDATE 4

Struggle continues for Agreement at Monash

Striking for respect at UNE

5

Round 7 bargaining coming to a close

Solidarity Morning Tea at UC

6

Fighting for a fair Agreement at USC

7

Have your say! State of the Uni survey returns

SECURE WORK NEWS 8

NTEU secures justice for underpaid casual member

Wage justice for academic sessionals

9 Two important wins for casuals at Melbourne A&TSI NEWS Advocate is available online as a PDF at nteu.org.au/advocate and an e-book at www.issuu.com/nteu NTEU members may opt for ‘soft delivery’ (email notification of online copy rather than mailed printed version). Details at nteu.org.au/ soft_delivery 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.

10 Division forums raise members’ voices 11 Preserving A&TSI sign language FEATURES 12 Whistleblowers expose uni’s profiteering from international students ABC Four Corners ‘Cash Cows’ program alleged waiving of English entry standards, double dipping by international student agents, and a lack of appropriate academic support.

14 National Executive statements Inappropriate student enrolments, profiteering by universities and the rights and obligations of university staff to participate in public debate.

Academic and Intellectual Freedom and Freedom of Speech.

16 No crisis of free speech Unsurprisingly, the French Review found no evidence of a ‘free speech crisis’ in Australian universities.

18 Higher education in the election aftermath Higher education and research were not prominent issues in the election, which suited the Coalition fine.

22 UOW fast-tracking Ramsay degree to avoid scrutiny UOW’s agreement to offer a Ramsay degree was undertaken in a manner to avoid scrutiny.

24 The Casualties of Academia A real conversation about the ‘benefits’ of casualisation in our universities

26 Racing towards a climate catastrophe Governments around the world are declaring a ‘climate emergency’, acknowledging that we are quickly running out of time to reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming.

28 One million and one species threatened with extinction A UN report into humans’ impact on nature shows nearly one million species risk extinction, while efforts to conserve the earth’s resources will likely fail without radical action.

30 How safe is your workplace? Is it healthy?

What about the workplace risks we can’t see?

What about the things that don’t directly cause physical injury, but injure our mental health?

INTERNATIONAL 32 Brazil: 1.5 million protest against Bolsonaro’s university cuts Brazilian students and teachers took to the streets on 15 May to repudiate government cuts to federal university budgets.

COLUMNS 34 Political post mortems

News from the Net, Pat Wright

p. 24

35 Women, men and trade unions

Immediate Past President, Jeannie Rea

36 Working in the interest of casuals Thesis Whisperer, Inger Mewburn

37 Coalition creeps back in

Lowering the Boom, Ian Lowe

38 Back to basics for New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Strategy

Letter from NZ, Michael Gilchrist, TEU

DELEGATES 39 Delegate Profile: Jenny Johnston 40 Delegate Profile: Jill ThompsonWhite YOUR UNION 41 New directions for union work 42 Women’s Conference 2019

NTEU Scholarships

43 Bluestocking Week 2019 44 NTEU moves from plastic to digital cards 45 Usernames & passwords

New & improved member benefits website

How to login to Member Advantage

47 New NTEU staff

Obituary: Andy Spaull

Update your membership details

p. 26

20 Changing the rules beyond the election How should we assess the achievements of the ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign? What direction should the union movement take now that the Coalition has been re-elected?

21 Ramsay at UQ: Pecunia non olet

Environment ISO 14001

The Latin saying pecunia non olet (money doesn’t smell) seems to sum up the position of UQ management when it comes to dealing with the Ramsay Centre.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 1

Editorial Alison Barnes, National President

Join us on the picket line if you support academic freedom The Federal Election has come and gone but what has changed for universities? It is clear that the Coalition Government wants to introduce new laws to shackle unions and thus weaken our ability to improve and maintain conditions of work.

The Government has a vision for industrial relations – albeit one it only talked about after the election – but its vision for higher education is less obvious, possibly because it doesn’t have one.

rates for regional students and Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander communities were also disappointing.

The issue of how higher education meets the needs of the Australian community was bought home to me at the recent launch of the Productivity Commission’s report, The Demand Driven System: A Mixed Report Card.

Despite Tehan’s rhetoric, universities currently face an unsustainable funding freeze – effectively a $2 billion cut – that, in the words of Andrew Norton from the Grattan Institute, freezes the operations of universities (perhaps with the exception of Vice-Chancellors’ salaries).

The primary aim of the demand-driven policy introduced by the Gillard Government was to give increased access to higher education to students from diverse backgrounds and address rising levels of unmet student demand.

As the report’s title suggests, demand-driven funding has been only partially successful in meeting these objectives. While the overall level of participation improved, drop-out rates for students who were new to university study because of the introduction of the demand driven system were significantly higher (22%) when compared to other students (12%). Increased participation

In spite of this, and in the absence of polices that ensure higher education meets the current and future needs of Australian society, Education Minister Dan Tehan’s recent statements about the value of higher education fail to ring true.

In a recent opinion piece Minister Tehan wrote that“[o]ur universities train our teachers and nurses, our doctors and engineers, our scientists and entrepreneurs, and drive our country’s research. In this way they contribute enormously to Australia’s success as a nation and, importantly, they help to shape Australia’s culture.”

The Government’s failure to adequately invest in higher education suggests it has a limited appreciation that genuine prosperity comes from a highly skilled society, that higher education provides a way out of poverty, and that it enriches society as a whole.

Instead, Minister Tehan appears to regard universities as a threat, and seems more interested in silencing dissent and manufacturing a crisis of freedom of speech where, according to the findings of the French Review, no such crisis exists (see report, p. 16). Freedom of speech is arguably more imperilled by the raiding

NATIONAL EXECUTIVE

NATIONAL OFFICE STAFF

National President Vice-President (Academic) Vice-President (General Staff) General Secretary National Assistant Secretary

Alison Barnes Andrew Bonnell Cathy Rojas Matthew McGowan Gabe Gooding

A&TSI PC Chair

Shane Motlap

National Industrial Coordinator National Senior Industrial Officer National Industrial Officers Industrial Support Officer Policy & Research Coordinator Policy & Research Officer

National Executive: Rachael Bahl, Nikola Balnave, Damien Cahill, Vince Caughley, Jonathan Hallett, Andrea Lamont-Mills, Louisa Manning-Watson, Virginia Mansel Lees, Michael McNally, Kelvin Michael, Catherine Moore, Kerrie Saville, Melissa Slee, Ron Slee, Michael Thomson, Nick Warner

National A&TSI Coordinator National A&TSI Organiser National Organiser National Publications Coordinator National Membership Officer

page 2 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no. 2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Wayne Cupido Kelly Thomas Campbell Smith Renee Veal Paul Kniest Terri MacDonald

of journalists’ homes and the ABC’s offices than by critical and sometimes controversial debates and protests that occur on our campuses.

Rather than supporting legislation that would, in the words of ACTU President Michele O’Neil, undermine “the right of workers to organise, and for members to democratically run their unions,” Dan Tehan should be looking to protect both academic freedom and respect the role of trade unions in preserving important human rights.

As Michele O’Neil goes on to observe, “…like a free press, free trade unions are essential checks on the powerful in any democracy. Every single worker benefits from the work of unions, attacking unions is another way of attacking every worker’s rights.”

If Dan Tehan genuinely wishes to protect academic freedom, rather than undermine our industrial rights, he would stand with us on our picket lines and support us in our enterprise bargaining negotiations with university managements when they seek to water down the protections for academic freedom contained in our Enterprise Agreements.

As is clear from cases such as Peter Ridd’s at James Cook University or Ros Ward at La Trobe, the Enterprise Agreements that NTEU members fight for and negotiate offer the only effective protection for academic freedom. The Union will not meekly submit to their undermining.

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

Education & Training Officers Ken McAlpine, Helena Spyrou Executive Manager ICT Network Engineer Database Programmer/Data Analyst Payroll Officer

Peter Summers Tam Vuong Uffan Saeed Jo Riley

Manager, Office of Gen Sec & President Anastasia Kotaidis Executive Officer (Meeting & Events) Tracey Coster Adam Frogley Admin Officer (Membership & Campaigns) Julie Ann Veal Celeste Liddle Receptionist & Administrative Support Leanne Foote Michael Evans Finance Manager Glenn Osmand Paul Clifton Senior Finance Officer Gracia Ho Melinda Valsorda Finance Officers Alex Ghvaladze, Tamara Labadze,

Lee Powell, Daphne Zhang

From the General Secretary Matthew McGowan, General Secretary

Where now for the union movement?

With a new Morrison-led Government returned, it’s an understatement to say that the results of the 2019 Federal Election were certainly not what we had hoped for.

Despite the confidence of both commentators and the polls that a Labor victory was all but assured, the electorate had a different view.

It’s worth noting that the outcome did result in marginal swings against both the two major parties, with the Coalition falling 0.6% and Labor 1.4%. The gains were with the minor parties and a number of independents, with the far right minor parties of One Nation and the United Australia Party (UAP) having the greatest impact.

One Nation more than doubled their vote, going to 3.1% from 1.3%, and their primary vote in Queensland was 8.9%, up by 3.3%. While Clive Palmer’s Trumpian campaign tactics and advertising largess did not secure him a senate seat, his party performed better than One Nation nationally (3.4%). More importantly, his preference flows had impact, boosting the Coalition’s count. His ‘investment’ in the election is also likely to benefit him personally, with the political green light for Adani set to flow on to six other proposed mines in the Galilee Basin, including Palmer’s.

attacks on unions in general, and our union specifically. And how do we engage in issues the ACTU and other unions took to the election under the Change the Rules banner?

For over 18 months prior to the election, the ACTU and affiliated unions, including the NTEU, had been working to highlight a range of issues such as wage theft, the problems of insecure work, reinstatement of penalty rates, a lack of industrial rights to organise and represent workers through the Change the Rules campaign.

The electoral strategy sought to replicate the Your Rights at Work campaign that saw the defeat of the Howard Government and WorkChoices in 2007.

We need to build social movements in a genuine and sustainable way, who will see the union movement as not only allies but part of their political voice.

The Greens did pick up support with 10.4% nationally (up 0.2% from the last election), but fell short of the high they had in 2010 of over 13%. The flow on from their preferences were not enough to counter the preferences from a myriad of conservative to far right minor parties and individuals.

Why was this different? In the end, it may be that what was missing from this election was the extent of public understanding of the issues. Under WorkChoices, it was common to hear, at a supermarket checkout line, on a train or at a soccer match, the daily conversations of people who were discovering that their work and conditions were being undermined.

What’s more, they were angry about it. Under Your Rights at Work, widespread grass roots anger was successfully channelled by the union movement and fed into a larger political campaign that gained momentum until it was unstoppable.

It is true that many on the progressive side of politics were blindsided by these results.

Questions that started on election night are still being asked. Despite voters being aware of the internal turmoil of UAP and One Nation they still voted for them in the election. Instead of a resounding defeat for the chaotic Morrison Government, they were reinstalled.

The issues we campaigned on in 2019 have not changed because of the election result. The most positive aspect of the ACTU campaign is and was that the union movement was promoting a positive agenda for change, not a reactive or responsive (to ALP needs) campaign. It put a marker in the ground about the sort of community we want to see in Australia.

There have already been many column inches spent analysing what went wrong.

Better psephologists than us will rake over those coals for years to come. What is more important for the Union is what we do now. How do we prepare for further

While we must review electoral strategy and tactics, we must not abandon a proactive agenda. This campaign has only been prosecuted for 2 years. It took the HR Nichols society much longer to dismantle our rights, we need to commit to the work

of reshaping the Australian workforce with similar commitment.

We can be certain that we will face new attacks on the Union and on our rights to organise and represent our members.

Along with the Ensuring Integrity Bill which will give the Workplace Relations Minister, Christian Porter, the anti-democratic ability to deregister unions, the Prime Minister announced a review of the industrial relations system, and in particular the role of trade unions. He also espoused on the benefits of non-unionised workplaces as being a productivity utopia, where workers know that “…the company’s success was theirs too”.

This echoes the language used by Howard when he dramatically swept clear the industrial relations chessboard with WorkChoices – and was punished by the electorate for doing so.

NTEU National Council had the foresight last year to increase the proportion of the Union’s resources being directed to our Defence Fund. It is this fund we rely upon to take on the most pernicious or aggressive management attacks. We may well need these resources in the months and years ahead. But more importantly, we need to focus our attention on improving our membership levels, and on how we organise and develop our active members.

NTEU will go back to the basics of organising, from the ground up. We must build our infrastructure in the workplace, better supporting delegates to communicate in their workplaces. We must engage with communities, students and other groups, working with them on the issues that are important to all of us. We know there are school children marching against climate change, and young first time voters who supported marriage equality. We need to build social movements in a genuine and sustainable way, who will see the union movement as not only allies but part of their political voice.

Now is the time where, more than ever, the trade union movement needs to stay the course and dig deep. We need to generate new allies and unify support, but we also need to go back to our core principles.

We are union.

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

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 3

Update Struggle continues for Agreement at Monash On June 11 and 12, Monash staff at Caulfield and Clayton took a 73 minute Stop Work to protest the fact that 73% of Monash’s professional and academic staff are in insecure work – the highest rate of insecure work of all campuses in Victoria. The NTEU used the 73 minutes to reach out to students by holding a free pizza lunch protest.

At the bargaining table, senior management has proposed to “aim to offer up to 10 Teaching Fellows per year”. That’s not 10% – that’s just ten places!

Considering Monash is a $2.7 billion enterprise that recently reported a $162.8 million profit, we think that’s a shameful target. Clearly, staff and students agree.

Melissa Slee, Victorian Division Secretary

Right: Staff and students enjoying free pizza during the 73 minute Stop Work Protest (Toby Cotton).

Striking for respect at UNE

University of New England (UNE) members took strike action in Armidale on 27 June.

page 4 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no. 2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Staff are campaigning for fair workloads, secure work and respect in their new Agreement.

Update Round 7 bargaining coming to a close

Assistant Professor scheme (an ‘up or out’ employment track) and provide employees already in the scheme the ability to opt out and into more secure employment.

With the approval by NTEU National Executive of Agreements at the University of Canberra (UC), University of South Australia (UniSA), and Federation University Australia (FUA), Round 7 of bargaining is well and truly coming to a close.

Improvements at UniSA

Power in union at UC Members at UC did an amazing job securing their new Agreement, fighting off an attempt by management to have staff approve a non-union Agreement.

In addition to the wins that have been standard across the sector in Round 7, members won improvements to parental and partner leave as well as a commitment that management review their unpopular

The NTEU UC Branch showed management that there’s power in a union, and that staff trust the NTEU when we say that a better deal is possible. Well done to the Branch and the activists that made it possible.

Negotiators for the UniSA Agreement achieved a number of improvements, including improved rights to renewal for fixed-term staff, an automatic review of long term fixed-term positions with a view to converting them to continuing employment, with improved severance if conversion is not granted. Other improvements include greater protections for staff on probation.

The Branch also achieved other conditions that have been won by NTEU members at many sites across the higher education sector, including 17% superannuation for fixed-term staff from July 2021.

Tough bargaining at FUA Members at FUA should be commended for their efforts during a tough bargain-

ing round, where management did their utmost to strip valuable conditions won

by NTEU members over successive rounds of bargaining. As a result the job security, contracting out, and commitments to preference secure over casual employment remain some of the best in the sector.

No doubt as a result of the Branch’s continued vigilance, FUA remains one of the lowest offenders in Victoria when it comes to the insecure employment crisis in Australian universities. Congratulations to the Fed Uni Branch on a great result!

Still bargaining Active sites in higher education still outstanding are Monash University, Flinders University, Victoria University, University of New England, University of Wollongong and the University of the Sunshine Coast.

Reports are that Monash and Flinders are close to securing an Agreement with only a small number of issues outstanding.

While Agreement remains elusive at Victoria University there has been movement from management on a number of issues.

Bargaining continues at the University of the Sunshine Coast (see report, p. 6).

Campbell Smith, National Industrial Officer

UC Solidarity Morning Tea NTEU members at University of Canberra College (UCC) walked off the job for 30 minutes on 19 June to have a Solidarity Morning Tea. In recent years UCC staff have endured privatisation, mismanagement and redundancies.

More staff were made redundant recently, and in Enterprise Bargaining management’s latest offer included significant pay cuts for many of the remaining employees.

Staff and students are now paying the price for years of mismanagement.

ACT Division Secretary Rachael Bahl told the Canberra Times that this “is another example of the pitfalls of privatisation in higher education. UCC has suffered years of mismanagement and neglect and it’s now students and staff who are left to pay the price”.

The Union is now calling on UCC management to provide a fair and reasonable pay offer, with no pay cuts.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 5

Update

Fighting for a fair Agreement at USC After 7 months of management intransigence, NTEU members at University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) voted for industrial action at the beginning of May. Thanks to a strong grassroots campaign, 80 per cent of members participated in the Protected Action Ballot – a very good turnout. Of those, 91 per cent of participants voted in favour of stop work actions, and 94 per cent of participants voted for bans on overtime.

Since then, we have had three successful stop works and members are currently enforcing numerous bans, including a ban on the transmission of assessment results to

the University. There have been roadside protests and we are building an alliance with the Student Union.

NTEU have had good coverage by the local media including television and newspaper reports on our action.

Our industrial action is having an impact at the bargaining table with one of our bargaining team noting that we have made more progress in the last three weeks than we made in the first 7 months.

Management are resisting our claims for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment targets and casual conversion.

They are pursuing higher contact hours for teaching focused staff and the removal of the related definition of research active.

Management also want the removal of review committees for terminations on the basis of unsatisfactory performance, misconduct and redundancy.

Top: NTEU USC members at the lunchtime Stop Work on 14 May (Lachlan Hurse).

We are hopeful that our action will lead to the finalisation of bargaining in the near future. Our members have resolved to keep fighting until we win!

Left: NTEU USC members at our lunchtime Stop Work on 22 May (David Szumer).

