SENTRY Artificial Intelligence
Psychological Reality or Technological Mimicry?
Kick 'em when they're down Budget 2020
Short term gain for longer term pain
Job-Ready Graduates bill becomes law
Published by National Tertiary Education Union
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nov 2020
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vol. 1 no. 6
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CONTENTS
Budget 2020
Artificial Intelligence
Frydenberg's Budget is a case of short term gain that will result in longer term pain.
Professor Daniel Stoljar asks is AI psychological reality or just technological mimicry?
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Cover by Dmitry Ageev/123rf
Sentry is a free online news magazine for NTEU members and Australian higher education staff. Sentry will be published during the COVID-19 shutdown in between publication of the Union's regular member magazine, Advocate. Sentry will be published in May, June, August, September, October and December. Advocate will be published as usual in July and November.
10 Kick 'em when they're down Despite the NTEU's best efforts, the Morrison Government’s Job-Ready Graduates legislation was passed in the Senate by the barest of margins.
SENTRY ISSN 2652-5992
Editorial 01 In case you missed it... 02 Coping with COVID changes 12 Union win in ballot at Curtin 14
Published by National Tertiary Education Union PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 Australia ABN 38 579 396 344 All text & images ©NTEU 2020 unless stated Publisher
Matthew McGowan
Editor
Alison Barnes
Production Manager
Paul Clifton
Editorial Assistance
Anastasia Kotaidis
Sentry is available online free as a PDF and e-book at www.nteu.org.au/sentry
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EDITORIAL
Building on our strengths and defending our achievements As the year draws to a close, we should stop and draw breath for a minute and reflect on what we've been forced to deal with: the biggest crisis the higher education sector has ever faced.
Throughout 2020, union members have campaigned to protect as many jobs as possible in the face of an uncaring government...
Alison Barnes, National President
We have had to confront bushfires, hailstorms, floods and, with COVID19, the near-total collapse of the international student market, the challenges of working remotely, massive revenue shortfalls at many universities and, worst of all, the disappearance of thousands of jobs, which has hit insecurely employed staff especially hard.
At the same time, tenacious campaigning by members helped to expose 13 (at least) universities – a third of the sector – involved in varieties of wage theft. We also took Federal Court action against JMC Academy, a private higher education provider, over allegations of long-standing wage theft and sham contracting. The case is continuing.
Throughout 2020, union members have campaigned to protect as many jobs as possible in the face of an uncaring government that changed JobKeeper rules 3 times to prevent access by higher education workers.
Throughout all this, the Union has remained strong and continues to grow, with membership having reached its highest level ever. Levels of activism and involvement are harder to quantify but are likely to match or exceed anything we have seen. We will need all of this strength and more as we enter the next bargaining round in 2021. We should acknowledge the work of our workplace Delegates, Committees, Caucuses and Councillors who have continued to selflessly give their time for the good of the entire membership and the sector despite their own working lives facing so much disruption this year.
We have had to deal with shortsighted and over-paid VCs, most of whom weren’t prepared to protect jobs or defend the sector when the Government announced its JobReady Graduates package, which was narrowly passed by the Senate on 8 October (see p.10). But not before we had run our Fund Uni Fairly campaign. Members across Australia in their many thousands petitioned, wrote parliamentary submissions, sent emails, attended snap actions, and lobbied politicians to demonstrate their opposition. We sincerely thank independent Senators Jacqui Lambie and Rex Patrick, the Greens and the ALP for their support in opposing these unfair laws.
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We need to build on the strengths we have honed during this most difficult of years and organise our workplaces so we can continue to grow our ability to defend not only our conditions of work but the future of the sector. As always, we are stronger together.
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CATCH UP
NEWS & CAMPAIGNS
In case you missed it.... State of the Uni Survey NTEU is currently running a special 2020 COVID-19 edition of NTEU State of the Uni survey, usually repeated every 2 years to establish longitudinal information about university staff attitudes to their work and workplace. This special interim survey will focus on the impacts of COVID-19 on workers in the University sector. It should take less than 20 minutes to complete the survey.
