Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

A worker from another university spoke about the party a new chancellor threw for themselves, saying: 'The university hired an event management contractor despite having countless staff with event experience. The installation was followed by a VIP luncheon for 80 guests. This came at the same time as staff were advised they could no longer travel, a hiring freeze was implemented and job cuts were imminent.' Another spoke about new fountains purchased for the engineering building at the university, saying: 'They're made of Italian granite which cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Meanwhile, we have mass lay-offs and cuts to research funding. Our own mountains here are made of granite.' Finally, a Griffith University worker noted the university purchased the Treasury casino building for $67.5 million at the same time as a round of redundancies and restructuring was happening. They said, 'It seems the only way that you could realise the strategic investment in the casino building was by getting rid of staff.' This is the end result of the Liberals' and Nationals' transformation of universities. They used to be institutions of learning and research; today, they are investment funds with educational facilities attached.

The most immediate victims of this transition are staff and students. While vice-chancellors are living large, 68 per cent of people employed in the sector are employed on casual or fixed-term contracts.

As much as Senator Henderson wants to defend the chancellors, I'm here to say they should be held to account. If you had given workers fairly paid, permanent jobs, I guess that might have impacted the Italian-granite fountain budget! That's why they've got so many people on casual arrangements—to make sure those fountains can be built with Italian granite.

On top of the casualisation, there's the wage-theft crisis in the industry. According to the NTEU, the total amount of wage theft already uncovered at universities has reached $226 million, with another $168 million pending. When you put all this together you get a very clear picture of the university management acting in their own interests rather than the interests of students, staff and the broader public and national interest. The NTEU report says:

University staff constantly report to the NTEU the opaque, incoherent and inconsistent decision making coming out of university managements who have not acted in the interests of the community.

One of the most stunning examples given in the report is from the University of Wollongong, where the Interim Vice-Chancellor—a partner at an advisory firm called KordaMentha—has hired his own firm to conduct a wide-ranging review of operations and people. This is at the same time that the university is imposing mass job cuts to save money. Another example is given of a whole team of staff being forced to attend a pointless workshop on how to use LinkedIn, only to later find out that one of their managers is friends with the person who runs the workshops and charges thousands of dollars to facilitate them. It's a breathtaking conflict of interest, and I encourage everyone to read the NTEU report, even Senator Henderson. She might learn something about universities because it's very eye opening.

We aren't sitting on our hands. Just this week, the Minister for Education, Jason Clare, announced the government would be establishing an expert council on governance for universities. This was a recommendation for priority action in the Australian Universities Accord interim report. The expert council will look at transparency and accountability processes, including the way remuneration policies are developed for senior university staff. Minister Clare told the Australian on Monday that the council would ensure that 'consideration is given to comparable scale and complexity of public service entities such as government departments and ensure remuneration policies and packages are publicly reported'.

The council will also crack down on systematic wage theft against academics and lecturers and ensure that these public institutions are meeting workplace obligations—something those opposite refused to do and something Senator Henderson continues to talk against. I talked about some of the disgraceful examples of wage theft in this sector, but all workers should expect their employer to pay them correctly and fairly—regardless of what Senator Henderson says. The measures the Senate have passed this week, including the Universities Accord (Student Support and Other Measures) Bill, go some way to repair the social licence of the sector. The move to clean up university governance is another piece of the puzzle. The opposition should get their hand out of the cookie jar and actually start working with us and put students back at the centre of the university experience.