Michael McNally, Queensland Division Secretary

page 6 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no. 2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Above: Shirley Callaghan, NTEU USC Branch President at the 21 May roadside protest (Lachlan Hurse).

Update Have your say! State of the Uni Survey returns During July this year, all NTEU members working at higher education institutions will be emailed a link to participate in the 4th biennial State of the Uni Survey. We encourage you to share your experiences and have your voice heard.

In 2017, about 18,000 staff completed the Survey. All NTEU members are urged to complete the Survey, and to encourage your colleagues – members or not – to complete it too.

Data from the State of the Uni Survey is used by the Union and others to monitor trends in higher education, and to find out what staff do and what they think about their working lives.

In response to feedback about the 2017 survey, this year’s survey has been shortened, allowing completion in about 15 minutes for most participants. nteu.org.au/stateoftheuni

2019 NTEU

STATE OF

THE SURVEY UNI Have your say!

This survey is conducted by NTEU every two years to establish longitudinal information on university staff views about: • The sector

The 3rd biennial national survey of staff working in Australian higher education.

Happening this July!

• Your University • Your Conditions at work • The Union that represents University staff Join us to help build the picture.

WWW.NTEU.ORG.AU/STATEOFTHEUNI NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 7

Secure Jobs News NTEU secures justice for underpaid casual member NTEU has secured $65,000 in back pay, superannuation and long service leave for a casual academic member at RMIT University who had been underpaid.

In 2018, the casual academic member contacted the NTEU about the possibility of conversion after 10 years of casual employment as a Research Scientist. The member had worked an average of 1000–1400 hours per year, had co-supervised PhD students and been co-author on 64 papers.

Whilst the RMIT Enterprise Agreement does not have a conversion process for academic staff, it does contain a strong positive obligation that RMIT will not use casual staff for long term, regular and systematic work.

The Agreement reads: “The University will … not use casual employment in circumstances which require significant numbers of hours per week for the conduct of long term regular and systematic work.”

NTEU lodged a dispute based on an allegation that RMIT had failed to properly employ the member in question.

As a direct result, the member was given two months employment over the Christmas/New Year period while the matter was investigated.

NTEU also argued that the member had been underpaid. Despite the fact they had a PhD and had exercised ‘academic judgement’ in marking they had been paid at the lower ‘other activity’ rate.

RMIT has agreed to pay the member $48,300 gross in back pay plus unpaid superannuation. The member will also be credited 241 hours of long service leave (equivalent to $13,000).

But wait, there’s more… RMIT has accepted that the member has been supervising doctoral students. The NTEU is in the process of calculating how many more hours of unpaid work this has entailed plus an open claim on payment for the ‘Conduct of Research’.

Rhidian Thomas, Victorian Division Industrial Officer

Wage justice for academic sessionals Local NTEU delegates from the School of Culture and Communications in the University of Melbourne are delighted to report that the Head of School has recently approved a significant improvement to the Sessional Examiner Payment Package.

The contract now adequately reflects the time it takes to complete the task of marking a 15,000-word minor thesis: 12 hours – substantially more than the 4 hours budgeted under the previous contract.

What would the talented honours and masters students think if they knew how little the university valued their 9-month effort? Sessional staff, who do the bulk of teaching, marking and meeting with distressed students at the university, are too often forced to choose between being ripped off themselves or doing a lacklustre job for their students.

In the ‘Uberised’ university, many of us feel anxious that if we speak out, we won’t get hired again. But if we do so collectively as a union, we can win.

Ben Kunkler, Branch Organiser

NTEU members at USC Sippy Downs at their stopwork in support for casuals and sessionals (David Szumer) page 8 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no. 2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Secure Jobs News

Two important wins for casuals at Melbourne NTEU’s Sessional and Casual Staff Network at the University of Melbourne secured two important wins for casual and sessional staff in May.

On 8 May, over 70 staff and students gathered for a speak-out outside the Raymond Priestly building where most of University of Melbourne’s senior leadership reside.

During the rally, the NTEU achieved a verbal agreement from the University on two out of our five demands: reimbursing all casual staff for the Working with Children Check (WWCC) $123 fee and revoking the casual email cut-off (which would have cut off casual staff after one month).

On 23 May, the NTEU met with University management to clinch the deal.

WWCC reimbursement All casuals at the University of Melbourne will be reimbursed for their WWCC in 2019.

That’s approximately 4000 casuals who are $123 better off thanks to the NTEU’s campaign.

This outcome follows the NTEU Sessional and Casual Staff Network wins earlier in the year which resulted in six schools and faculties reimbursing casuals for their WWCC. The activists pressed on to ensure that all casuals would be reimbursed.

Email access The University has also agreed in principle that casual employees should not have their email accounts cut off and is actively looking for a technical solution to ensure that casual email accounts will be extended for a further three months from the termination date linked to payroll.

Annette Herrera, University of Melbourne NTEU Branch Committee Member (Casual Employee)

Above: Casual staff demonstrating on 8 May (Graduate Student Association, University of Melbourne).

Further information on how to get reimbursed will be communicated to staff by the University in the coming weeks.

All NTEU members are automatically covered for journey injury insurance.

Travel Work insurance Travel Toto Work Insurance

As an individual you could be paying hundreds of dollars per year to get this valuable cover, but as a financial member of NTEU, it’s absolutely free!

Find out more at www.nteu.org.au/traveltowork NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 9

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander News Division forums raise members’ voices The annual NTEU Division Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) Forums have now been held across the country. Kicking off in the Northern Territory, representatives have gathered at campuses, Division offices and A&TSI education centres to discuss our business on campus and prepare for the annual NTEU National A&TSI Forum – to be held in Sydney from 8–10 August.

Branch elected representatives, together with delegates and other interested members, came together to discuss their working lives and how universities can better support A&TSI employees.

Across the country, discussions were varied with some topics forming common themes whereas others gave a unique insight into the struggles local communities are having due to government policies and ongoing racism.

Lateral violence Of the common threads, lateral violence was a key topic. Lateral violence has been repeatedly raised by the NTEU as an issue, forming part of both our I’m not a racist, but… and I’m still not a racist, but… reports, and being addressed in various National Council Motions.

At nearly every Division Forum, participants expressed how lateral violence and universities continual failure to properly address racism and discrimination on campus had impacted their lives.

Coming from the Forums, it is likely there will be an updated motion presented to our National A&TSI Forum for discussion charging the NTEU to investigate ways to incorporate measures into our collective bargaining and additionally push universities to develop policies and procedures to address it.

Work and social justice issues In addition to this, delegates outlined many other issues such as cultural property and ownership of knowledges, emotional and cultural labour and how it is not properly compensated within the system, universities failing to respectfully engage with local Indigenous communities, rising levels of casualisation and stress.

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As well as these workplace issues, broader social justice issues such as the Government’s racist and discriminatory Community Development Programme, the Adani mine and the national environmental crisis also formed part of discussions.

Connecting with members Attendance levels were mixed across the Divisions, but regardless of the size of the caucus, the discussions were robust and informative.

In Queensland, the Division A&TSI Forum took place on the same day as IDAHOBIT (International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia) Day so delegates posed with a rainbow flag to show solidarity for LGBTIQ+ communities across the country.

In NSW, a good mix of first time and returning attendees provided a lot of scope for discussion.

In SA and WA, Division Secretaries Ron Slee and Jonathan Hallett, respectively, helped co-ordinate what were warm and welcoming gatherings in lieu of having a current Division A&TSI Representative in those areas. Attendees and staff at both left feeling heard and valued.

The Division A&TSI Forum schedule is an important part of the work the NTEU does to ensure that A&TSI business is core union business. Those seeking more information about the Forums, or wish to discuss opportunities for later this year, are advised to contact the National A&TSI Organiser.

Celeste Liddle, National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Organiser

Above: NSW Division forum (N Clark). Left: Qld Forum shows solidarity on IDAHOBIT Day (Lachlan Hurse).

Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander News Preserving A&TSI sign language 2019 is the UN’s International Year for Indigenous Languages and, as we saw in the previous edition of Advocate, some are choosing to highlight the importance of language preservation on campus.

It is particularly important to note that language holds the key to culture – that historical narratives, rules and regulations are often held in languages and it is therefore to Australia’s shame that the worth of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are not seen as part of our overall story.

Over the years, many A&TSI languages have been made extinct via the processes of colonisation. From land-clearing exercises forcing people onto missions where use of traditional language was punishable, to the Stolen Generations, to current manifestations where dual language programs in schools have been continuously discouraged by government – in most cases language which does remain has done so in spite of the aims of this country, not because of.

Rebuilding palawa kani Take, for example, the efforts which have gone into building palawa kani in Tasmania. Various genocidal programs including the Black War and the removal of communities to the islands meant that the last native speaker, according to Wikipedia, passed away in 1905.

Through the efforts of community, however, words that remained in the oral history of traditional owners, combined with language recordings and other sources have been drawn on to reconstruct not only language, but also history and knowledge. The dual naming of many sites around Tasmania partly shows this re-education process. These methods have also been used to various degrees around the country for languages which are under serious threat.

Indigenous sign language As mentioned, though, language is not just words and the retention of these, it is so much more than this. It is the preservation of modes of communication in general and the recognition of the roles

different forms of communication have in culture, history and ceremony. One such mode of communication is sign language.

Highly developed sign languages have existed in a number of Aboriginal language groups for a long time, and are particularly prominent in desert communities.

Such sign languages serve many purposes.

They allow for communication over vast distances, for example. Along with catering for those who have hearing difficulties, they also allowed for respectful communication during times of mourning, or other times when taboos regarding speaking are in place. It was additionally noted by some early observers that some signs allowed for communication over traditional borders due to their similarities. Post-colonisation, as with spoken languages, traditional sign languages have incorporated kriols and adopted words.

Due to the important function of traditional sign languages within the cultural and ceremonial practice of communities, as well as the continuing impacts of colonisation, there is a need to preserve them.

Most recently, it was announced that Emma Watkins – otherwise known as the Yellow Wiggle – had donated $20,000 to assist with the production of a Yolngu sign language directory in a bid to preserve this language for future generations.

On Sydney radio 2SER, anthropologist and linguist Dr Bentley James described this project along with the imperative to preserve Yolngu sign language along with other traditional sign languages. Australia is the world leader when it comes to the rate of language extinction. A lot more work and support is therefore needed to ensure that these knowledges can be preserved.

Similar initiatives have been developed in other areas. In Central Australia, for example, a website created by Batchelor Institute, called Iltyem-iltyem, documents signs from various communities. These signs cover different languages and are demonstrated via videos and posters. In addition to this, resources such as the Eastern and Central Arrernte to English Dictionary include some sign language

gestures encouraging readers to flip the pages to see how to compose the word physically.

Unfortunately, all these efforts end up being at risk via continual governmental policies to assimilate Aboriginal people and sideline culture. Many elders note that sign is used more often in remote communities than it is in the towns, and more often by older people than by young. It is clear that more resources are needed to not only connect future generations to language but to ensure that rather than dying out, the languages thrive in the years to come.

Guaranteeing a future for our languages A&TSI languages have been denigrated and ignored for far too long. The knowledges they contain within them extend back thousands and thousands of years.

The Government must make it a priority to ensure that languages are preserved and/or (as seen in the case of the palawa) rebuilt so these knowledges are retained.

This includes traditional sign languages and the important part they play within so many Aboriginal communities.

This UN International Year of Indigenous Languages is not only timely, it also challenges us to think beyond words and translations into the full spectrum of what language encompasses. It’s therefore a great opportunity to ensure that amazing cultural and historical records such as traditional sign languages have a solid and celebrated future.

Celeste Liddle, National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Organiser

Above, L–R: Sign language for djóngok (mother-inlaw, poison cousin) in Ndjébbana language; yukuyuku (baby) in Wurlaki & Djinang languages; muma (mother) and jachahcha (uncle, mother’s brother) in Gun-nartpa & Burarra languages. (Drawings Jennifer Taylor, graphic design Chris Storey; from Maningrida Kinship Sign poster series by Maningrida Action project, supported by the Centre for Australian Languages & Linguistics, Batchelor Institute, the Research Unit for Indigenous Language, University of Melbourne, the ARC & Indigenous Languages & Arts).

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 11

Cash Cows

Whistleblowers expose uni’s profiteering from international students

Photo: Wallet with Indonesian rupiah. (acarapi/1q23rf)

On 6 May 2019, ABC’s Four Corners broadcast an expose of management practices at some Australian universities that appear to exploit international students in an effort to build revenue. Entitled ‘Cash Cows’, the program alleged that a number of universities were waiving English entry standards, there was double dipping by international student agents, and a lack of appropriate academic support was being offered to international students.

Practices in the higher education sector which seek to profit from international students without taking responsibility for their welfare and academic success are deeply concerning. We’ve had two decades of funding declines and university managements have responded with aggressively cost cutting and chasing alternative income streams. The result is rampant casualisation and an over-reliance of income generated from international student fees.

NTEU has been expressing concerns for some time about this over-reliance. It has long been considered a threat to the integrity of tertiary institutions and ripe for corruption. The Victorian Ombudsman reported back in 2011 “that universities have been reluctant to face problems with their English language admission standards for fear of reducing international student numbers and revenue.” 1 In 2015, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption also identified key problems in relation to university management of international students:

Jonathan Hallett WA Division Secretary

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“There is pressure for some international students to pass courses that are beyond their academic capabilities, pressure on staff within universities in NSW to find ways to pass students in order to preserve budgets, and pressure created by an increasingly competitive market that makes recruitment targets difficult to meet.

There is a widespread public perception that academic standards are lowered to accommodate a cohort of students who struggle to pass. Controversy around cheating features largely in the media and other sources. False entry qualifications, cheating on English-language proficiency tests, essay mills selling assignments, plagiarism, cheating in university exams and paying others to sit exams are reportedly common.

The pressures within the universities are also conducive to corruption. The gap between student capabilities and academic demands increases the likelihood that students will offer inducements to academics in order to pass courses and, conversely, makes students vulnerable to improper demands from academics.” 2 The international student industry in Australia has rapidly expanded in recent years generating “some $30 billion in export revenue in 2017 from the fees and living expenses paid by all overseas students in Australia ($20.7 billion attributable to the higher-education sector).” 3 While it is far from clear that universities are adequately investing in support for vulnerable students, it is clear that they are not investing in sufficient staff. Failure to provide appropriate resources, including protecting against excessive staff workloads, not only undermines the capacity of students to succeed, it also impacts on the mental health and well-being of staff and students and ultimately the success or failure of Australia as a destination for international students.

Particular emphasis in the Four Corners program was placed on Murdoch University with three whistleblower academics from the institution speaking on camera about their concerns. During an interview on ABC Radio a few days later, the Chancellor of Murdoch University was asked whether he could guarantee that the jobs of the three academics who appeared on the Four Corners program, would be safe.

He refused to do so. In refusing to give that guarantee the Chancellor indicated in the interview that despite being the head of the university’s highest governance body, he was not the right person to ask.

The failure of the Chancellor to publicly stand by Murdoch staff members who have raised concerns in public has heightened anxiety for many and reinforced a view that Murdoch is not open to public discussion about its operations. The protection of whistleblowers is a serious public issue that goes to the heart of accountability of public institutions.

ward concerns about the University that they cherish and that I care about too.”

Chris Tallentire, a WA Labor MP followed this up stating, in reference to the three academics who featured on camera, “While they may have raised difficult issues for Murdoch University, their assistance in bringing this matter to public attention and their desire to see this issue discussed publicly must be commended.”

The NTEU subsequently wrote to the Vice-Chancellor and Chancellor demanding their commitment that no action will be taken against employees who provided information to the program.

No response to this correspondence was received.

An all members’ meeting at Murdoch University was called with almost 200 staff turning out. After a standing ovation for the whistleblowers, members unanimously passed a resolution condemning the Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Provost and the Deputy Vice-Chancellor International for the managerial practices exposed in the Four Corners program, their responses to, and denials of the issues raised in this program, and the reputational damage such practices have caused to the University.

The resolution congratulated the staff and students who participated in the program, pledging union support for their defence in the event any action was taken against them, and expressed concern about the potential for the debate to become racially divisive and voiced strong support for international students and their wellbeing.

Members also called upon Murdoch management to end the managerial practices highlighted in the program and instigate a full, open, independent and transparent internal inquiry noting “that this is not the first time that Murdoch University has been exposed to significant reputational risk due to previous Murdoch University management activities.”

The Four Corners episode aired the same day that the WA Government announced a budget boost to secure more international students to Perth with a $4.5 million investment in StudyPerth’s International Education Action Plan. This plan “aims to attract an additional 16,000 students, bringing the total international student enrolments in Perth to an estimated 88,000 by 2022.” 4

While university funding decisions are in the remit of the Federal Government, state parliaments have a significant role to play in ensuring accountability of these institutions. In WA, the State Government has responsibility for the accountability of our universities via their Acts of Parliament and associated reporting requirements to the parliament, and universities and their employees come under the jurisdiction of the state Crime and Corruption Commission and Public Sector Commission.

On that basis, NTEU members at Murdoch have also called on the State Government to conduct an inquiry into the matters raised in the Four Corners program and the international student industry in WA. We’ve written to the State Minister for Education and Training Sue Ellery calling for a public inquiry to explore and provide recommendations on the following areas: • Adequacy of enrolment standards.

• Use of recruitment agents.

• Resourcing and support provided to international students.

• Role of university senates and councils in overseeing relevant processes.

• A cademic freedom, free speech and the protection of whistleblowers.

NTEU is concerned that there may be further erosion of public confidence in our institutions and have urged the government to institute an inquiry at the earliest possible date. The extensive recent media coverage5,6,7,8 highlights the reputational risk that the aforementioned management practices may have on both individual universities and the higher education sector more broadly.

These are important matters of public interest that go to the core of accountability of our public institutions and are of great concern to our members and the broader public. We await a response from the Minister.

