â—† DELEGATE PROFILE
Professor Peter Dabnichki Engineering, RMIT University RMIT has had a lot of challenges in 2020, some similar to all other institutions and some unique to it. Overseas student numbers have fallen, meaning decreased revenue, everyone had to move to 100% online teaching, learning and working, the entire sector suffered through exclusion from JobKeeper, mass sackings and a wholesale change to funding. The idea of the university as we know it has again fundamentally shifted. While NTEU has resisted the cuts to courses, funding, staff and increases to workload that have wounded higher education and left many students stranded mid-stream as a Union we are again grappling with what we are to do about the future of higher education.
ings and political gatherings' the building blocks of collective engagement. Peter reflects on that time as 'the lesson to take is you can not be a trade union and be politically independent, that is a dogma that regimes love to perpetuate, it's impossible because their policies are against freedom.'
The people who resist these pernicious changes and fight on the frontlines to keep our universities places where new ideas are made and our futures strengthened are our delegates and one of our most experienced and active Union delegates is Professor Peter Dabnichki.
When reflecting on the demands for democratic reform which swept Eastern Europe in 1989 which led Zhivkov to resign Peter says 'very similar to Poland we eventually became the biggest organisation and eventually led to the downfall of the regime.' For all intents and purposes, this was the end of Communist rule in Bulgaria.
Peter has been an academic in Europe, the UK and now Australia. His research is focused around applications of smart technologies in the areas of medicine, sport and biomechanics such as Intelligent systems in medicine and sport, pervasive computing in medicine and sport modelling in biomechanics, biology inspired design, and sport engineering. This is all amazing work, but here we focus on Peter's political life as a radical trade unionist. The first union Peter became an activist in, in Bulgaria, was illegal. 'I started as a unionist in my country which was in a very similar situation to Poland. The communists had union membership which is mandatory, we didn't become part of that and the only way to resist government, which was management really, in day to day work was to create an independent trade union... by virtue of trying to be independent you become immediately political because they didn't tolerate any dissent and always wanted full control.' Peter learned how to organise with others to build power and solidarity 'Yes of course it involved a lot of strikes and meet-
Later on, Peter moved to the UK to continue his academic career and as it turned out found another reason to continue his union activism. 'Very quickly I saw in the post Thatcher years when they started nationalising universities and it didn't matter whether Tories or Labour were in power the policies were exactly the same for universities, which was government control.' Again, to defend higher education and the 'curiosity that must be the heart and leader of research' Peter determined 'there was only one way to resist this' which was to join and to become active against the changes to research funding that both sides of politics were putting forward. 'University funding depended on a research funding model in what became known as the REF... this led to wild swings in university funding, frequently with people being laid off. My first experience with that was when 300 medical researchers were made redundant because of the funding changes.' Like many union leaders the challenges of getting people interested in campaigning for an improved sector is real. 'The way continued next page...
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ADVOCATE VOL. 27 NO. 3 â—† NOV 2020