Take the survey File-Signature
Budget 2020: NTEU response NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes discusses the failures of Josh Frydenberg's Budget in our Budget response video. 'This budget does nothing to help the 12,000 people who work in our universities who are already standing in unemployment queues after being denied access to JobKeeper on three separate occasions'.
Watch the video M
National Council 2020
Annual Report
Right to Protest
The first ever online NTEU National Council was held on 30-31 October. A full report will appear in the upcoming issue of Advocate.
NTEU Annual Report 2019-20 was presented to 2020 National Council and is available online for members.
On 13 October, NTEU won a case in the NSW Supreme Court, defending the rights of members to hold COVID-safe protests against higher education cuts.
Read the report a Sentry
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BUDGET
POLICY & LOBBYING
Budget 2020
Short term gain = longer term pain The 2020-21 Federal Budget very much turns the expression that there is no long-term gain without short term pain on its head. This Budget delivers short gain but will inevitably lead to longer term pain. The Budget delivered record levels of public expenditure, budget deficits and government debt. In 2020-21 total government payments will be a record $677b, an increase of 22.8% over 2019-20. This represents 34.8% of GDP, well above the average of about 25% since the turn of the millennium. Sizeable deficits are forecast over the next four years. Net Commonwealth Government debt is expected to be in the order of $1,000 billion ($1 trillion) or 44% of GDP in 2023-24. continued overpage...
Paul Kniest Director (Policy & Research)
Image: Annie Spratt/Unsplash
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BUDGET
POLICY & LOBBYING
We fear that even if there is a change in government, the short-term gains included in this Budget will inevitably be followed by longer term pain.
Figure 1 clearly also shows that the record increases in government spending is a short-term temporary boost to the economy.
crisis of deficits and debts has merely been relegated to reserves bench rather than permanently retired from Australia’s political discourse.
In addition to the short-term gains from this boost in public spending the Budget, at cost of $17.8 billion over the forward estimates, also brings forward stage 2 of the Government’s tax cuts. All other things being equal, this reduces the ongoing level of government revenue or income and in a comparative sense (structural budget outcome) puts the Budget in a worse position into the future (refer to Budget Paper 4 Chart 3).
There are already muttering amongst some of the more conservative members of the Coalition Government that once a vaccine or effective treatment for COVID-19 has been found, there will a return to more traditional conservative economic lectures about escalating government debt, living within means, and tightening belts. Given the permanent tax cuts result in larger underlying or structural deficits this will inevitably result in austere (back in the black) Budgets which will achieved by cutting public spending on public services including welfare, health and education – not by increasing taxes or living with high level of government debt.
While the proponents of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) might see this as an affirmation of the fact that the size of Budget deficits don’t matter, the more likely explanation is that the rhetoric around the fiscal
We fear that even if there is a change in government, the short-term gains included in this Budget will inevitably be followed by longer term pain.
Figure 1: Australian Government Budget 2001-02 to 2023-24 Receipts, Payments and Underlying Cash Balance ($billions) $800b
Payments Receipts
$600b $400b $200b
2001-2007
-$200b
4
2008-2013
2014-2020
Forecast Underlying Cash Balance
2001-02 Budget
2008-09 Budget
2014-15 Budget
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november 2020
A budget business wanted Numerous commentators have said that this as the Budget that business wanted. One only need look at the major initiatives announced as part of the Budget to see that, apart from the cost bringing forward personal income tax cuts, it strongly favours providing support for business. This includes a total of almost $70 billion of commitments over the forward estimates on: • Allowing business to fully write the cost of investments in year of purchase ($26.7 billion). • Extension of JobKeeper payments ($15.6 billion). • Loss carry back provisions (allowing business to claw back tax paid in previous years) ($4.8 billion). • JobMaker hiring credit (wage subsidy for those under 35) ($4 billion).