Watch Four Corners “Cash Cows” www.abc.net.au/4corners/cash-cows/ 11084858 References available in the blogged version of this article at www.nteu.org.au/advocate

Below: NTEU National Executive showing support for Murdoch staff.

This sentiment was not lost to state politicians in the days following the program’s airing. WA Greens MP Alison Xamon called for such protection in Parliament: “It is also absolutely critical that those people who have spoken up and have effectively taken on the role of whistleblowers are not persecuted and pursued and that their jobs are not put in jeopardy for legitimately putting forNTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 13

Cash Cows NTEU National Executive statement on inappropriate student enrolments, profiteering by universities and the rights and obligations of university staff to participate in public debate From time to time, NTEU National Executive believes that a matter is so important that the policy that guides the Union needs to be restated in the context of the moment.

The wash-up from the Four Corners report was one such occasion.

The Executive felt it important to spell out exactly what the Union’s position is to the matters raised, both in the program and in subsequent debate.

This Executive Statement combined key elements of existing, more expansive policies from the NTEU Policy Manual. It was adopted by unanimous resolution of the National Executive, 11 May 2019.

1. NTEU supports international education.

We believe that an education system with students and staff, both domestic and from all around the world, enriches the learning experience and promotes a greater understanding of other cultures and societies.

2. Federal Government funding cuts over a long period have led to cost cutting by university managements and the pursuit of alternative income streams across the university sector. The result is rampant casualisation of the workforce and the aggressive pursuit of fee paying international student income.

3. NTEU supports an admissions process that ensures all students who are

enrolled have a genuine opportunity to succeed. Universities have a fundamental duty of care to ensure that the resources and support necessary for the success of any student they enrol are provided. Critical to this is a well-funded and appropriately staffed university sector with support systems in place to promote the academic success of all students.

4. Failure to provide appropriate resources, including failure to protect against excessive staff workloads, not only undermines the capacity of students to succeed, it also impacts on the mental health and well-being of staff and students.

5. NTEU believes that the primary purpose of international education is to promote the benefit of education via the lens of educational exchange, international capacity-building and human rights and not to generate income to subsidise the core work of teaching and research within publicly funded institutions.

6. NTEU remains concerned that government and sector policy initiatives that seek to increase reliance on international student fee income expose both institutions and the sector more broadly to unacceptable risk. Further, increased reliance on international student fee income provides an environment in which the exploitation of students is more likely.

7. NTEU is deeply concerned by the practices in the higher education sector which seek to profit from international students without taking responsibility for their welfare and academic success.

8. NTEU is committed to the principle of intellectual freedom – the right of all

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staff and students to freely hold political and intellectual views and values and express them publicly, without fear of reprisal or retribution, or restriction by university policies and procedures.

9. NTEU notes that participation in university governing bodies and criticism of the functioning of higher education institutions, including their own, is not only a right but a professional responsibility of university staff and students as set out in the Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching personnel adopted by the 1997 General Conference of UNESCO. 10. NTEU will vigorously defend any member who suffers adverse actions against them as a result of exercising their intellectual freedom rights.

11. Further, NTEU believes that open discussion and debate of issues, and transparent decision making and governance processes, are key elements of public accountability.

12. Universities must enact policies that provide for and promote institutional and legislative whistleblower protections. NTEU will vigorously defend members who make disclosures in the public interest and suffer the threat of adverse consequences.

13. Racism and intolerance in all their forms – institutional, tacit, and casual, are deplorable and unacceptable in Australian society. Opposition to racism, xenophobia and intolerance in the workplace is a core commitment of NTEU. NTEU Policy Manual www.nteu.org.au/policymanual

Academic Freedom NTEU National Executive statement on Academic and Intellectual Freedom and Freedom of Speech

NTEU National Executive felt it important to spell out NTEU Executive Statement on Academic and Intellectual Freedom and Freedom of Speech NTEU has a long and proud history of defending academic and intellectual freedom in the higher education sector. The only effective protections for academic freedom and intellectual freedom of university staff are the relevant clauses in enterprise agreements, negotiated and enforced by NTEU. Australian universities have frequently attempted to water down protections or remove them from legally enforceable agreements, with NTEU the consistent voice defending and protecting academic and intellectual freedom.

NTEU strenuously defends the rights of members who exercise academic and intellectual freedom, including in cases where these individuals have expressed unpopular views, and notes that freedom of speech includes the right to protest.

Education Standards to incorporate the definition of academic freedom set out by Justice French, and the recommendation to require all higher education providers to have a policy that upholds freedom of speech and academic freedom.

NTEU therefore welcomes the core findings and recommendations of the Independent Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers (known as the French Review). We note the important finding that there “is no evidence, on the basis of recent events, which would answer the pejorative description of a ‘free speech crisis’ on campus.”

To give force to the French Review recommendations, NTEU calls upon Universities Australia to negotiate with NTEU an agreed Statement On The Rights And Obligations Of Institutions And Employees Regarding Academic And Intellectual Freedom And Its Protection, for incorporation into Enterprise Agreements.

Nonetheless, we welcome recommendations that have the potential to enhance the protection of academic and intellectual freedom of all university staff and students.

NTEU therefore calls on the Federal Government to implement the recommendation to amend the existing Higher Education Support Act and the Higher

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

NTEU supports the principles articulated by Justice French in the proposed voluntary code of conduct on academic freedom and freedom of speech and believes that there must be an opportunity provided for all stakeholders to participate in negotiating a binding code of practice.

NTEU Policy Manual www.nteu.org.au/policymanual

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 your own copy of AUR (either hard copy or digitally), please edit the Publication Preferences in your Member Record at nteu.org.au/members Or send an email to aur@nteu.org.au

AUR is published twice a year by the NTEU.

www.aur.org.au NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 15

Not quite the French revolution

No crisis of free speech In late June, the report of former Chief Justice of the High Court, and UWA Chancellor, Robert French, entitled Review into University Freedom of Speech was released.

French had been commissioned by the Federal Education Minister to conduct an investigation into the ‘crisis of free speech’ on our university campuses – a crisis that was generated by conservative media commentary and a back-lash against several high-profile protests on campuses.

No surprise in the results While rejecting the premise that initiated the Review, NTEU nevertheless keenly awaited the final report. Nothing is more important to us than academic and intellectual freedom, and the right to free speech, including a vibrant protest culture, on our campuses.

These are amongst the fundamental defining characteristics of universities and are vital elements required if our institutions are to fulfil their role in a functioning democracy. As our national policy states: “Intellectual freedom and academic freedom are essential defining characteristics of autonomous and publicly accountable modern universities.”

Photo: Writer in chains (Weerapat Kiatdumrong/123rf).

It came as no surprise to the Union that French found that: “There is no evidence, on the basis of recent events, which would answer the pejorative description of a ‘free speech crisis’ on campus.”

Alison Barnes National President

Gabe Gooding National Assistant Secretary

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What was a little more surprising, given the derivation of the Review, was that French identified and sought to address many threats to academic freedom which have been of concern to NTEU for some time.

Enterprise Agreements key to protections In his comprehensive report, French proposed two particularly significant reforms: • Legislative protection for academic freedom.

• A Voluntary Code of Practice for universities to sign The National Executive of the NTEU considered the outcomes of the French Review and prepared a statement in response (see p. 15).

As the Executive statement makes clear, the only effective protection of academic and intellectual freedom is strong clauses negotiated into Enterprise Agreements by NTEU. It was the strength of the Enterprise Agreements that stood between academics Peter Ridd and Roz Ward when management sought to take action against them for expression of views that were either unpopular or that the university perceived posed a threat to the reputation of their institution.

In the most recent round of enterprise bargaining, a significant number of universities sought to either remove or to water down provisions that protect academic and intellectual freedom. In addition, many universities sought to expand the scope of misconduct provisions by seeking, as serious misconduct, conduct that causes a risk to the reputation, viability or profitability of the University, making it therefore a potential reason for dismissal.

Despite the fact that the universities proclaim that they are defenders of academic freedom and free speech, it is perhaps not surprising that they have rejected that call.

NTEU asked them to give force to their rhetoric. They declined.

Code of Conduct French proposed that universities adopt a code of practice on academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus. While having some concerns with some provisions, NTEU agrees with much of this code, particularly the provisions that protect against hate speech.

However, our long experience of voluntary codes of practice is that they undermine legislation and regulation and are completely unenforceable. They are nice statements of intent but they carry no binding force.

If universities are serious about their stated commitment to academic and intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, they would be willing to sign up to a binding code (and coincidentally would cease their attempts to water-down the protections provided in Enterprise Agreements).

While French rightly concluded that there is no crisis of freedom of speech on campus, he did identify that “the diversity and language of a range of policies and rules give rise to unnecessary risks to freedom of speech and to academic freedom.”

It is obvious that without a strong academic and intellectual freedom clause, or a specific exclusion for the exercise of academic and intellectual freedom, such provisions in misconduct clauses could, and would, be used to suppress freedom of expression by university staff.

Increasingly expansive codes of conduct, the breaching of which constitutes misconduct or serious misconduct, are a key risk. These are codes are not the result of a negotiation or a collegiate process, they are developed by university management, and in most cases their underlying purpose is to protect the institution, which can be at the expense of academic and intellectual freedom.

Protecting reputations

Other lurking threats

At least one university management negotiator explicitly stated that the purpose of the proposed clause was to prevent academic freedom threatening the reputation of the university.

While the overt attacks on academic and intellectual freedom are easily identified, there are a range of insidious threats to freedoms that are less easily observed.

French identified interference by philanthropic donors as one such threat, an issue that will resonate with those who are keeping up with debates around Ramsay Centres (see reports, p. 21 & 22).

At a collective level, NTEU does not and will not support provisions in Agreements that reduce the rights and protections afforded to members on this issue. On an individual level NTEU has always, and will continue to, vigorously defend members who are charged with misconduct for exercising their academic and intellectual freedom rights, including the right to criticise their institution.

In the wake of the French Review, NTEU has called on Universities Australia to negotiate a common agreed statement on these issues for incorporation into Enterprise Agreements to ensure that the protection of academic and intellectual freedom is consistent across the country.

Another insidious threat to academic freedom comes from the increasing reliance of universities on external private funding of research, and their dependence on rankings driven by research outcomes. This results in significant pressures on academics to conduct the research as required by the provider, to engage in research only in areas identified by the university as being of ‘strategic significance’, and to publish in journals that will increase rankings. Each of these is an impost on the freedom of academic staff to research and publish.

Commercial imperatives around teaching are also impacting on the freedom of academic staff to determine content, and the way on which it is taught and assessed.

In the 2017 State of the Uni survey, which had over 17,000 respondents, nearly 1-in-3 academic staff agreed or strongly agreed that they feel pressure to pass fee paying students who would not otherwise pass.

This not only undermines the capacity of academic staff to set what they teach and how they assess, it is also a serious threat to the reputation of the institution, the higher education industry and the academic discipline concerned.

Another erosion of freedom comes with the increasing use of non-disclosure agreements by universities when staff leave the institution or when a complaint is settled or resolved. Preventing people speaking out on issues of complaint or exposing the outcome of a complaint is the antithesis of free speech. The hypersensitivity of modern universities to reputational risk and their obsession with brand management comes at the expense of accountability, which can often be dependent on the actions of whistleblowers and those expressing their academic and intellectual freedom rights to criticise.

Right to protest For NTEU a significant omission in the report is the lack of balance between the rights of those who may come to campus and express views that are unpopular with some (which is clearly expressed in the report), and the right of those to protest against those views (which was the stated trigger for the Review). NTEU is a strong supporter of the right to protest on campus and will oppose initiatives that are designed to shut it down.

As the Chancellors and Vice-Chancellors stand-off about this issue – with the Chancellors Committee publicly backing the legislative definition and the voluntary code, and the Vice-Chancellors, through their representative Universities Australia rejecting the proposal – this story obviously has a long way to run.

For our part, NTEU will continue to promote and act to give force to our policy quoted in the Review, that staff and students have the right to freely hold political and intellectual views and values and to express them publicly without fear of reprisal or retribution or restriction by university policies and procedures.

Eventually, perhaps, the Vice-Chancellors will come to the party and agree to give force to their policies by agreeing to uniform enforceable rights for all staff and students.

A longer version of this article appeared in The Australian.

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Federal Election 2019

Higher education in the election aftermath

While the ALP and Greens had well-developed and strongly supported policies, higher education and research were not prominent issues in the 2019 Federal election. This suited the Coalition, who were no doubt happy to keep higher education issues below the policy parapets.

Photo: Democracy sausage (Wikimedia Commons).

While the ALP was committed to restoring demand driven funding for Commonwealth supported places (CSPs) and the Greens were promising to abolish tuition fees for all undergraduate students, the Government remained silent on higher education. This silence, however, should not be interpreted as the Government lacking a policy agenda.

Paul Kniest Policy & Research Coordinator

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In the months leading up to the election, the Government initiated a number of reviews into various aspects of tertiary education, including vocational education and training, regional education strategy, performance based funding, provider classifications, the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) and academic freedom and free speech on university campuses.

There is, of course, also the issue of the continuing funding freeze, which it was anticipated would end with a change of government.

Therefore, it would be a mistake to think that the next twelve months will be a relatively quiet time in terms of higher education. The Government’s responses to these reviews will not only define its policy agenda, they may also have profound impacts on the sector.

For example, on June 15 the newly re-appointed Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, wrote an opinion piece in The Australian urging universities to implement Justice Robert French’s model code for the protection of free speech and academic freedom.

The Minister is also considering amendments to TEQSA standards and the Higher Education Support Act 2013 as recommended by French.

Funding freeze The biggest and most immediate challenge confronting higher education with the re-election of the Coalition Government will without a doubt be the continuation of the freeze on funding and the introduction of performance based funding. The funding freeze means the level of Commonwealth Grants Scheme (CGS) funding for each university will be capped at 2017 levels in 2018 and 2019 , with funding to ‘grow’ in line with the 18–64 year old population from 2020.

NTEU’s previous analysis shows that the impact of the freeze largely depends on how universities respond in relation to the number of CSP enrolments. At the extremes, universities could respond by: • Increasing CSP enrolments resulting in very significant cuts to real funding per CSP, or • Reducing CSP enrolments resulting in otherwise eligible students missing out on a university place or unmet demand.

Performance based funding The so-called ‘growth’ in CGS funding from 2020 (in line with 18–64 year old population) is to be distributed between universities on the basis of, yet to be finalised, performance based criteria. Prof Paul Wellings (Vice-Chancellor, University of Wollongong) has been chairing a review of performance based funding. A final model is expected to be released in coming months.

In addition to our broader concerns about the choice and interpretation of performance indicators, and the perverse behaviour such incentives might encourage, there a number of other more immediate issues with the proposal. Firstly, this socalled ‘growth’ funding will be insufficient to cover increasing costs (the freeze means there is no indexation of grants) let alone any increase in CSP load.

Secondly, and by its very nature, performance based funding, must result in some universities being relatively better-off than others. That is, there will be winners and losers. Being a winner in this sense probably means being able to keep your head above water, while being loser will mean, all other things being equal, having to make considerable cost savings, which inevitably will include reductions in staffing.

Productivity Commission assessment of demand driven funding An interesting development in the debate around university funding was the release on Monday 17 June 2019 of a productivity Commission report entitled, The Demand

Driven University System: A mixed report card, which concluded that while, overall, the demand driven system succeeded in increasing the number of students and made progress in improving equity of access, there are many additional students entering university who ill-prepared and struggling academically.

To overcome some of these issues, the report suggests that further policy consideration be given to: • Better preparing school students to succeed at university.

• Addressing reasons why equally qualified students growing up in regional or remote areas have considerably lower university participation rates than their metropolitan peers.

• Improving additional academic and pastoral support for the increasing number of students at risk of dropping out.

• Promoting viable alternatives to university in employment and/or vocational education and training.

Academic Freedom and Free Speech on campus The Minister for Education and Training, Dan Tehan, released Justice Robert French’s review into Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers on 6 April 2019 (see report, p.16).

While French concluded that there was no crisis of free speech on Australian university campuses, he nonetheless recommended the adoption, on a voluntary basis, of a model code to protect academic freedom and free speech. He also suggested minor amendments to the Higher Education Support Act 2003 and the Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) 2015.

As noted above, Tehan has been actively encouraging universities to consider adopting French’s recommendations.

Provider Classifications and the Australian Qualification Framework The Government appointed Professor Peter Coaldrake and Peter Noonan to undertake reviews of TEQSA’s Provider Classifications Standards and the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) respectively. The Government’s response to these reviews, expected sometime in the latter half of 2019, could potentially have profound implication for higher education.

such a category, the Government might be attracted to such a proposition as way introducing greater contestability and reduced costs in the delivery of higher education qualifications.

For example, the newly established Independent Tertiary Education Council of Australia (ITECA) – formerly the Australian Council of Private Education and Training (ACPET) – has made it clear that they will be lobbying for their members to have greater access to public subsidies, or as they put it, an ‘agnostic’ funding system.

One issue raised in the context of the Noonan AQF review was the status of so-called micro-qualifications. The NTEU’s response enphasised the importance of ensuring that any changes to AQF not further compromise institutional autonomy. We also highlighted the substantially increased risk of including a large number of small, low skill, stand-alone micro-credentials (provided by an array of providers, many of whom will not be education providers per se) being recognised by the AQF. The Government might be attracted to both the introduction of teaching-only universities and the inclusion of micro-credentials as a way of lowering costs.

NTEU will maintain our position that education is far too important to be left to market, and as such will fight against any such policies.

Review of Vocational Education and Training In December 2018, the Government appointed Steven Joyce (former NZ minister with responsibility for vocational education and training) to undertake a review of Australia’s VET system. The Government response to the review was included in the 2019-20 Budget handed down on 6 April 2019.

