A platform
for renewal

We love our university – and we are ambitious for what it could be.

We also believe in the importance of unions: working together to make our work and our world a better place.

We also recognise things could be much better.

The managerial experiment with higher education has failed.

While university executive salaries and senior managerial numbers soar, student-staff ratios have deteriorated, workloads continuously rise and casual forms of employment proliferate. Management inflicts wave after wave of arbitrary, dysfunctional ‘change initiatives.’

It is time to stop the rot.

Our union branch also needs renewal.

It has become the plaything of Branch Committee factionalists. We need a union that is welcoming. Where differences of view are not met with abuse and slander. A leadership that provides creative, effective industrial strategy.

Vote for NTEU Renewal

For the many, not the few

Strikes are sometimes necessary – but other industrial tactics are possible.

We need a growing membership, and leadership listening to all of us.

The Branch Committee factionalists only achieved 20% support among union members for their final stance against last year’s EBA and barely 3% of the University population at large.

We need a union for the many not the few.

Change is vital but we need to set priorities and chart a clever course.

The union has limited resources and we have limited voluntary time. While we have views on a wide range of issues, we are standing with a commitment to pursue three major objectives.

We’re entitled to decent work at a decent University. But first we need a decent union.

Our aims

We are standing with a commitment to pursue three major objectives.

Expand each section to read full details.

  • Management increases our workloads year after year.

    New IT systems ‘automate’ systems of management control, increase our working time, and reduce our understanding of one another’s roles. Student numbers are increasing while teaching and professional staff roles stagnate. Decasualisation initiatives in the EBA are hijacked by management to minimise the prospect of long-term casuals actually getting a fair chance of ongoing work.

    Our latest EBA has important provisions for monitoring and potentially controlling workloads and provisions for decasualisation that need substantive not formalistic implementation.

    If elected, we will work to bring these provisions to life to make a difference for academic and professional staff members alike.

  • The increase in managerial ranks has been relentless. And what do managers do to justify their existence? They launch endless rounds of ‘change’. More often than not these initiatives are poorly thought through and highly disruptive. They typically result in less efficient outcomes. The resulting gaps in systems impose on us more hours of work.

    If elected we will work to bring more discipline and coordination to our rights on change. Lessons from this will inform the development of standards we will pursue locally and take to the next round of EBA negotiations.

    As a minimum we will endeavour to generalise responses to management’s endless changes so that management’s ability to fragment and isolate individuals subjected to ‘change’ and potential redundancy is reduced.

  • Improving our working lives won’t come with nice words to management or resolutions from union bodies. It requires effective union organisation.

    Our union branch has weak workplace structures and attendance at membership meetings is low. We need to nurture and consolidate deep roots in our faculties, schools and portfolios.

    A network of workplace reps needs to take up issues day-to-day, and keep the branch aware of staff concerns as soon as possible. If elected we’ll make this a top priority.

    Without improvements at the grassroots, it will be impossible to get a step change in membership levels, improvements in job quality and change processes.