BUDGET
POLICY & LOBBYING • Modern manufacturing strategy ($1.5 billion). • Apprentice wage subsidies ($1.2 billion). • Various infrastructure programs (totalling $10.7 billion). By contrast, the initiatives that provide additional public service, social or welfare support are far more modest totalling less than $10 billion over the forward estimates. This includes: • Further support for pensioners and other welfare recipients (additional two $250 payments) ($2.6 billion). • Additional aged care support ($2 billion).
...the initiatives that provide additional public service, social or welfare support are far more modest totalling less than $10 billion over the forward estimates.
• Access to COVID-19 vaccines and consumables ($1.8 billion). • Supporting hospitals ($1.1 billion). • University guaranteeing Medicare ($1 billion). • Research support ($1 billion).
• R&D Tax incentive ($2 billion).
continued overpage...
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BUDGET
POLICY & LOBBYING
These short-term temporary gains in higher education will be offset by longer term with the passage of the Government’s Jobs-Ready Graduate legislation...
A very blokey budget
Research sugar fix
A number of commentators, foremost amongst them Dannielle Woods from the Grattan Institute, have described this a very blokey budget. Ms Wood notes that the sectors hit hardest by COVID 19, namely hospitality, tourism, the arts, recreation, administrative services and which have a higher proportion of female workers were not those supported in the Budget.
In addition to the initiates outlined above, the Budget also included a $1 billion increase in the level of university research support funding.
Instead the Budget provides greatest assistance to what might be described as the is helping high-vis male dominated industries such as construction, energy, defence and manufacturing. There was criticism of the Budget for not specifically addressing the issues around the cost of childcare and the very high effective marginal tax rates faced by parents wishing to work fulltime.
Figure 2: Research support funding, 2019-20 to 2023-24
1,918
$2,000m $1,500m $1,000m
902
927
929
938
2021-22
2022-23
2023-24
$500m
2019-20
2020-21
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However, as Figure 2 shows this like the rest of the Budget delivers a short-term temporary sugar which id here this financial year and gone the next. This short-term boost is also true for the other two new inanities announced as part of the Budge: 50,000 new short-term courses, and 12,000 new Commonwealth Supported Places (CSPs). These short-term temporary gains in higher education will be offset by longer term with the passage of the Government’s Jobs-Ready Graduate legislation which slashed public investment per university place by 15% per student. A more detailed analysis of the Budget and the Job-Ready Graduates bill will be covered in the upcoming edition of the Advocate.
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Artificial Intelligence
TECHNOLOGY
MEMBER EXPERTS
Psychological Reality or Technological Mimicry? The Chief Scientist of Australia, Dr Alan Finkel, has proposed a ‘Turing Certificate’ to deal with what he sees as a new and pressing moral challenge: the ethical implications of artificial intelligence (AI). The reference is to Alan Turing, the UK mathematician who in 1950 published Computing Machinery and Intelligence, widely regarded as the foundational document of AI. The project of AI, as Finkel characterises it, is 'to produce human intelligence without the blood, tissue, and goo.' But Finkel’s proposed certificate conflates two different notions of AI. The first raises a moral challenge that is new but not pressing, the second raises a challenge that is pressing but not fundamentally new. The conflation here is not unique to Finkel; in fact, it is a feature of a general anxiety about AI, present in different forms in both traditional and social media. He is just an eloquent and distinguished example. continued overpage... Alter the android, National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation (Mirakian), Tokyo, Japan (Maximalfocus/Unsplash)
Daniel Stoljar ANU
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TECHNOLOGY
MEMBER EXPERTS What are these two notions of AI?
Since those systems could in principle come about in artificial things rather than naturally occurring things, you could have artificial intelligence, human intelligence without the goo.