Regional Education Strategy The Regional Education Strategy report is due to be published by the end of June. To date, the Government has responded to the plight of regional universities as result of its funding freeze by allocating regionally based campuses additional CSPs. We anticipate the Government’s response will include (relatively modest) measures aimed at providing additional resources to regional universities and financial incentives to encourage greater participation by regional/remote students.

One of the critical questions being addressed by the Coaldrake review is whether Australia should introduce a category of ‘teaching-only’ university. While the NTEU and universities more generally are strongly opposed to the creation of

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 19

Federal Election 2019

Changing the rules beyond the election How should we assess the achievements of the ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign? Was it a waste of time or a bold transformative agenda?

What direction should the union movement take now that the Coalition has been re-elected?

The ACTU’s Change the Rules campaign hoped to deliver a change of government at the May 2019 federal election as a precondition for reshaping Australia’s restrictive and unbalanced industrial relations laws. Instead, the Morrison Coalition Government was reinstated with a (slightly) increased majority. Unions now face a hostile environment, with employers calling for further restrictions on unions alongside an emboldened conservative government and a stagnant economy.

This has led some to claim that the Change the Rules campaign was a waste of union time and resources. Former ACTU Assistant Secretary, Tim Lyons, for example, is reported to have claimed that ‘there’s absolutely nothing to show for it’.

In one sense, such reactions are understandable as the campaign seemed to fall flat at its first hurdle.

And its limitations are readily apparent.

The campaign was targeted almost exclusively at union members.

Whether it was persuasion calls, rallies or social media, the campaign spoke to a relatively small social base. On the other hand, the ACTU adverts were mostly indistinguishable from Labor’s campaign ads.

But in our rush to examine critically the Change the Rules campaign we risk missing its significant achievements. The ACTU campaign has brought about a significant shift in public debate. Concepts such as economic inequality, wage theft, and precarious employment are now front and centre in the mainstream media. The ALP too has shifted on industrial relations, committing to limits on casualisation, the possibility of industry-wide bargaining and removing employers’ ability to terminate enterprise agreements, among many other changes. All of this is testament to the success of the ACTU’s bold new focus.

But where to from here? It would be a giant leap backwards if the election result led the ACTU to abandon the Change the Rules campaign altogether. After years of ACTU leaders presiding over the slow decline of the labour movement, the election of Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil, and the campaign they’ve spearheaded, have been a breath of fresh air. Nonetheless, we should learn the lessons from the federal election and chart a new course in what is likely to be a challenging environment for unions.

Whereas the Change the Rules campaign so far has been almost exclusively political in its orientation, the focus now needs to shift. Of course, political campaigning and lobbying is essential to achieve regulatory change. But for this to be effective, unions need to build their power, and this means increasing membership density.

The current system rewards free-riding, so we need to give people a good reason to join their union. We must be assertive with our demands and use what leverage we have to win better conditions. We should challenge employers in areas where they are vulnerable and tap into issues that are deeply and widely felt among staff.

For the NTEU, there are three areas we can most usefully focus on.

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First, we need to continue to build support for changes to the regulations that govern our work. Many changes are needed to have a fairer system that is less biased in favour of employers. But the most important of these is undoubtedly the right to take industrial action, especially to withdraw labour, as this is the fundamental source of trade union power. Other areas where we need to continue to build political support are curbing the power of employers to terminate Enterprise Agreements, stronger limitations on the use of insecure forms of employment, and making it more difficult for free-riders to benefit from the hard work and sacrifices of union members whilst not contributing themselves.

Second, the NTEU should support unions who face penalties for transgressing the industrial relations rules in the course of acting in the best interests of their members. Solidarity between unions will be crucial even just in holding the line against a hostile government and aggressive employers. And history is littered with examples of bad laws changing when people refuse to obey them.

Third, the NTEU needs to prioritise the difficult and resource intensive task of workplace organising. By and large we haven’t integrated organising systematically into our work as a union. Organising requires lots of one-on-one conversations with members and non-members. It requires not only skilled organisers, but also training and support for rank and file delegates.

Most people join unions when they believe the union offers them the best chance of making their working life better.

This means we need to find out what issues are deeply and widely felt and then work collectively with our members to win on those issues. It isn’t easy, but ultimately this is the only way to rebuild our power, which is a pre-requisite for changing the rules on industrial relations.

Damien Cahill, Assistant Secretary, NTEU NSW Division

Left: NTEU members at a Change the Rules rally in Melbourne, 2018 (Paul Clifton).

Ramsay Centre

Ramsay at UQ Pecunia non olet The University of Queensland’s (UQ) new motto could be the Latin saying pecunia non olet – money doesn’t smell; it would sum up the position of UQ management when it comes to dealing with the Ramsay Centre.

As previously reported in the Advocate, in October 2018 the management of UQ put forward a formal expression of interest in hosting a Ramsay Centre for the Study of Western Civilisation. In January–February 2019, while most students and many staff were on leave or otherwise engaged (for example, in research or writing grant applications), the management of UQ opened a formal online consultation process, which lasted for 3-4 weeks.

Staff complained to the NTEU UQ Branch that the answer boxes on the website were limited, both in terms of the questions asked and the room available for responses. UQ staff asked whether the consultation was genuine, or whether UQ management had already decided on what the outcome of the process would be.

UQ management has repeatedly stated that they would be requiring the Board of the Ramsay Centre to observe certain “red lines”: respect for academic freedom and institutional autonomy. UQ management also stated that any Ramsay program would have to go through the normal processes for course and program approval.

During the ‘consultation process’, UQ NTEU members attended a meeting which resolved by an overwhelming majority vote (one member against) to campaign against the Ramsay Centre at UQ. On 8 April, a petition was delivered to the office of the Executive Dean of the Faculty of

Humanities and Social Sciences (HASS) at UQ, signed by the majority of staff from the HASS Faculty and the Law School.

Around a third of petition signatories were casual academics teaching in the HASS Faculty, who rejected any suggestion that the Ramsay Centre was a suitable response to the extent of casualisation of teaching in the Faculty. It had been foreshadowed that the HASS Faculty would host the Ramsay Centre, with some teaching into the program from the Law School.

The day after the petition revealing that a majority of staff in the Faculty opposed the Ramsay Centre, a meeting of the HASS Faculty Board of Studies took place (on 9 April), which overwhelmingly voted not to approve the proposed curriculum of the Ramsay-sponsored Extended Major in ‘Western Civilisation’.

In the following weeks, academics who had been tasked with developing course descriptions for the Ramsay program undertook further ‘consultation meetings’ with various groups in the HASS Faculty.

On Monday 20 May, a second, extraordinary meeting of the HASS Board of Studies was convened for the purpose of approving the Ramsay degree. Despite a sense that the Faculty was under pressure from management to pass the program, the meeting voted once again not to approve the Ramsay curriculum. The HASS Faculty Board of Studies plays an essential academic governance role, acting as the most expert quality control board for new programs and courses in the Faculty.

Unfortunately, the following Friday afternoon, staff in the HASS Faculty received an email from the Executive Dean stating that the proposed curriculum had undergone

changes in response to feedback, and that, while she acknowledged the concerns of staff, she had to consider the ‘broader strategic concerns’ of the Faculty and indicated that she would be recommending the Ramsay program to the Committee for Academic Programs and Policies of the University-wide Academic Board.

A student general meeting convened by the UQ (student) Union on 29 May, and attended by some 450 students, voted overwhelmingly against the university hosting a Ramsay Centre. No more than 30 of the 450 present voted for the Ramsay Centre. This was the first student general meeting held since historic votes on the 4ZZZ eviction from the UQ Union complex in 1988 and the anti-apartheid protests against the Springbok tour in 1971.

At the time of writing, the Ramsay proposal was due to go to the UQ Academic Board for consideration. By this time, UQ management’s assurances are starting to look threadbare. It is hard to see how UQ can maintain its institutional independence when it has already agreed to allow a Ramsay representative to buy a seat on selection committees. It is hard to see how academic autonomy can be guaranteed when the politicians (and retired politicians) on the Ramsay Board can withdraw funding if staff do not behave themselves politically or ideologically.

And the commitment to normal academic approval processes is looking shaky when the principal expert quality control body of the relevant Faculty can have its vote against Ramsay set aside – twice.

Andrew Bonnell, Branch President, UQ

Above: Roman coin (pxhere).

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 21

Ramsay Centre

UOW fast-tracking to avoid scrutiny

Photo: Judith Beheading Holofernes, Caravaggio, 1598–99, Italy (Wikimedia Commons).

On 18 December 2018, University of Wollongong (UOW) staff and students woke to the news that UOW had signed an MOU with the Ramsay Centre to offer a Bachelor Degree in Western Civilisation. We were completely blindsided by the announcement.

Some of us knew (or suspected) that UOW was likely to have submitted an expression of interest to the Ramsay Centre for the big dollars, but none of us in our wildest dreams imagined that the announcement would be made as a fait accompli without any consultation with academic staff.

The news had been sent to us via a latenight email from the Vice-Chancellor the night before, but we were particularly shocked that it was through the news media, not our own management, that we first were informed – and only days before Christmas. This was a time when academics were preparing to take leave or were away on research trips; professional staff were winding up their work for the break; and the news media were starting to wrap up the year as well.

UOW NTEU Branch was inundated with media requests. We deferred our holiday plans and made our feelings very clear.

The secrecy with which management had decided such a major and controversial issue was entirely unacceptable and in our view the timing was hardly accidental.

Georgine Clarsen School of Humanities & Social Inquiry University of Wollongong

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Kelly Thomas National Senior Industrial Officer

We saw this as an attempt to pre-empt any action on the part of UOW staff, who management must have been very aware were likely to have very strong views on the issues.

After all, ANU staff were celebrating their VC, Brian Schmidt, who had turned down the Ramsay ‘opportunity’ and University of Sydney staff had been very clear in their opposition to a Ramsay degree there.

Fast-tracking When the VC announced on 16 February 2019, again while most of us were away, that he had taken it upon himself to approve the proposed curriculum via a ‘fasttrack process’, it became even more clear to us that management were determined to exclude staff from involvement in a collegial decision-making processes.

Most of us were not even aware that there was a fast -track process, as it had previously only been used for minor, non-controversial, changes in courses – for example to re-jig an existing course, to extend an existing course to a new location, to delete a course, to adjust a course to meet professional accreditation etc.

When we looked into it, we discovered that there was a fast-track process which seemed to by-pass the usual processes of academic committee review under certain circumstances and with specified limitations. In our view, however, in no way did those conditions apply to the proposed Ramsay degree.

#Uniontown UOW has a lively and active NTEU Branch.

We had been in negotiations with management for the past year on our new Enterprise Agreement. Management had demonstrated a hard, managerialist approach to us and our negotiations.

They have tried to stand in the way of our rights to speak with our colleagues and to meet freely. Two very successful strikes in October (the first on our campus for more than 10 years) had swung the balance at the table by the end of the year.

We had a fantastic media campaign, with the local newspaper, radio stations and TV giving us plenty of opportunity to talk about the huge levels of job insecurity at UOW. This message is one that resonates in Wollongong: #Uniontown we call our city.

There is a long and ongoing history of community activism here. The steelworkers, miners and dockworkers were also in dispute with their managements and the South Coast Labour Council organised a rally, where the whole district came together to support each other – teachers, nurses, childcare, public service and community workers as well – at a great Change the Rules rally.

of review, and we won significant gains for both Professional and Academic Staff, especially in our first priority – in conversions out of insecure work.

Mounting anti-Ramsay protests The activism around our Enterprise Agreement negotiations and the media contacts it had generated were there, ready to go, when we heard the news of the secret Ramsay deal. We mounted a very active campaign from the day of the announcement, which continued over the break until the new teaching year started.

We organised a petition of 3,000 signatures, students and staff rallied outside University Council and Academic Senate meetings. Brave academic staff put a motion to Academic Senate objecting to the use of the fast-track process, which won with a large majority.

Seventy-three per cent of permanent staff members in the faculty of Law Humanities and the Arts signed an open letter to the Vice-Chancellor and the Executive Dean of the Faculty that we object to the partnership with the Ramsay Centre, to the use of the fast-track process, and that we had not been consulted.

Finally, and most importantly the NTEU filed a case with the Supreme Court of NSW challenging the VC’s use of the fasttrack process.

Court action The case alleged that the VC’s decision to use the fast-track approval process to approve the Ramsay degree was unlawful. That unlawfulness arose, in part as a result of the complete failure of UOW to speak with its staff, and importantly, the Academic Senate.

NTEU saw the actions of UOW and its VC as being entirely against the notion of academic governance, and the importance of integrity in academic decision-making. The Union considers that UOW’s actions were an example of the erosion of the importance of involving academics in decisions affecting the university community.

Once the action was filed, the case has run through the usual procedural steps,

including for NTEU to file our evidence in support of the case.

The level of support from UOW staff and students in telling their story was striking.

Never underestimate the degree of care and support NTEU members have for ensuring the decisions of their universities are academically sound and of the highest quality. The NTEU unequivocally thanks all those who gave their time and support to the case in speaking up as a witness in the proceedings.

Degree approved Following the filing of the NTEU’s evidentiary case, UOW’s University Council took the unusual step of approving the Ramsay degree. The public message from UOW was it was necessary for Council to step in to provide the ‘certainty’ in relation to the approval of the degree. The suggestion is that the litigation created sufficient levels of doubt regarding the VC’s use of the fasttrack approval.

However, one has to question the UOW’s reliance on University Council as a decision-making body in the circumstances of this case. It beggars belief that UOW would seek to use another unusual decision-making process in the context of such strong opposition from its staff.

NTEU members remain concerned that UOW would take such an extreme step to avoid putting the Ramsay degree through its usual, rigorous, calibrated process of academic decision-making.

Once again, UOW has disregarded the university community and have made it clear that the university community’s views are not wanted here. And ultimately, that is what academic governance is about: having a voice, and having that voice heard.

Georgine Clarsen in NTEU University of Wollongong Branch President On 5 July, NTEU withdrew the proceedings in the Supreme Court. For details please refer to the media release: https://bit.ly/2L7fqm0

Below: NTEU UOW members protest against the Ramsay Centre at Academic Senate.

That #Uniontown energy was decisive in our bargaining and has since seen us into a good Enterprise Agreement, now being finalised. Management were unable to strip out the conditions they were determined to see go, for example committees

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 23

The Casualties of Academia

A real conversation about the ‘benefits’ of casualisation in our universities In August last year, the NTEU reported that two in three people employed by Australian universities do not have secure employment. In other words, over half the work conducted in universities is undertaken by employees who do not have an ongoing contract. Of these people, 43% are employed on a casual basis, while 22% are engaged on a fixed-term contract. To put it in perspective, only one-third of university staff have secure employment, while three in four Australian employees enjoy the benefits of secure work and entitlements.

Photo: First aid kit (belchonock/123rf).

Therefore, if you or someone you know works at a university, your job, or their job, is most likely precarious.

If you’re a casual academic, you’re an expert first of all in precarity.

Dr Kate Cantrell School of Humanities & Communication USQ M @kate_cantrell

Kelly Palmer School of Communication QUT

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As a casual, you have no annual leave, no holiday leave, no research leave, no carer’s leave, no domestic violence leave, and, less critically, since you’re never unwell, no sick leave. You don’t have access to funding for conference fees or travel, or any form of professional development.

There’s no remuneration for designing and re-designing teaching materials and curricula; no compensation for attending meetings, organising readings, digitalising resources, peer-reviewing articles, replying to e-mails, or hosting negotiations with Jenny from Payroll.

You’re not reimbursed for mentoring undergrads, supervising projects, reviewing coursework, editing proposals, or promoting your faculty in O-Week. And you can forget those long, drawn-out hours spent on cross-marking and double marking and moderating. You don’t even have access to the photocopier. And at the end of semester, when your email account is deactivated, the swipe access to your office will expire, and you won’t be able to borrow books from the library. And by office, we mean the kitchenette where your hot-desk is located when the space is free.

So, what do you do?

First of all, you don’t complain. You earned this job through months of unpaid labour, years of study, and the gradual accumulation of a lifetime debt. But the honour of a casual appointment is bestowed upon

you, and later stripped away from you, in a popularity contest judged at the discretion of a unit coordinator.

To be given casual work is a gift. But no one chooses to be casual. Saying ‘yes’ to a casual job is not really a choice when your choices are: casual job or no job at all.

Choosing between a bad option and a worse option, as we see time and again in politics, is a contextual dilemma: one that reflects the unavailability of better options and more effective forms of objection, and one that, by extension, poses serious questions about the assumption that freedom of choice is synonymous with freedom itself.

So, imagine your surprise when in April The Conversation published an article1 about the ‘benefits’ and ‘challenges’ of casualisation in academia.

Let’s start with the benefits According to the article’s authors (three senior academics who are presumably tenured), many casuals ‘enjoy the flexibility of working across different institutions’.

If you’re a casual, you work multiple overlapping contracts at different universities because you need to eat, and unfortunately, the hours that you’re paid at Uni A are not enough to cover your groceries for the week, nor is the wage you receive at Uni B. So, you work at Unis A, B, and C, because you need food and shelter and running water. And you sleep under your desk at Uni C because you can’t afford your rent.

You don’t sleep there because you love ‘the flexibility’.

Let’s not confuse flexible work with poverty and functional homelessness. But that’s okay because according to The Conversation’s article, there are other advantages of casual work. For example, as casuals, we ‘don’t have to fulfil service requirements, such as attending meetings or annual performance reviews’.

Actually, we go to a number of meetings, both voluntarily and warily, and usually unpaid. It’s true we aren’t invited to department meetings or staff meetings, and our colleagues are quick to remind us of our good fortune in this respect. ‘You’re lucky you don’t have to attend,’ they laugh.

But here’s the kicker: most of us would like to attend meetings in which decisions are made about our workloads, the courses we teach, and the training we receive.

Most of us would like to be included in the decisions that affect us. And since we do more than half of all undergraduate teaching, and since teaching brings in more revenue than research and consultancy combined, we should have a seat at the table. In fact, as the lowest-paid academics who bring in the most money, we should have the table. And an office space! And staff profiles too!

Yet career development programs that are designed to help casuals transition to permanent employment have been cut, at the same time as face-to-face classes are replaced with online content. Casuals are

paid minimal preparation time for a class, and what usually equates to only twenty minutes per student for an entire semester of marking and moderation. If your class is overloaded, your adjusted hourly rate is less than the minimum wage.

Ultimately, what the article fails to communicate is that casualisation is not a valid hiring practice with ‘pros’ and ‘cons’ but a system of exploitation that brutalises academics and imperils not only teaching and research but the spirit of inquiry itself.

If we don’t have job security and enough money to support ourselves, then our non-compulsory attendance is not a joke; it’s an exclusionary device, a way to keep us powerless and on the fringes, a mechanism to keep us quiet while our labour – the wealth generated from the services that we perform – is dispersed into marketing, bonuses for management, and unnecessary infrastructure.

Instead of engaging in a serious conversation about the problems of casualisation – instead of asking why it is that casuals academics ‘aren’t going anywhere’ or why reducing reliance on a casual workforce isn’t a priority of university leaders – the authors fixate on casuals themselves as the problem. Instead of identifying or even acknowledging the different types of casuals who comprise the academic underclass, career casuals, industry casuals, and PhD-candidate-casuals are all heaped together. Therefore, in seeking to provide a ‘balanced’ view of casualisation, the authors elide the systematic brutality that casuals experience everyday.

In fact, the latest five-year review from the Productivity Commission finds that tuition fees generate a ‘teaching surplus’ of $1.5 billion, which is streamed directly into research, out of reach from students and the casual academics who teach them at an hourly rate. Meanwhile, management win bonuses for keeping the costs of running courses low, essentially pinching the very funds that both casuals and students bring in, all the while claiming that there isn’t enough in the budget to pay for extra marking or sick leave or professional development.

Naturally, general morale and wellbeing is affected.

But the flexibility!

According to the article, another benefit of casualisation is that casual staff have ‘high levels of commitment’ and ‘regularly go beyond their contractual obligations’.

Of course, this is true. Two-thirds of staff working beyond what they’re paid is a huge money-saver for an institution.

So, why suggest that casual work is ‘something of a double-edged sword’ when our experience doesn’t cut both ways?

Even the title of the article is highly offensive: ‘Casual academics aren’t going anywhere, so what can universities do to ensure learning isn’t affected?’ The presumption here is that casual academics have nowhere else to go – that beyond the university sector, we’re unemployable.

Even though our work security is dependent on the same qualifications that permanent staff have attained, our value is dismissed. And here is where that idea of casual work as a ‘gift’ germinates. If management really believe that their own graduates, holding their own qualifications, have nowhere else to go, then perhaps they should be considering the ethics of manufacturing those degrees and selling them. Or else we’re all working in what the NTEU has called a McUniversity. And no one, it seems, is lovin’ it.

The inequalities facing students are equal to those of their teachers. If universities are to deliver quality education to their students, as well as foster a thriving research community, then research and teaching need to be intimately paired and supported, starting with paying casuals with ongoing contracts. Advocating for better work conditions is the only way forward.

The systems pits casuals against each other; one casual can’t effectively object from the queue on their own. But as the largest group of teachers in universities, casual academics are certainly powerful enough to ask for what they need.

Management at all levels should be asking themselves: what is a university?

Is it a place where academic freedom, diversity, and progressive education create intelligent and engaged citizens?

Or is it a place primarily of enterprise: one that strives for profitability and efficiency above all? Do we support our teachers or do we exploit them? Do we make citizens out of students or do we make shareholders from customers? Do we want to lead by example and foster a fair and inclusive peer-led academy? Or should we be teaching our students early that the market is competitive and that you’re only as valuable as what employers can get away with paying you?

Finally, university management should remember who pays their bills, and every now and then it wouldn’t hurt – to include with the invoice – a simple thank you.

1. ‘Casual academics aren’t going anywhere, so what can universities do to ensure learning isn’t affected?’ by Dorothy Wardale, Julia Richardson & Yuliani Suseno, 8 April 2019. theconversation.com/casual-academicsarent-going-anywhere-so-what-canuniversities-do-to-ensure-learning-isntaffected-113567

Quit lit and Cas-ploitation

A longer version of this article was originally published in Overland:

Perhaps this is why a new genre of journalism has formed, which is based around the testimony of ex-academics: quit lit is both achingly familiar and sensibly hopeful.

overland.org.au/2019/05/thecasualties-of-academia-a-response-tothe-conversation

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 25

Photo: Retrieving oceanographic moorings and weather stations on sea ice in North West Greenland, June 2019 (Steffen Malskaer/DMI).

Racing towards a climate catastrophe Around the world, governments of all persuasions, big and small, are declaring a ‘climate emergency’, acknowledging that we are quickly running out of time to reduce carbon emissions and slow global warming. In May, the City of Sydney became the 26th local Australian government to do so, and it is expected more will follow.

Which begs the crucial question – what will it take for the re-elected Coalition Government to acknowledge that climate change has become a huge issue and put in place real measures to address it?

Michael Evans National Organiser

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A strong view in the leadup to the Federal Election was that climate change would play a significant role in the election outcome for the first time since the early 2000s. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest report in October predicted that the world has only 10 to 12 years to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above 2005 levels, or risk serious catastrophe if warming goes above this. Carbon pollution will have to be cut by 45% globally by 2030, and be reduced to zero by 2050 to limit warming to 1.5 degrees.

An Ipsos poll in March indicated that 46% of Australians agree that climate change is ‘entirely or mainly’ caused by human activity, while a further 33% agree that it is ‘partly caused by human activity and partly caused by natural processes’. Only 11% said it was ‘entirely or mainly’ caused by natural processes only. And only 13% said that the Coalition was doing a ‘good job’ dealing with climate change.

The Morrison Government was forced to at least acknowledge that climate change was now an issue following the Wentworth by-election in October last year, when Malcolm Turnbull’s previously ultra-safe seat was won by independent Dr Kerryn Phelps on a platform that included the need to address climate change and the switch to renewable energy sources.

The #StopAdani movement, the million fish killed in the dried up Darling River, the National Party losing previously safe seats in the NSW election as a protest about water and land mismanagement – all these disparate elements pointed towards Australians voting for real action around climate change at the federal election.

So what happened?

Clearly, climate change was nowhere near as significant a factor overall as many had anticipated in the almost ‘business as usual’ election outcome. Moreover, regional voters in Queensland and elsewhere were more concerned about jobs and the current state of the economy than stopping any new coal mines. After the election, despite Tony Abbott losing his seat, the Coalition is still riddled with climate change deniers.

The Coalition announced a range of measures prior to the election that will do no more than tinker at the edges of reducing carbon emissions, and in the case of possible new coal-fired power plants in Queensland, could actually increase emissions. These measures include: • The Coalition will underwrite a New Generation Investments program, taking on the risk of building new electricity generators and covering any losses. It is considering 12 projects for possible taxpayer support.

• In addition the Coalition will provide $10 million for a feasibility study of a range of possible projects for Queensland, including a possible low emission (HELE) coal-fired power plant.

• Its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions remains at 26% on 2005 levels by 2030, notwithstanding that Australia’s current emissions levels continue to rise.

• It will create a $2 billion Climate Solutions Fund, an extension of Tony Abbott’s ‘direct action’ Emissions Reduction Fund, to partner with farmers, local government and businesses to deliver ‘practical’ solutions to climate change.

• $1.4 billion is earmarked to build the Snowy Hydro 2.0 project.

Resources Minister Matt Canavan said that since the election that the rise in Australia’s emissions is attributable to the production and export of gas, and should be balanced against reduced carbon emissions in other countries.

Energy and Emissions Reductions Minister Angus Taylor stated recently that Australia’s emissions reduction targets of 26% are ‘ambitious’, and urged the ALP to drop its 45% target. The 26% target means that Australia will almost certainly not meet its commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack probably best summed up the Coalition’s view on the IPCC’s October report when he said that the Government would not change its policy “just because somebody might suggest that some sort of report is the way we need to follow and everything we should do.”

Where to from here?

The climate all over the world has changed and is continuing to change, clearly for the worse. Summers in both hemispheres are becoming much more extreme, with several European countries recording their highest temperatures ever during a massive heatwave this northern summer.

The latest and more serious concern is the rate of change, which appears to be happening much faster than climate scientists had previously predicted. In June it became clear that the permafrost in the northern hemisphere is melting at twelve times the rate previously expected, and years earlier than expected. This is particularly serious because permafrost contains both methane gas and nitrous oxide, far more dangerous greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide, and likely to significantly increase the warming effect. The Greenland ice sheet has melted much faster than expected this northern summer, while there has been a significant fall in the amount of Antarctic sea ice since 2014.

It’s all of these elements put together that makes doing something drastic to implement the latest IPCC recommendations all the more urgent. Rather than being decades away, at the current rate

of change we will see significant impacts of climate change on human civilisation much sooner than anticipated.

The planet is now in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of plants and animals, with as many as 30 to 50 per cent of all species possibly heading towards extinction by the middle of the 21st century.

The overwhelming cause of this is human activity leading to habitat loss and global warming (see report, p. 28).

This will have huge ramifications for our ability to produce enough food for the world’s population, when combined with water shortages and loss of arable land. It’s looking like a pretty bleak future that we are creating for ourselves, let alone future generations.

But the Coalition continues on as if climate change is at worst a minor side issue. It’s clear that the vested interests of fossil fuel producers, significant donors to all major political parties, still hold a strong sway over government policy, and this won’t change in the foreseeable future.

Mobilising for our future The most promising movement of people pressuring for real action on climate change is the School Strike 4 Climate, a movement started by school students in Europe and now spread globally. The next major international day of action is planned for 20 September, with rallies being held in all Australian capital cities and major regional towns. It will take hundreds of thousands of people on the streets to make the Government take notice.

The NTEU National Executive has endorsed participation in the rallies and has written to Vice Chancellors seeking their support for university staff involvement. We urge members and your families to participate wherever you can.

School Strike 4 Climate Facebook page facebook.com/StrikeClimate

Below: Germany’s Rhine River sits at a record low level after months of drought (piggeldi/pxhere).

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One million and one species threatened with extinction Recently, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), released the Global Assessment – Summary for Policy Makers. The Assessment, the first of its kind, investigated the state of nature, in terms of its capacity to support future human wellbeing.

Photo: Hawksbill turtle, Maldive Islands (Andrey Armyagov).

The study finds that 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction within coming decades, and the human species is also under threat.

Dr Kirsten Davies Macquarie Law School

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This assessment is a landmark study, researched and written by 150 experts, with input from a further 310 contributing authors. The experts came from 50 countries across the globe and have been working on the assessment over the past three years. They drew their findings for the assessment from research conducted over the past five decades, from 15,000 scientific and government sources.

The study found that 1,000,000 species are threatened with extinction, within coming decades. This rate of extinction is unprecedented. Professor Settele, Co-chair of the Assessment said “Ecosystems, species, wild populations, local varieties and breeds of domesticated plants and animals are shrinking, deteriorating or vanishing. The essential, interconnected web of life on Earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed.”

In this article, I am claiming one extra species is also under threat, the human species, particularly future generations, our grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Why is our future under threat? The IPBES Chair, Sir Robert Watson explained that “The health of ecosystems on which we and all other species depend is deteriorating more rapidly than ever. We are eroding the very foundations of our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quali-

ty of life worldwide.” It is quite simple, if we don’t have clean air to breathe, water to drink and healthy soils to grow our food, we won’t survive. Psychologically, physically and spiritually humans need to connect with the natural world, ‘the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees’. Nature is the foundation of human life on earth!

The Global Assessment has explained that these life-supporting eco-systems are now seriously threatened. Some of the many examples include that the number of native species has dropped by, at least 20% (the average abundance, in most major land-based habitats). Highlighting that more than 33% of all marine mammals, 40% of amphibian species, and almost 33% of reef-forming corals are now threatened. At least 680 vertebrate species had been driven to extinction since the 16th century and more than 9% of all domesticated breeds of mammals used for food and agriculture had become extinct by 2016, with at least 1,000 more breeds still threatened.

The assessment notes that most of the land-based and marine-based environment has been significantly altered by human action, but that this trend is less severe or avoided in areas held or managed by Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities.

Other notable findings of the Assessment include that: • More than a third of the world’s land surface and nearly 75% of freshwater resources are now devoted to crop or livestock production. Consequently, the value of agricultural crop production has increased by about 300% since 1970, raw timber harvest by 45% and approximately 60 billion tons of renewable and non-renewable resources are now extracted globally every year – having nearly doubled since 1980.

• Land degradation has reduced the productivity of 23% of the global land surface, and 100-300 million people are at increased risk of floods and hurricanes because of loss of coastal habitats and protection.

• Plastic pollution has increased tenfold since 1980, and 300-400 million tons of heavy metals, solvents, toxic sludge and other wastes from industrial facilities are dumped annually into the world’s waters.

So how did we get ourselves in to this situation? The assessment nominates the five most globally influential direct drivers of these changes. These are, “(1) changes in land and sea use; (2) direct exploitation of organisms; (3) climate change; (4) pollution and (5) invasive alien species.” It progresses to identify ‘indirect drivers’ such as population growth and the consumption of natural resources. It describes the significance and capacity of accountability, gov-

ernance and technology which can both aide and hinder the protection of nature.

The Assessment also finds that most of the global goals, such as the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Sustainable Development Goals, developed to conserve nature and its provisions, will not be met.

What can we do about this paradigm of decline? The Assessment offers hope, in the form of transformational change. It explains that “Negative trends in nature will continue to 2050 and beyond in all of the policy scenarios explored in the Report, except those that include transformative change – due to the projected impacts of increasing land-use change, exploitation of organisms and climate change, although with significant differences between regions.” Many positive pathways for action are described, with an emphasis on cross sectoral initiatives.

How can Australia respond to the challenges presented by the Global Assessment? We need both top down and bottom up approaches. In terms of ‘top down’, I personally would like to see Australia undertake a national , IPBES type assessment. Many nations, such as South Korea, are now going down this track.

Such a national assessment would identify the part Australia plays in this global picture. It would identify and prioritise the transformational change we need to undertake.

Challenges differ from nation to nation, thus the importance of national assessments. For example, in Australia we don’t have a significant issue with population growth, but we do have a high carbon footprint per capita. Once we have such an assessment, we then need commitments and enforceable targets across all sectors including: business, industry, government and non-government organisations.

Let’s not wait for such an assessment, it would take some time. In the meantime, we can all commence the ‘bottom up’ process of transformational change, right now. This does not mean that we have to all become ‘deep green’, nor live a subsistence life. Radical behavioural change is rarely sustainable.

I suggest a couple of things.

Firstly, make time to enjoy nature in some way, every day. Have a picnic in a park with your family. Go for a walk in the bush. It will make you, and the people you love, feel good, I promise. When we connect with nature and value it, we are much more likely to look after it!

Secondly, think about your consumption patterns and the resultant waste. How can you minimise this? We are now seeing such positive signs of people stepping up to protect nature. We are separating our waste, carrying shopping bags and keep cups, and minimising the use of plastics.

But we can do more, without too much

impact to the high standard of life we enjoy in Australia. The concept is that we should use natural resources, or nature’s provisions, as very, very precious and finite commodities, ensuring that minimal waste is generated.

In addition, the Global Assessment has highlighted the dual problems of a high level of the extraction of natural resources, particularly non-renewables, and the damage to nature of the resultant waste, such as plastics in the ocean.

Individually, we can do something about both these problems. We can reduce our consumption patterns, purchase quality goods that last and fix them when they break, if we can, rather than replace them.

We can choose goods that are locally produced, this action, in turn will create local jobs and support Australian business and industry, such as agriculture. We all need to get behind our farming communities!

This, in turn, will benefit the Australian economy. We can reject goods with excessive packaging, and leave packaging in retail stores, whenever possible, sending a strong message to the retail and manufacturing sectors.

An inspiring example can be found in the city of Taipei. A system was introduced where households were required to pay for the removal of rubbish, by the weight of a garbage bag. To avoid these exorbitant costs, consumers started leaving packaging in stores when they purchased goods. As you can imagine, very rapidly, the retail sector demanded that business and industry minimise packaging.

I suspect, if we all did a similar thing in Australia, leaving the packaging in the stores, the retail and commercial sectors would be forced to comply.

Last, but not least, as people working in the education sector, we can build paradigms of sustainable living into our campuses, classrooms, teaching and research.

For example, with my first-year university students, I require them to calculate their ecological footprint at the start of the semester. Invariably they are horrified by the result and this exercise alone can be life changing for them. Most importantly, we are all in positions where we can empower our students through education, inspiration and leadership. They are our bright stars and natures future decision makers.

Dr Kirsten Davies is a lecturer at Macquarie Law School, a coordinating lead author of the IPBES, Asia- Pacific Regional Assessment, and an NTEU member.

To contact Kirsten, email her at: Kirsty.davies@mq.edu.au For further information on the Global Assessment: www.ipbes.net/news/ipbes-globalassessment-summary-policymakers-pdf

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WHS

Is your workplace safe? Is it healthy?

The answers to those two questions are possibly and probably not. Risks to our safety are usually visible and obvious in the physical environment and you can, and should, make yourself aware of them and report them. Are there risks of trips and falls?

Are the steps slippery? Is the lighting adequate? If you work in old buildings it may be that there are invisible hazards lurking there. As as our members at Notre Dame Fremantle discovered recently, asbestos can be anywhere and odours can be the tell-tale signs of significant biological contamination.

Of course, the most extreme consequence of an unsafe worksite is the death or serious injury of a worker. As of the time of going to press there had been 64 workers lose their life at work in Australia this year, and last year there were 157 families who had a family member go to work and never come home.