Caption
One notion – let’s call it psychological AI – has its home in the attempt to understand the psychological capacities and achievements of human beings, the capacities to speak a language, think, reason, perceive and so on. This is a huge and multi-faceted task that draws on many disciplines including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science and others. A guiding idea behind psychological AI is sometimes called the computational theory of mind. This is both an empirical hypothesis and recommendation for research. The hypothesis is that humans have the capacities we do because we have various computational systems. The recommendation is that to understand those capacities you need to understand the systems. From this point of view, to understand how we speak a language, for example, you would need to understand the underlying computational systems – how they work, how they interact with other systems, how they develop in individuals, what their evolutionary history is, and so on. The computational theory of mind means that AI is possible in principle. Suppose we have the capacity to understand a language because we have certain computational systems. Since those systems could in principle come about in artificial things rather than naturally occur-
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ring things, you could have artificial intelligence, human intelligence without the goo. At the same time, the likelihood of AI in this sense is extremely remote – a ‘fantasy’ according to scientists Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis. You don’t need to be a Cartesian dualist to say this – someone who thinks the mind can’t be explained scientifically at all. You just need to appreciate how intricate the computational systems underlying thought or language must be, and how limited our current understanding of them is. What pressing moral challenge does AI in this psychological sense present? Basically, none. Since the likelihood of AI in this sense is so low the question of how to react if it occurred is not an urgent practical matter. That is not to say that this ‘what if’ is uninteresting. On the contrary, questions like this are well worth investigating since they teach us about the scope of moral and other principles. But they are not questions of immediate moral concern. It is like asking what would have happened if the Neanderthals had not died out in their evolutionary competition with humans, and continued to live amongst us, perhaps (unfortunately) as second-class citizens – an excellent question, but not an urgent one. Does this mean that there are no pressing ethical questions surrounding AI? No, because the second
MEMBER EXPERTS notion of AI does raise urgent and serious moral questions. This notion of AI, technological AI, has its home in the attempt to build technologies that duplicate or mimic things that humans do. That is the notion at issue when people express concern about driverless cars, drone warfare, or the huge data sets used in medical diagnosis, advertising, and political campaigns. Technological AI is quite different from psychological AI. Mimicry is not reality. That a machine mimics something we do within limits does not begin to show it’s doing what we do when we speak or reason. Moreover, as psychologist Chaz Firestone has recently pointed out, contemporary AI machines often make mistakes no human would dream of making – that’s good evidence their underlying computational nature is quite different from our own. Technology on its own is neither good nor bad, but it can greatly amplify the human capacity for both. It allows a factory to sack its employees but also opens up the possibility of new jobs in other domains. It can give you the power to wipe out an entire city, but also to produce a vaccine for COVID-19. Technological AI is no different. It places unprecedented levels of information seemingly at our fingertips but presents it in way that may entrench existing inequalities – a point explored in different ways by many
different writers, including Ruha Benjamin, Kate Crawford, and Safiya Noble. No wonder so many universities, such as Oxford and ANU, have established centres to research the ethics of AI. Interesting and important as they are, the underlying form of these challenges is familiar from an historical point of view. The struggle against the de-humanising effects of technologies and the people that control them did not start with Turing’s 1950 article. Charlie Chaplin portrayed it brilliantly in Modern Times well before Turing wrote his famous paper. And don’t forget Blake’s dark satanic mills.
CaptionChaplin and the feeding machine in Charlie a scene from Modern Times, 1936 (United Artists/YouTube)
While the real target of Finkel’s Turing certificate is this second notion, his rhetoric often invokes the first. 'We want rules that allow us to trust AI, just as they allow us to trust our fellow humans', he writes. But if ‘AI’ here is the psychological notion, we don’t at present need such rules, and if ‘AI’ is the technological notion, the proper object of trust is not AI systems but the human beings that make and use them. None of this is to criticise Finkel’s underlying idea; having a certificate of the sort he suggests may be helpful in dealing with technological AI. But, while we should of course try to react to the moral challenges that confront us, a big part of doing so is identifying them correctly.