NTEU strongly supports unions advocating for laws establishing serious penalties for employers responsible for industrial manslaughter.

Mental health hazards Thankfully, accidental deaths in the workplace are extremely uncommon in our industry and by and large our employers are prompt to respond to physical, biological and chemical hazards.

But what about the things that we definitely can’t see? What about the things that don’t directly cause physical injury but injure our mental health?

There is no doubt that in the past, there was little recognition that damage to your mental health is every bit as much a workplace injury as tripping and breaking your ankle. But the tide is turning. Over a decade ago the European Agency for Safety and Health at Work published an expert study on emerging psychosocial risks.

They identified five categories of risks: 1. New forms of work and job insecurity.

2. Ageing workforce.

3. Work intensification.

4. High emotional demands at work.

5. Poor work-life balance.

Fast forward a decade and these five categories are in many ways also the defining characteristics of work in the tertiary education sector. Casualisation is on the rise; the workforce is ageing; there is extreme work intensification as fewer and fewer staff are expected to do more with less; bullying, harassment and abuse are commonplace; and there would be few if any university staff members who believe that

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their work and private lives were balanced.

Burn-out is now such a problem that the World Health Organisation (WHO) has included it as an occupational phenomenon in the International Classification of Diseases In January of this year, Safe Work Australia (SWA) released national guidance material on work-related psychological health and safety for employers.

The comprehensive list of psychosocial hazards that SWA has identified will be horribly familiar to NTEU members. They include long work hours and high workloads, workplace bullying, aggression and harassment, lack of fairness and equity, poor management of performance issues, inadequate consultation about workplace change, inconsistent applications of policies, and workers not being involved in decisions that affect them.

These will be of no surprise to members, but importantly they can also be no surprise to our employers as they are foreseeable risks.

Mitigating risk Employers have an obligation to remove risks, then if they are not able to be removed, to mitigate against them and reduce the impact.

Mitigating against risk is not providing employee assistance programs, its not providing resilience training or access to mindfulness programs. These are, in effect, tools to allow the employee to tolerate the damage done by the risk; they do nothing to prevent the harm occurring in the first place.

Would we ever accept that a suitable response to a physical trip hazard would be to re-train employees to better deal with the pain of a broken ankle? If not, then we should not accept that resilience training is a suitable response to a known excessively high stress environment.

As SWA observes “a psychologically healthy and safe workplace does not happen by chance or guesswork.” Employers

WHS

need to assess the psychosocial risks that may occur in the workplace and work towards controlling those things that are reasonably practicable for them to control, eliminate or minimise.

Towards a psychologically happy workplace It is not as if the effects of sustained workplace stress are not as well known as the likely effects of a trip hazard. Sustained work related stress can lead to insomnia, anxiety, depression, break-down of family and working relationships, physical illness including cardio-vascular disease, and can also increase the risk that the employee will suffer physical harm through accidents; either at work, on the journey to or from work, or at home.

SWA advises employers that consultation is a key element of providing a psychologically healthy and safe workplace.

Consultation “involves sharing information on hazards and risks, giving workers a reasonable opportunity to express their views, raise issues, contribute to the decision making process and taking those views into account.”

It would be interesting to know how many members could say that discussions about stress and its impact on their health are the subject of meaningful consultation in their workplace.

The psychosocial hazards in our workplaces including extreme workload pressure, constant change and uncertainty, precarious work, bullying, harassment and abuse, and vicarious trauma are not unique to Australian tertiary education. Recently the BBC reported that university counselling services are being inundated by stressed academics.

Acting General Secretary of the Universities and Colleges Union (UK), Paul Cottrell was quoted as saying “excessive workloads, a lack of job security and managers obsessed with league tables and rankings have blighted the sector for years”, an observation that will resonate with many of our members.

Boland Review recommendations The recent Boland Review of Australia’s workplace health and safety laws contained a range of recommendations that NTEU supports. Principle among these is the inclusion of a provision on industrial manslaughter as well as more rights and support for health and safety representatives, but of special interest to us is the key recommendation that health and safety laws contain greater regulation of psychosocial hazards.

State Ministers with responsibility for workplace health and safety.

NTEU calls on all Australian governments to adopt the Boland recommendation on psychosocial risks and in doing so ensure that psychological injury resulting from known workplace hazards is afforded recognition equivalent to that afforded to workplace induced physical injury.

NTEU’s very strong view is that members, and all workers, have a right to return home at the end of each day healthy as well as safe, and that includes mentally healthy as well as physically healthy.

It is past time that we accepted that our mental health is as worthy of protection as our physical health and it is past time that arrangements at work that threaten our mental well being are dealt with as the safety risks that they are.

Gabe Gooding, National Assistant Secretary

Above: Stressed worker (Ion Chiosea/123rf).

Acceptance of the recommendations lies within the purview of the Federal and

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Brazil

1.5 million protest against Bolsonaro’s university cuts

Photo: Protestors in Avenida Paulista,Rio de Janeiro, 15 May 2019 (Joalpe/Wikimedia Commons).

Thousands of Brazilian students and teachers took to the streets all over Brazil on Wednesday 15 May repudiating government cuts to federal university budgets.

Some 1.5 million students, teachers and administrative personnel from higher education institutions rallied in the capital, Brasília, in Belo Horizonte, Salvador, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and cities in many other states in the first massive protest since extreme right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took office in January.

Brazilians were spurred into action by the announcement that some US$1.8 billion – that pays for inputs for research, electricity and water bills, purchase of basic lab equipment, research scholarships, housing for foreign students and others – would be cut from university budgets.

The cuts amount to 30% of the total ‘discretional’ budget. It amounts to 3.4% of total annual budget spending, according to the Ministry of Education. ‘Obligatory’ spending such as salaries and pensions was untouched.

The marchers for education were joined by others who were protesting against the pension reform and a recent decree that makes it easier to own weapons.

From Dallas in the United States, Bolsonaro claimed on national strike day that “most of the protesters are militants; their heads are empty. If you asked them for the formula of water, they do not know it; they are useful idiots and imbeciles manipulated by a minority…”

Bolsonaro may have been venting his anger at the massive scale of the protests.

María Elena Hurtado University World News

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“It seems that Bolsonaro… has managed to stir up conflict in the education sector and awaken a civil society opposition that had been lethargic since the start of his rule,” Eduardo Grin from the Getulio Vargas Foundation was quoted as saying in an article in the Chilean daily El Mercurio.

Disruptive universities punished According to Brazil’s Vice-President Hamilton Mourão, the federal universities’ budget has only been frozen as part of nationwide budget cuts. Depending on income, he said on the day of the demonstrations, the cuts “could be unblocked in the second half of this year”.

But that education was a particular political target became clear from the words of Education Minister Abraham Weintraub when announcing the cuts.

These were needed, he told the press, because the centre-left governments of Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff that preceded the Bolsonaro Government had expanded university access through scholarships and quotas for blacks, poor and indigenous people, staging a ‘tragedy’ because many of them were now unemployed.

Weintraub first restricted the cuts to three universities: the Federal University of Bahia, the University of Brasília and the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niteroi in Rio de Janeiro state. He did so after accusing them of ‘promoting disruptions’ and ‘staging ridiculous events’ instead on focusing on academic excellence. After the uproar that ensued, Weintraub extended the ‘punishment’ to all federal universities, 63 in all.

Many teachers and students believe the cuts are in retaliation for the stance by some federal university students against Bolsonaro during last year’s presidential campaign, when they hung large antifascist banners on university premises to ‘alert’ against a victory of the extreme right.

It’s the ideology “The university cuts are not only about economics; it is something ideological.

This is why he [Bolsonaro] started with a few universities he wanted to restrain,” Fabiana Amorin, linked to the National Union of Students, told the Spanish daily El Mundo.

Bolsonaro, an ex-military captain and longterm parliamentarian, is a declared critic of education in Brazil. The Spanish daily El País reminded its readers that during the electoral campaign Bolsonaro proposed instituting ‘long-distance education to help combat Marxism’ and eradicate from classrooms ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘the gender ideology’.

Last April his suggestion to redirect the sociology and philosophy budgets to areas that give an immediate return such as veterinary, engineering and medicine, provoked a strong international reaction.

Some 800 institutions and 17,000 people around the world signed an open letter urging the Brazilian Government to carry on funding sociology and philosophy studies because “the purpose of higher education is not to produce immediate returns over investment”. The objective must always be to “create a well-educated and enriched society that reaps the benefits of the collective effort to create human knowledge”, the letter said.

Simon Schwartzman, a social scientist and international education advisor, thinks that the president’s real target was the social sciences, since the number of philosophy and sociology students in Brazil is tiny – less than 10,000 out of around 8 million university students.

“The predisposition manifested by the Government against social science seems to stem from an ignorance about the numbers and the nature of social studies linked to an ideological preconception – that sociology and philosophy would be centres of Marxist ideology that need to be extirpated,” Schwartzman wrote in his blog.

However, he thinks the two disciplines are safe for the time being. “If the Government could, it would close the sociology and philosophy departments in universities… but for that they would have to intervene in the universities, and we are very far from that,” he told University World News.

Many students believe that the final aim of the Government’s attack on universities is to privatise them since, they argue, they are coveted by private investors because many Brazilian public universities have a lot of prestige plus the largest demand.

Schwartzman thinks privatisation of higher education institutions is unlikely, as “75% of enrolment in higher education in Brazil is already in private institutions, thanks to a large extent to the subsidies granted by previous governments, particularly a student loans program”.

“They [the Government] really don’t know what to do,” he said. “They have a short budget constraint problem, no long-term project for education and are now facing a political storm.”

This article originally published in University World News, 17 May 2019.

Reprinted with permission. www.universityworldnews.com

Below: Protesting on 15 May in the regional city of Sorocaba, Brazil (Ogat/Wikimedia Commons).

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News from the Net Pat Wright

Political post mortems At Bob Hawke’s memorial, Bill Kelty recalled Lenin’s judgement that Australia was no place for revolution.

Since Lenin, the soporific Long Boom of Menzies brought about the slow death of revolutionary politics, the near-paralysed, relaxed and comfortable Howard years saw the decline and fall of political reform, and the prolonged declining of nearly thirty years of economic growth tailing off under the ATM government has seen the neardeath of politics itself, judging from reports online of the 2019 Federal Election.

It is not that there was no talk of politics, or informed discussion of politics, or vigorous political debate – it is just that the proportion of the population engaged in and by such talk has shrunk, and the proportion of the population who have stopped listening has grown to a tipping-point where putative non-politicians can game the system for individual advantage, free from any obligation to govern, leaving that to the ad guy in the baseball cap.

The 2019 Federal Election saw the proportion of votes for one of the two major parties continue to fall to an all-time low.

This growth in the number of people averse to politics is part of the international wave of anti-politics, which can be discerned in the Trump victory, Brexit, France’s yellow-jackets, populist governments in Eastern Europe, etc. It seems the best way to get elected in parliamentary politics is to adopt an unparliamentary, anti-politics pose, or at least an anti-major-party posture.

Meanwhile, the major parties beat each other up and a complicit media revels in the consequent reputational damage, personal foibles, scandals, etc, to the neglect of policy analysis, or even policy reporting.

This brings politics further into disrepute, and more and more people turn off politics altogether, either because they get nothing from it, because they are too busy getting and spending, or because it disgusts them.

The politically-engaged continue to develop ideas, propose reforms, discuss policies and debate alternatives, but they will only get media coverage if they attack their rivals with ad hominem arguments and encourage the media to seek “gotcha” moments. Of course, it is easy to overlook the fact that they are only talking in an

echo-chamber of the politically-engaged, or their own large ‘bubble’, enclosing the smaller Canberra ‘bubble’. The disengaged outside the ‘bubble’ remain unaffected, unmoved, and blissfully ignorant of politics.

The disengaged, of course, are happy to remain politically illiterate – but that makes them vulnerable to last-minute voting whims or careless gestures sparked by simplistic slogans, hollow headlines or downright deceits in saturation coverage in the media, social media and polling.

This is a perfect situation for the cashedup anti-politician.

Polling during the 2019 Federal Election campaign was remarkably inaccurate in terms of the ultimate Two-Party-Preferred (TPP) vote, but quite accurate in terms of the Preferred PM vote – a placebo poll which should be irrelevant because we don’t get a vote for our PM unless we are in her/his electorate, but is useful for push-polling. Had the media framed the election as a contest between alternative policies, the outcome might well have been different, but the conservative forces, in collusion with the mainstream media, ensured that it remained a Presidential-style contest between a politician and an ad man. Hence the result more resembled the Preferred PM polling than the TPP polling.

In addition, it is difficult for the pollsters to take account of the growing number of disengaged, when they do not report how many people decline to answer their questions, don’t answer their phones, or don’t register to vote. Polling only reports the views of the at least minimally engaged – and this group is shrinking, while the disengaged group is growing, so it should be no surprise that the polls are losing accuracy. I am grateful to Peter Brent, whose Mumble blog on Inside Story points out that the betting markets (which I commended in error in the last edition of this column) are even less accurate because they report on only the more committed voters.

When smart electoral parasites harvest the votes of the disengaged and pass them on as a favour to the Government (with the reasonable expectation of reciprocal favours from the Government at some future point), then the result of the election is determined by reaping the votes of those who know little and care less about politics, thus demeaning the election to the level of football-barracking.

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It is at best ironic that a country which has compulsory voting and compulsory education does not have compulsory voting education. Schools should at least make all students aware of the operation of preferential voting, whereby a vote for a Hanson or Palmer ticket is a vote for a Morrison Government. Many anti-politics voters delude themselves in thinking that their votes don’t help elect a government Most of those voting for one or other of the major parties are “rusted-on”, but for varying periods of time. Some have been rusted-on for a lifetime, some for a few electoral cycles, and some to save themselves the bother of thinking about politics at each Election time. As the older ones die out, they need to be replaced by voters, usually younger, from the great pool of the disengaged. This is a mammoth task, but the intergenerational theft implicit in the Coalition’s climate change, housing investment, taxation, health and education policies provides opportunities to hook the attention of the disengaged.

Many post-mortems on the net criticise Labor’s policies, or their number, or their breadth, or their marketing, but that misses the point that the number of people open to voting on the basis of policies had shrunk, because of what the CSIRO Australian National Outlook 2019 calls a lack of trust in institutions, such as the political system. The marketing of policies must be directed at the younger disengaged demographic, not at the conservative base, nor the rusted-on loyalists, and needs to be advocated by leading with the Benefits first, with the necessary hypothecated Costs following. Consequently, first-home buyers would be advantaged if housing investors were no longer able to add to their tax breaks. And kids would have better healthcare, early learning and schools, if tax credits from investments could be used to reduce income tax to zero, but not beyond to negative tax payments.

Even so, the mainstream media would almost certainly try to reverse the emphasis, and deflect the discourse away from policies and onto personalities, so charismatic spokespersons would be needed to hold the line and direct it towards the disengaged. In short, there was not a lot wrong with Labor’s policies, just the targeting of those policies in a very adverse culture.

Pat Wright is an NTEU Life Member. patrite@me.com

From the Immediate Past President Jeannie Rea

Women, men and trade unions Australian unions are now in the forefront of taking on the community-wide scourge of men’s violence against women, and making the connections between gender-based violence in and outside the home.

Whilst we have campaigned against sexual harassment in the workplace for decades, we have now adopted a zero-tolerance approach and named gendered violence at work as one of the factors that perpetuates gender inequity.

Men and unions Over two decades ago, I produced a subject for a Women’s Studies postgraduate degree named Women and Trade Unions. At that time, we were still dealing with entrenched sexism amongst male union comrades and academics’ presumptions that women were less inclined to militancy, less serious about their jobs and usually disinterested in union involvement and leadership.

This was despite a rich history of women’s union activism in Australia; contemporary militancy by the nurses’ union; and where research was also showing that women were just as likely to join unions as men, including amongst immigrant and Indigenous women. Internationally, brave young women were at the forefront of organising new unions in factories across Asia.

However, a common story, here and overseas, was still one of male unionist antagonism to women speaking out. Many men also expected, and even insisted, their wives and daughters take on most of the physical and emotional labour of the household and caring for others, thus thwarting time for union activism. The reality for too many women was that they faced harassment and violence not only in their workplace, but also in their homes and even their unions. These issues remain barriers to women’s equality in union activism internationally and even persist in Australia.

In the course, we asked why this is so, and one ‘excuse’ was that trade unions are

a site for working class men to exercise dominating traditional masculinities. (In the Australian context, there used to even be an explanation that Australian wives and mothers are so dominating that ‘henpecked’ men need to assert their masculinity somewhere.)

Another argument was, and is, that extreme masculine behaviours are common in dangerous industries, so unions have to fight fire with fire. However, this was and is unacceptable, as we also expect our unions to demonstrate the behaviour we expect of others. That is why John Setka’s lawyer’s comment in court that, “the qualities that make him good at this job, make him effective, aren’t necessarily compatible with being a husband and father,” is so outrageous.

No man (or woman) should be expected to behave at work in ways that would shame them and adversely impact upon their families. Let’s put the pressure back where it should be - on the bosses and their intolerable demands, expectations and exploitation and renounce their unacceptable behaviour. We can do better.

Making domestic violence a workplace matter When some women and men of the Australian trade unions first raised the proposition that we could assist in supporting those dealing with domestic (or intimate partner) violence by including specific leave and other entitlements in collective agreements, we initially faced some opposition even within our ranks.

But not for long, as research demonstrated that women were losing their jobs and tumbling into poverty as they tackled domestic violence. Keeping women in jobs seemed the obvious practical solution. We educated our members, our negotiators and even employers with a lot of success.

In a short period of time, ‘domestic violence leave’ has become an accepted part of industrial relations discourse.

Gendered violence at work On 20 June, the International Labour Organisation (ILO) Centenary Conference adopted a Violence and Harassment Recommendation and Convention, which says that violence and harassment in the world of work “can constitute a human rights violation or abuse… is a threat to equal opportunities, is unacceptable and incompatible with decent work.”

Australian union women were at the centre of the negotiations at the ILO, following an intense, and sometimes controversial, education and organising campaign amongst Australian unions on gendered violence at work.

Sadly, instead of this ILO decision and the Australian involvement being a major local news story, the case of John Setka, the Victorian Secretary of the CFMMEU Construction Division being convicted of gendered harassment via a carriage service and breaking family violence court orders, dominated social and mass media.

In and outside our movement many have been quick to judge, often with few facts, not only the man at the centre, but his partner, colleagues, women in the Union, the ACTU leadership and anyone else.

Meanwhile, clearly much heated internal debate continues where it should - in the CFMMEU construction division with one publicised outcome being the resignation of the (male) Victorian assistant secretary.

And ACTU Secretary Sally McManus has proposed to Setka to step down in the broader interests of our union movement.

Unions must draw the line on tolerating male violence against women The question for us of the trade union movement is whether men’s violence against women is still to be excused in some circumstances. We should not even be debating this. Leaders should model the attitudes, behaviours and commitments they ask of others.

The CFMMEU clearly thought so as they had a video of leaders making the call against male violence towards women.

The Victorian Secretary featured on this video. It was still on the website after the charges against him became public. It is now taken down. There must be a resolution that means the Union can proudly promote this video again.

The face of Australian trade unions today is a woman with a degree rather than a man with a hard hat. Women are joining unions at faster rates than men. But union membership overall is stagnant. Our unions must provide leadership on social and economic justice and equality. And taking consistent and resolute stands attracts and retains union members of all genders.

Jeannie Rea was NTEU National President from 2010 to 2018.

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The Thesis Whisperer Inger Mewburn

Working in the interest of casuals In 2004, I sat down with a calculator. I was doing my tax return for 2003, which was complicated. During that financial year I had worked 26 hours a week as a casual academic over four different universities and earned roughly $30,000 before tax. I was exhausted and did not feel adequately compensated by any measure.

This motivated me to look up the academic pay scales. Immediately the rage fire burned strong within me. I compared my income to that of my primary academic patron who was on a level C salary and earned about $100,000 a year. He ran a commercial business on the side and spent about four hours a week in the classroom. In fact, he didn’t spend much time at all on campus. I helped his students when they couldn’t get hold of him – which was often – for free.

Back then there was no term ‘gig economy’, but it was clear I was being exploited by this man and the system. I was angry at being a second-class academic citizen, so I rang the Union to see what they were doing about it. The kind man who answered the phone agreed wholeheartedly there was a problem, and told me that I was free to join, but cautioned me not to expect too much. He told me the Union would act in the interests of the majority of its members – permanent staff.

labour the university would surely grind to a halt. The SuperCasuals campaign at Swinburne University is a good example of the latent power of solidarity amongst casual academics, when supported by the resources and organising power of the Union.

...don’t take up their time with corridor meetings and ‘quick catch ups’ that amount to another hour or two of unpaid work each week. It’s not cool.

Since 2003 I have gone from casual to full time academic and climbed the ladder to Associate Professor. Now I regularly employ casuals, which probably makes me part of the problem – so I was very pleased to have the chance to go along to a Union meeting at ANU aimed at running a SuperCasuals campaign in our university.

I was disappointed to find I was the only full time academic in the room, even though the invitation had explicitly asked us to come along and show solidarity. I get that not everyone wants to come to union meetings and wave placards, but there are some concrete things full time academics can do to help our casual comrades get a better deal.

Stop working so damn hard: every hour of over-time you do is an hour of work that someone else in a

He didn’t think this was right and suggested I encourage other casuals to join so I could start my own faction. I laughed (bitterly). What casual academic has time to start a faction?! I was exhausted enough trying to keep a roof over my head and food in my child’s mouth, but I did sign up to the Union eventually and thankfully times have changed. The Union is now working in the interests of all its members.

It’s estimated they 60% or more of the teaching is done by casual academics. If all these ‘second class’ citizens withheld their

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more precarious position is denied. While we make it easy for management to keep running our universities without enough full time staff, nothing will change. Deciding to stop donating your unpaid labour to your university is a powerful political act.

Make sure casuals get paid on time: every time I hire someone, I have to be on top of people higher in the management chain, and HR, to make sure the process is moved forward quickly. People should not have to start work without being paid – but it’s sadly routine. Oh, and while you’re at it – don’t take up their time with corridor meetings and ‘quick catch ups’ that amount to another hour or two of unpaid work each week. It’s not cool.

Make sure casuals have the resources they need to do the job: It was a bit depressing to hear the number of mundane problems that casuals face, which I experienced at the turn of the century too. Casuals are usually expected to provide their own pens, paper and laptops. The least you can do is make sure they are connected to the printer and have a key to the rooms they are teaching in.

Perhaps others have not had the experience of being an exploited casual and don’t feel as strongly about this as I do. Fair enough, but without solidarity from full time academics it will be harder to get campaigns like this off the ground. I urge you to consider how you can help beyond these practical, mundane gestures and join the movement towards equity for all of us.

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

M@thesiswhisperer Left: Matt Styles, NTEU member at USC (Lachlan Hurse).

Lowering the Boom Ian Lowe

Coalition creeps back in After setting out in the last issue why the Coalition deserved to be voted out of office, I was comforted by opinion polls consistently showing that would happen. When the dust settled after the May election, it was clear that most of Australia did want to get rid of the Government. The ALP won a majority of seats in NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, SA, the ACT and WA. The Coalition crept back into office by winning an overwhelming number of seats in Queensland.

There were several reasons for this. Clive Palmer effectively donated over $50 million to the Coalition by running advertisements attacking the ALP, ostensibly to support his United Australia Party (UAP) candidates who were never likely to get elected.

Rusted-on One Nation voters were prepared to overlook their party trying to get funding from a US gun lobby, even delivering enough Senate votes to return the ridiculous Malcolm Roberts to the parliament.

There was a welter of blatantly dishonest campaigning about ‘death taxes’ and ‘retirees tax’, but that was probably no worse in Queensland than in other States.

There were simplistic slogans – my local MP still has a billboard near a major road promising lower taxes, more jobs and cheap electricity, even though the first impact of lower taxes will be the loss of thousands of public sector jobs and the Coalition has no policy that could reduce electricity prices.

But again, these were not much more dishonest than the similar slogans peddled in other States. The elephant in the Queens-

land room was the proposed Adani Carmichael coal mine, which clearly influenced the vote in regional areas.

There has been considerable speculation about the reasons this proposal affected voting patterns. Judith Brett, writing in The Monthly before the election, suggested the Coalition’s desperate hope was that the voters would be sufficiently selfish and greedy to put short-term possible gains ahead of their long-term interests.

...the number of permanent jobs in an automated coal mine is a tiny fraction of the jobs at risk in tourism associated with the Great Barrier Reef.

There was undoubtedly some of that, but the argument is undermined by other evidence; the ALP did better in seats where many voters would have seen their retirement incomes pared back by the elimination of the Howard-Costello gift of ‘tax refunds’ to people paying no tax. The Coalition, despite presiding over high levels of unemployment while in government for six years, did better in regions where many are unemployed.

While there is an understandable concern in regional Queensland about the lack of jobs for young people, the number of permanent jobs in an automated coal mine is a tiny fraction of the jobs at risk in tourism associated with the Great Barrier Reef.

Those tourist numbers are already down as a result of awareness that the reef systems have not recovered from the severe bleaching events of recent summers. The Murdoch press has noted this and blamed environmental activists for drawing attention to the problem!

From the comments in social media, some people still don’t accept the science of climate change and see no reason to curb coal exports. A misinformation campaign has found fertile ground in regions where it is telling people what they desperately want to hear: coal has a great future, don’t listen to the greenies and scientists. The recent BP report on global energy use found that coal is still being burned in increasing quantities, fuelling the delusion that there is no problem.

It is true that many nations, Australia included, have done little to meet their Paris commitments. It is also true that those Paris targets are not ambitious enough to achieve the stated goal, limiting the increase in average global temperature to two degrees. That should not be giving anyone in rural Queensland any comfort; it means we are on track to increase average temperatures by three or four degrees this century. That will mean catastrophic conditions in large areas of rural Australia.

The second strand of misinformation says that we only account for 1.4 per cent of global emissions, so what we do isn’t important. That figure already puts us in the top twenty nations for contributing to climate change, but when you add in the emissions produced by our exported fossil fuels, our total contribution climbs to about 4 per cent, lifting us to sixth on the ladder. We should also be expected, as a relatively wealthy country, to assume some responsibility for our actions. It is not reasonable to ask India and China to clean up their act if we say that we can’t afford to.

The third argument that really annoys me is the drug dealer’s defence. We don’t burn the coal, we only export it, and in any case it is better for people to burn our clean coal than other countries’ dirty coal.

One observer said this is a bit like a person charged with stabbing a stranger to admit the deed but say they used a clean knife, where another person might have used a rusty knife!

The final problem is that people in rural Queensland clearly don’t believe assurances that there will be more jobs in renewable energy than in large coal mines. I was recently speaking to a trade union official who was worried that the jobs building solar farms might go to itinerant backpackers. The ALP was fatally indecisive on the Adani mine, rather than advocating for jobs in the clean energy systems that will need to replace coal. That might have appealed to rural voters, where evasion clearly didn’t.

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

M@AusConservation

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 37

Letter from Aotearoa/NZ Michael Gilchrist

Back to basics for New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Strategy Over the last four decades tertiary education in Aotearoa has been turned into a market, knowledge into a commodity, and students into consumers.

That movement is now grinding slowly to a halt.

It is grinding to a halt because of the collective efforts of Tertiary Education Union (TEU) members and of student activists over the last decade. Those efforts have stopped a privatisation bill in 2018, brought an end to the competitive tendering for funding of courses, an end to funding based on Educational Performance Indicators and an end to the outsourcing of student enrolments at one institution.

It has led to the current government making the first year of tertiary study fees free, and to them proposing a complete overhaul of the vocational education sector based on public good, rather than private market, principles.

That remorseless, seemingly unstoppable neoliberal agenda is grinding to a halt because of the unwavering drive by TEU to ‘actively defend and promote quality tertiary education that is accessible to all New Zealanders’. Our campaigning has struck home with at least one person in

government – the Minister of Education Chris Hipkins.

At our May conference the Minister recommitted to ensuring everyone had access to quality tertiary education: “We share the TEU’s passion for ensuring that we’ve got high quality, thriving public education in New Zealand. We believe that every New Zealander deserves equal access to quality education and training throughout their lives, so they can realise their potential and participate fully in our economy and in our society.”

The words seemed to come straight out of TEU’s Te Kaupapa Whaioranga, our aspirational blueprint launched in 2013 (a document dismissed as ‘unachievable dreams’ by some when it was launched).

The values based campaigning that has followed has had an impact with the Minister.

The question is, can we shift the vision and actions of the entire machinery of government and all the layers of managers in our own institutions who currently still implement market approaches to education every day. Can we change that culture? And where should we direct our collective efforts?

Much of the drive to make tertiary education into a market and tertiary education institutions into businesses has come through successive tertiary education strategies. The last such strategy stated that the purpose of the sector was to advance economic growth and labour market productivity.

There was no real mention of the value of education in its own right. No discussion of our role as critic and conscience. There was definitely no expectation that staff and student well-being should be considered as a crucial element to quality tertiary education.

So when the Labour Coalition Government announced it was writing a new Tertiary Education Strategy (as it’s required to do by law) we saw an opportunity. We asked the Ministry of Education to meet with us and talk about what should be in the next strategy.

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For members, the starting point is getting a clear definition of tertiary education into the strategy.

No more economic growth and labour market productivity for us. We want a strategy that recognises our responsibility to advance Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the cultural life of Aotearoa New Zealand. A strategy that helps develop a skilled and knowledgeable population, and one that ensures we reduce inequality across all groups in our country. There’s more, but you get the picture.

We want to go back to the fundamentals of what education is for – transforming lives. Can we get the Government to accept this?

The game changer might be the very fact that we were able to put our ideas in front of the Government before officials began writing the strategy. Last time, the Government wrote the plan and asked for comment – that left staff in the sector very little room to think aspirationally.

The game changer might be all the very human stories our members have told to the Minister and government officials about the harm done when education is seen as a commodity. We know these stories make a difference.

We won’t know how much success we’ve had until a draft plan emerges. But we do have on record what we have asked for as experts in teaching, learning, innovation, research, and student support. That means we’ve got a starting point for evaluating the Government’s plans and lobbying to get them on the right track.

The move away from seeing tertiary education as a market and institutions as businesses has started. It’s up to us to keep the collective pressure on and get back to basics: Education as a right, because it transforms lives.

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

Delegates News Delegate Profile

Jenny Johnston Southern Cross University Why did you become a delegate?

When the task of getting fairness, equity and transparency in workplaces becomes increasingly difficult, staff need support to ensure they are able to achieve that in their workplaces.

My NTEU involvement has always been about working to make the climate and culture of the workplace a more reasonable one.

There are so many areas within the university where management don’t follow their own guidelines and staff are compromised in that process. Working to ensure ethical behaviour is very motivating.

To be able to support staff in that process is a privilege. Sharing knowledge about what can and cannot be achieved can be empowering for the individuals with whom we come in contact.

Many staff just want to know more; some want a second opinion; some want to just debrief about a particular situation; some want you to attend in a potentially awkward meeting with them.

Management sometimes assert that those of us who work in the NTEU are at odds with their agendas. I disagree. I see

my Union work as an extension of their tasks. We are both working to improve the University, it is just that sometimes that desired ‘improvement’ may look different from another’s perspective.

What do you enjoy most about being a delegate?

For me it is about helping people. At the end of the day that is what drew me into academia and I see this aspect of my job as an extension of that capacity to support.

The resources and training for delegates is great and the collegiality of working in teams to assist staff is empowering. You get to see that your desires for clarity and fairness in the workplace are shared by others.

What are some of the challenges you face as a delegate?

Getting access to the right advice and advisory people when the situation goes beyond my expertise can be daunting, but the development of the new Delegate website and handbook has gone a long way in addressing that.

Encouraging people to actually consult their Enterprise Agreement is difficult. I know it’s not the most riveting document, but it’s so important in framing what is possible in the workplace. People tend to dismiss it as irrelevant. But we helped to create it; we own it; and we should use it in our efforts to ensure fairness.

The other problem is getting action out of the collective mass of staff. There are many instances where fear reigns. Staff are reluctant to challenge e.g. an unfair allocation of workload; inappropriate bullying behaviour by a senior person etc – for fear of recriminations and ‘looking bad’.

Management aren’t going to act on any of those kinds of issues if we don’t point it out. So many individuals don’t see the strength and power on which Unions are built that put the power in the hands of the collective group. Gently encouraging people to unite and work together for change is a long term goal

What would you say to other who might want to become delegates?

It is a very enjoyable aspect of my work life and for me perhaps the most rewarding. It keeps me grounded in the reality of what is, and what is possible. I encourage you to get more involved.

NTEU Delegates handbook is available at our Delegates website: delegates.nteu.org.au

Your

Delegate Name: Ext:

Email:

Delegate

Talk to me about:

• Issues in this workplace and the University • Why Collective Bargaining is important • NTEU news and how to get involved • Your rights and entitlements • Joining the Union

NTEU Delegate stickers 2uponDL.indd 1

27/07/2017 9:11 AM

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 39

Delegates News Delegate Profile

Jill ThompsonWhite Edith Cowan University Why did you become a delegate?

I have represented unions in almost all employment positions I have held. My grandmother was a strong unionist, and from an early age, I heard her words about what work conditions and rights that unions had achieved for so many workplaces and employees over her years.

Employers and employees had worked together to ensure safe conditions and secure weekly incomes. I believe these earned conditions and rights are worthy of protection and promotion.

Many industries and services have changed their style of management and accountability since my first lecturing appointment in 1998. Management is highly paid, but their staff are asked to be fully accountable and versatile. Supportive administration staff are not usually replaced when organisational restructuring removes their positions.

Federally funded universities often forget that all of their employees are shareholders. I believe providing secure and fair employment for those shareholders should be a core value for every university.

What do you enjoy most about being a delegate?

Being a governance geek, I truly enjoy knowing the arrangement of the ECU Enterprise Agreement and its schedules.

Perhaps it comes from my senior high school days as a netball umpire when I was proud to know all the rules, and felt unbiased and calm each time I blew the whistle.

I am honoured and I truly appreciate being part of the tertiary education industry expertise, and I enjoy helping colleagues successfully challenge an unfair direction or remuneration, or at least help them learn what their options are. My grandmother’s efforts are still worthy and her voice stays strong as I act as a delegate.

What are some of the challenges you face as a delegate?

I’m challenged by colleagues who are reluctant to raise their disputed work conditions with their line manager due to unreasonable fear of repercussion.

I am challenged by ideals of university management that seem to work towards bonus points for saving money on salaries while less than half of students’ fees go towards their elected study programs. I’m challenged by my colleagues’ tears when redundancies are offered.

NTEU Tax Guide 2019 Our tax guide for financial year 2018-2019, prepared with Teacher Tax, is now available for download.

Specifically prepared for staff in tertiary education, this guide is designed to help NTEU members at tax time.

Download at nteu.org.au/tax

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I’m challenged by those who have no history of family or friends who worked towards current employment conditions that many take for granted.

What would you say to others looking at possibly nominating as a delegate?

Please join your union! Please become a delegate for at least a while (informative seminars and workshops are offered).

Delegates are often the first point of contact for colleagues who need advice.

Delegates need to be known by face and be approachable so that fellow workers can come to them if they have concerns.

Please be that face!