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Technology on its own is neither good nor bad, but it can greatly amplify the human capacity for both.
Daniel Stoljar is Professor of Philosophy at ANU
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FUNDING
NEWS & CAMPAIGNS
Kick 'em when they're down Job-Ready Graduates Bill becomes law Despite the NTEU's best efforts, the Morrison Government’s Job-Ready Graduates legislation was passed in the Senate by the barest of margins – just one vote – on 8 October.
We also hope that the price that Senator Griff sold his vote for is worth it to a generation of students who will now be burdened with overwhelming debt...
This was after a frenetic few days of last-minute campaigning by members and supporters to win Centre Alliance’s vote, after independent Senators Jacqui Lambie and Rex Patrick publicly declared they would oppose the Bill. The campaigning included a giant mobile billboard calling on Centre Alliance (CA) to vote against the Bill, which was driven around CA MP Rebekha Sharkie’s electorate of Mayo over a long weekend, and a snap online action on 2 October where over 300 members, students and supporters around the country sent emails, social media posts and phoned the CA MPs’ offices.
Michael Evans National Organiser (Media & Engagement)
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CA Senator Stirling Griff, whose vote was the one that got the Bill over the line, announced a few days before the vote that he would support the Bill, saying that it would provide
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'funding certainty' to universities from next year, and end the funding freeze imposed by the Government in 2019.
'Certainty' means cuts But the only 'funding certainty' that Centre Alliance has delivered to Australia’s universities is an overall funding cut of $1 billion. It is especially disappointing that Centre Alliance has chosen to ignore the thousands of constituents who contacted them to oppose the Bill, something that we hope South Australian voters remember at the next federal election. We also hope that the price that Senator Griff sold his vote for is worth it to a generation of students who will now be burdened with overwhelming debt, or deterred from seeking a university education because of the cost. The legislation will strip $1 billion of funding from universities, more than double the cost of many courses and in particular arts and humanities courses, and make it more difficult
NEWS & CAMPAIGNS for many students to go to university. It will jeopardise more university jobs, increase insecure employment and the quality of education provided to students. It is also extremely disappointing that this has been done with the complicity of the majority of Vice-Chancellors who supported the package, and we ask them to explain why they supported a package that will make university even more expensive for their students, while reducing the funding for research and teaching overall. Thousands of NTEU members, supporters, students and friends, including student organisations NUS and CAPA, signed petitions, wrote submissions, attended online and in-person rallies, posted on social media, and wrote, phoned and emailed politicians expressing their opposition to this unfair legislation, under the banner of the Fund Uni Fairly campaign (see the October edition of Sentry for more details of the myriad of activities we did to convince the crossbench Senators to oppose the Bill). It’s fair to say that our vigorous campaign was a significant factor in persuading both Jacqui Lambie and Rex Patrick to vote against the Bill.
Funding & jobs crisis continues
that is smashing our universities as a result of COVID-19, with over 12,000 jobs lost and a revenue shortfall of nearly $3 billion. The author of this mess is Dan Tehan and the Coalition Government, which has completely abandoned Australian universities during their worst ever crisis. Rather than stepping in with a robust support package, the Liberals and Nationals have pushed the cost of the crisis onto students and the university workforce. Livelihoods and careers are being destroyed and irreparably damaged. This Government has used the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to implement an agenda which sees less funding for universities to teach and research, more debt for students, opens the door to rampant privatisation, and drives up insecure jobs in higher education – its agenda is to cut the heart out of our university sector in what is an ideologically driven vendetta against universities, students and staff.
Above: Independent SA Senator Rex Patrick signing the NTEU's Fund Uni Fairly pledge. Below: Opposition Education Spokesperson, Tanya Plibersek, presenting our Fund Uni Fairly petition, signed by over 15,000 people, in Federal Parliament.
The campaign to repeal this legislation and win fair university funding will continue and run right up to the federal election and beyond. We need a fair and equitable higher education system where obtaining a degree doesn’t depend on your capacity to pay.