Email the NTEU to find out how you can help both yourself and others. delegates.nteu.org.au

My Union ELECTED LEADERS’ CONFERENCE UNION LEADERSHIP New BUILDING MEMBER POWER IN THE WORKPLACE www.nteu.org.au/elc2019 1–2 July 2019, Victoria University directions for union work An important NTEU conference held in Melbourne on 1-2 July brought together elected Branch Presidents and members of the Union’s National Executive. The Elected Leaders’ Conference heard from leading national and international scholars and unionists about what the evidence tells us about the effective forms of union organisation and action.

The Conference was not a formal decision-making body, nor was it concerned with immediate issues. However, it sought to reassess the Union’s work and look at new directions in the coming years. This is critically important if the Union is to continue to benefit members and defend public tertiary education.

It was very clear from the reflections of participants that the Union needed to build upon its bargaining successes in ways that more effectively built the power of the Union in workplaces. Some of the issues discussed including building effective delegate networks, more direct and regular engagement with members in all their diversity and the establishment of clearer and more focussed priorities.

Turning these reflections into concrete changes in the way the NTEU does its work will take time, but the Elected Leaders’ Conference reflected a strong determination to make our Union even more effective in years to come.

Ken McAlpine, Union Education & Training Officer

From top: National President Alison Barnes, WA Division Secretary Jonathan Hallett and Qld Division Secretary Michael McNally; Natalie Lang, guest speaker from ASU; SA Division Secretary Ron Slee, ACU Branch President Leah Kaufmann and Adelaide Branch President Nick Warner (Helena Spyrou).

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 41

My Union nTeu nAtiOnAl WomEn’s coNfEreNcE 2019

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ntEu.oRg.Au/wOmeN/cOnfErEncE/2019

Women’s Conference

higher education and build power in our workplaces to achieve change. We want to not only talk about what kind of changes are needed, but more importantly, how these are to be achieved in a meaningful way. The main objectives:

The biennial NTEU National Women’s Conference, held on 12 & 13 July in Melbourne, saw delegates from all Branches and Divisions of the Union engage in debate and listen to inspiring women speakers as they shared their stories, met with other NTEU women activists and discussed some of the most salient issues facing women in higher education today.

• Increase women’s capabilities as union activists, delegates and representatives.

The theme for this year was ‘Challenge for Change – Building power, defining purpose and making progress for women’.

The Conference sought to empower participants to challenge the workplace structures that work against women in

NTEU Scholarships 2019 – Call for applications NTEU is again offering two scholarships in 2018. The application deadline for both scholarships is Friday 26 July 2019. A decision will be made in late August 2019.

The Carolyn Allport Scholarship for Postgraduate Feminist Studies by Research is available for a woman undertaking

rialism and the corporate culture of universities • International campaigning around insecure work, union advocacy and women’s issues • Advocacy and communication skills • Recruitment tips and tactics

• Seeking to ensure that our workplaces are free from gendered inequality.

Guest speakers

• Ensure that women and gender equity continue to explicitly feature in NTEU political and industrial priorities.

• Senator Mehreen Faruqi, Australian Greens (NSW)

Speakers included:

• Better position the Women’s Action Committee and women’s networks at the centre of union activities.

• Michelle O’Neil, ACTU President

Topics for plenaries and workshops included:

• Annie Butler, Federal Secretary, Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation

• The post-election political landscape for women

• Caterina Cinanni, National President National Union of Workers.

• Women in the union movement and building capacity at the local level • Dealing with the neoliberal manage-

postgraduate feminist studies, by research, in any discipline, awarding $5000 per year for a maximum of 3 years to the successful applicant. Applicants must be currently enrolled in postgraduate studies, by research, in an academic award of an Australian public university. 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.

The Joan Hardy Scholarship for Postgraduate Nursing Research is available for any student undertaking a postgraduate 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

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• Sharon Burrows, General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation

Women’s Conference 2019 nteu.org.au/women/conference/2019

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 evidence 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.

For more information nteu.org.au/myunion/scholarships Or contact Helena Spyrou hspyrou@nteu.org.au

My Union

nteu.org.au/bluestockingweek NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 43

My Union NTEU moves from plastic to digital cards In May, all NTEU plastic membership cards expired and were replaced by a system of digital membership cards.

Ditching plastic Digital cards are more secure, more convenient, more environmentally friendly and do not have expiry dates.

Not issuing plastic cards saves the Union a considerable amount of money in printing and postage.

Just like the plastic card, your digital card will be your proof of membership. It will be accessible from our Member Advantage website and you can use it access your NTEU member benefits.

Your digital membership card will be accessible via the card icon on the site’s top menu. This card is your proof of union membership.

To access it anywhere you go, simply create a link to it on your phone’s home screen. Instructions for doing this is available in the sidebar on this page.

3. Select the ‘Publications & Membership Card’ section.

4. Change your default option from ‘Digital card’ to ‘Printed card’.

5. While here, please take a moment to check and update your work/contact details on this page.

For more information regarding your card or your member record, please contact your local Branch or Division office.

Opt to retain a physical card If you wish to continue to receive a plastic membership card, you’ll need to opt-in. But it’s an easy process: 1. Go to the NTEU Member Record login page: click on ‘Member Login’ at the top of the NTEU home page, or go to www.nteu.org.au/members.

2. Login with your membership number and password.

How to add your NTEU digital membership card to your smartphone home screen For quicker access to your membership card on your smartphone, add a shortcut on your phone’s home screen. iPhone/iPad (iOS10)

Android & Windows phones

1. Go to nteu.memberadvantage.com.au using Safari.

1. Go to nteu.memberadvantage.com.au using Chrome.

2. Log in (see instructions on p.45).

2. Log in (see instructions on p.45).

3. Click on ‘My Digital Card’ in the top menu.

3. Click on ‘My Digital Card’ in the top menu.

4. Click on the Share button on the menu bar (a box with an arrow sticking out from it).

4. Tap the Menu button on the browser bar (3 dots).

5. Tap on ‘Add to Home Screen’.

6. Rename ‘NTEU’ (optional – this just makes it easier to find).

7. Tap on ‘Add’ in the upper-right corner.

8. Y­ou have your NTEU card icon on your Home Screen, just like your favourite apps!

page 44 • NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no. 2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate

5. Tap on ‘Add to Home screen’.

6. Rename ‘NTEU’ (optional – this just makes it easier to find).

7. Tap on ‘Add’ .

8. Y­ou have your NTEU card icon on your Home Screen, just like your favourite apps!

My Union Usernames & passwords Confused about your usernames and passwords for accessing NTEU services? You’re not alone!

The main point to remember is the Member Advantage system is completely separate to NTEU’s Membership Record system.

Therefore, you need separate usernames and passwords to access each one.

NTEU Member Record www.nteu.org.au/members (or click on Member Login in the top right hand corner of nteu.org.au) Your NTEU Member Record contains all the information the Union needs to service and support you as a member, such as your work address, employment details, payment method, publication preferences and more.

Your username is your membership number (also called Member ID).

Your password is what you were originally sent, or whatever you changed it to. If you can’t remember, there is a password reset function.

For any information regarding accessing your Member Record, please contact your local Branch or Division office.

Member Advantage nteu.memberadvantage.com.au The NTEU Member Advantage website includes access to a wide range of benefits, as well as your digital membership card.

Your username is the same email address listed in your NTEU Member Records. This is also the email to which your unique login link would have been sent.

You will be asked to set a new password the first time you login.

For any information or assistance regarding Member Advantage member benefits, please contact NTEU Member Advantage on 1300 853 352.

New & improved member benefits website The website for Member Advantage, our membership benefits provider, has undergone a huge makeover.

This means which means the way NTEU members login to use the service has changed.

Click on ‘Dining & Leisure Near Me’, represented by the little map icon in the top-right of your benefits website.

An email with a one-time login link was sent to all members on Wednesday 29 May. To login, all you need to do is click on the link and set your new password.

You can then find a venue of your choice and click on the pin to see the full offer.

Once you are at the location, ready to pay – simply click the Redeem Button.

Your email address and the password you set will be used for future logins.

This will then bring up the Gold Ambassador digital benefits card, simply point out the Ambassador Card logo to apply your saving.

Accessing Ambassador Card The way you access your dining and selected entertainment benefits has also changed.

Log into your NTEU Member Advantage website on your mobile or smart device like a phone or a tablet.

How to login to Member Advantage Follow this process to access the Member Advantage site.

1. Go to the activation link reset page: nteu.memberadvantage.com.au/user/ activate 2. The NTEU Member Advantage site will load up on your screen, in the email box please enter your registered email address and click on the tab that says Activate.

3. Once you have requested activation, you will receive an email, which contains a long link chain. Please click this link to go to your NTEU Member Advantage My Account page.

This will bring up a map of all the restaurants and venues around you. TIP: if you see a map of Australia and not your location, make sure you have location settings enabled on your device.

With a restaurant-guarantee, venues across Australia and your digital benefits card providing on-the-go access, your benefits have never been better!

For more information regarding your benefits, contact NTEU Member Advantage on 1300 853 352.

Please note: the link in the email can only be clicked on once to log in and will lead you to a page where you can set your password. The link will expire after one day and nothing will happen if it’s not used. You will then need to click on the activation link again to resend another activation email.

4. Your NTEU Member Advantage account will load up on your screen, please enter a password in both password boxes.

5. Once you have entered your password in both password boxes, please scroll to the bottom of the screen and click on the green save tab.

6. Once you have set and saved your password, click on the NTEU logo on the top left of the screen, which will take you to the NTEU Member Advantage homescreen. You will be logged in from there and set up to use your benefits.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 45

For more information, email: info@memberadvantage.com.au or call: 1300 853 352.

Have you logged in yet?

Re-discover your benefits program with your brand-new NTEU Member Advantage website and activate your new account.

Visit your new benefits website now!

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My Union New NTEU staff Azita Arian Industrial Officer Vic Division Azita has recently joined the NTEU as an Industrial Officer within the Victorian Division. In May 2019 she was admitted to the legal profession following the completion of her Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Commerce degree.

Azita is, by nature drawn to helping those in need. Prior to working at the NTEU, she worked at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers, where she was exposed to a wide range of challenging work. Her role as a Law Clerk within the Superannuation & Insurance practice allowed her to manage the conduct of various disability insurance claims to assist those under distress, bereavement and financial hardship. However,

WGEA Report On 24 May 2019, NTEU lodged our annual compliance report with the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA).

it was the completion of her Graduate Traineeship within the Employment and Industrial practice area that nurtured her interest in Industrial Law. Azita is interested in developing a long-standing career championing workers’ rights at the NTEU and gaining greater exposure to an area that is ever evolving and often impacted by economic and social change as well as legislative reform.

A few fun and quirky facts about Azita: 1. She had an identical twin sister named Anita (who is also a lawyer).

2. She is bilingual and can speak Farsi.

Staff & officer movements Corey Rabaut has been appointed to the Victorian Division Industrial Officer position.

Victorian Division President Nic Kimberley has resigned his position as he has ceased employment in the sector.

The report can be found online at www.nteu.org.au/library/view/ id/9645.

This notice is in accordance with the requirements of the Workplace Gender Equality Act (2012).

Obituary: Andy Spaull NTEU notes with sadness the death on 26 January of Dr Andrew Spaull, formerly Reader in the Education Faculty, Monash University.

Andy (pictured here in 1982) was an outstanding teacher, researcher and supervisor, notably (although not exclusively) in the field of industrial relations/unionism in education. He was also a committed unionist. Former NTEU General Secretary Grahame McCulloch observing that “Andy was emblematic of all the good things about NTEU members.”

NTEU passes on its condolences to Andy’s family and friends.

Paul Rodan, friend and former PhD supervisor.

NTEU ADVOCATE • vol. 26 no.2 • July 2019 • www.nteu.org.au/advocate • page 47

 I want to join NTEU  I am currently a member & wish to update my details PLEAsE COMPLETE ALL sECTIONs. Information on this form is needed for aspects of NTEU’s work. Privacy statement: nteu.org.au/privacy

A YOUR PERsONAL DETAILs

B YOUR EMPLOYMENT DETAILs

TITLE

INSTITUTION/EMPLOyER

|SURNAME

GIVEN NAMES

CAMPUS

HOME ADDRESS

fACULTy/COLLEGE

|STATE | MALE

SUbURb

DATE Of bIRTH

/

/

|POSTCODE

DEPT/SCHOOL MAIL CODE/bLDG CODE

 fEMALE  NON-bINARy

INCL ROOM NO.

wORk PHONE

POSITION

INCL AREA CODE

MObILE PHONE

EG: LECTb, HEw4

wORk EMAIL

STEP/INCREMENT

OTHER EMAIL

yOUR EMPLOyMENT GROUP

HAVE yOU PREVIOUSLy bEEN AN NTEU MEMbER?  yES. AT wHICH INSTITUTION?

C YOUR EMPLOYMENT CATEgORY & TERM

 FULL TIME  PART TIME

 FIXED TERM CONTRACT

DATE Of ExPIRy ______________________

D PAYMENT METHOD

ChOOsE either

FEEs = 1% GROss ANNUAL sALARy except for casuals/sessionals – see below

CAsUAL/sEssIONAL:

INDICATE ANNUAL sALARy RANGE

1 2

OR

 Under $20,000  $20,000–$29,999  $30,000–$49,999  $50,000 or more

3

ChOOsE either

1 PAYROLL DEDUCTION AUTHORITY

2

OR

3

annual salary range

Monthly

Under $20,000 $20,000–$29,999 $30,000–$49,999 $50,000 or more

AVAILABLE TO ALL MEMBERS

— — —

|ACCT NO.

 MONTHLy  QUARTERLy  HALf-yEARLy  ANNUALLy

|DATE

3 CREDIT CARD

AVAILABLE TO ALL MEMBERS

| | ExPIRy |DATE

5% dISCOUNT fOR ANNUAL dIRECT dEBIT

— — — —

— — — —

— — — —

SIGNATURE You may resign by email (national@nteu.org.au) or by written notice to your Division or Branch Secretary. Where you cease to be an eligible member, resignation shall take effect on the date the notice is received or on the day specified in your notice, whichever is later. In any other case, you must give at least two weeks notice.

E MEMBERsHIP DECLARATION

— —

☛

 VISA /

— —

 MONTHLy  QUARTERLy  HALf-yEARLy  ANNUALLy

I hereby authorise the Merchant to debit my Card account with the amount and at intervals specified above and in the event of any change in the charges for these goods/services to alter the amount from the appropriate date in accordance with such change. This authority shall stand, in respect of the above specified Card and in respect of any Card issued to me in renewal or replacement thereof, until I notify the Merchant in writing of its cancellation. Standing Authority for Recurrent Periodic Payment by Credit Card.

fOR ASSISTANCE IN COMPLETING THIS fORM, PLEASE CALL 03 9254 1910 F sCAN & EMAIL TO:

please sign & date

I hEREby APPLy FOR MEMbERshIP OF NTEU, ANy bRANCh & ANy AssOCIATED bODy EsTAbLIshED AT My wORkPLACE DATE

I hereby authorise the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) APCA User ID No.062604 to arrange for funds to be debited from my/our account at the financial institution identified and in accordance with the terms described in the Direct Debit Request (DDR) Service Agreement. Full text of DDR at www.nteu.org.au/ddr

processed on the 16th of the month or following working day

 MASTERCARD

NAME ON CARD — — — —

ALL SMALL PRINT ON THIS fORM IS REPRODUCED AT NTEU.ORG.AU/ jOIN/sMALL_ PRINT

processed on the 15th of the month or following working day

| NAME |&bRANCH ADDRESS

SIGNATURE

SIGNATURE

$104 $156 $208 $260

fINANCIAL INSTITUTION

ACCOUNT NAME

☛

annual

I hereby authorise the Institution or its duly authorised servants and agents to deduct from my salary by regular instalments, dues and levies (as determined from time to time by the Union), to NTEU or its authorised agents. All payments on my behalf and in accordance with this authority shall be deemed to be payments by me personally. This authority shall remain in force until revoked by me in writing. I also consent to my employer supplying NTEU with updated information relating to my employment status.

INSTITUTION

2 DIRECT DEBIT

$52 $78 $104 $130

Office use only: Membership no.

If kNOwN

SIGNATURE

CARD NO.

half-yearly

$26 $39 $52 $65

|STAff PAyROLL NO. |HEREby AUTHORISE |DATE

I INSERT yOUR NAME

☛

Quarterly

$8.67 $13 $17.33 $21.67

Members are required to pay dues and levies as set by the Union from time to time in accordance with NTEU Rules.

Casual/sessional rates are adjusted in March each year.

Further information on financial obligations, including a copy of the NTEU Rules, is available from your Branch or at www.nteu.org.au/rules.

NOT AVAILABLE TO CASUAL/SESSIONAL MEMBERS

Of yOUR ADDRESS

— — —

fees are based on estimated annual salary range as indicated in section C, at left

CAsUAL/sEssIONAL:

I INSERT yOUR NAME

bSb

CAsUAL/sEssIONAL MEMBERsHIP FEEs

Choose one only

FULL TIME, PART TIME, FIXED TERM CONTRACT:

If kNOwN

 ACADEMIC sTAFF  TEACHING & RESEARCH  RESEARCH ONLy  TEACHING INTENSIVE

MEMBERsHIP FEEs

Choose one only

 CAsUAL/sEssIONAL

HR PER wk OR fRACTION (EG: 0.6) ___________

fULL TIME EQUIVALENT

 GENERAL/PROFEssIONAL sTAFF  RESEARCH ONLy  OTHER: __________________________

ARE yOU AUSTRALIAN AbORIGINAL OR TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER?  yES USE My HOME ADDRESS fOR ALL MAILING

☛

|GROSS ANNUAL SALARy NExT |MONTH INCREMENT DUE

CLASSIfICATION LEVEL

OR HOME PHONE

national@nteu.org.au jOIN ONLINE AT NTEU.ORg.AU/jOIN National Tertiary Education Union, National Office PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia ph 03 9254 1910 • fax 03 9254 1915

OR POsT TO:

NteU National Office PO box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205

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