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This legislation does nothing to address the funding and jobs crisis
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LA TROBE
MEMBER STORIES
Coping with COVID changes Harm, hope & hypocrisy Having worked for over twelve years at Monash University in a variety of sessional and fixed-term contract roles, I moved to La Trobe University in November 2019. I work as an Academic and Language Skills Advisor and the new position offered me the exciting chance to extend my work with graduate and higher degree research (HDR) students, within a very different institutional context. There was also the benefit of a (slightly) more secure position that was closer to home. It started well, then COVID-19 came. Trying to establish myself in a new position in the shadow of a pandemic has certainly had its challenges, although there have been benefits as well. Fortunately, I had some time to get to know some of my colleagues and tentatively start to plan for how my new position would function. However, the academic year had only just started when the chaos of COVID-19 descended, and we were forced into crisis management and the whole online, workingfrom-home adventure.
Dr Lynda Chapple La Trobe University
Since March, we have made rapid shifts in the ways we work. Gone is the belief that working from home means lower productivity – indeed, many of us feel guilty moving away from the screen, and others work early in the morning or late at night to accommodate
To tell your COVID-19 story to the NTEU member community, please contact Helena Spyrou
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MEMBER STORIES the juggle of home-schooling and childcare. Interesting word, ‘flexibility’. I now run workshops and consultations exclusively on Zoom, but to be online constantly is exhausting. At the end of each day my eyes sting, my back aches and I simply want nothing to do with screens. There’s also a great deal that I miss about being on campus: the chance encounters, the energy of students, campus events, corridor conversations and productive collaborations that arise when we are physically proximate; the lemon-scented gums, the ducks, even the grungy old moat. I work in a wonderful and supportive team and feel it would be so restorative just to meet them for a coffee. The process of structural reorganisation in the wake of COVID-19 has been a little less brutal at La Trobe than at other universities, but has been swift and painful, nonetheless. My team will have lost four out of ten members to voluntary redundancy packages by the end of the process – experienced and highly-valued educators who simply could not face yet another re-structure. At least they had the choice – there will be many others who don’t.
have been dispiriting at best. The upshot, of course, will be far fewer secure jobs across the university. On top of this, there’s the shocking, although not unexpected, antipathy of the Government for the entire sector. I was privileged to have access to free tertiary education and am appalled that our younger people today do not have the same opportunity. That MPs and Senators who have benefitted in this way (many of whom studied arts and humanities) see fit to deny the next generation is the ultimate hypocrisy.
That MPs and Senators who have benefitted in this way (many of whom studied arts and humanities) see fit to deny the next generation is the ultimate hypocrisy.
As I sit down to write this, we are slowly, hopefully, longingly moving out of lockdown. COVID-19 has taught us many things over the past six months or so, but by now, at least here in Victoria, we are simply drained. What is clear though, is the importance of fighting to defend education in a world that needs it more than ever.
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We have been shifted into a different portfolio, had staffing reduced and lost another colleague to a different team. The disruption and uncertainty
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INDUSTRIAL
NEWS & CAMPAIGNS
Union win in ballot at Curtin Members at Curtin University ran a successful campaign to defeat a management attempt to vary the terms of their Enterprise Agreement. A ballot seeking to vary the terms of the Curtin Enterprise Agreement, relinquishing the 2% pay increase scheduled for June 2021, was defeated with a No vote of 55.4% The successful rejection of the University’s drive to attack our salaries unnecessarily sends an important message that WE
value staff and the quality education we deliver over protecting investment reserves and a profit at any cost
against unnecessary wholesale job cuts, and demanding management’s accountability for change will continue.
It also tells the University that NTEU members are a united and powerful voice on campus.
A union is only as strong as its members. We are the only ones championing the protection of our jobs, pay, conditions, and decent funding for higher education.
The fight, however, is not yet over. Our campaign
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