Talk presented in Workshop 8: Universities for the rich - the privatisation of Australia's Higher Education sector, at the Now We The People conference, University of Technology, Sydney, 24.8.03

Trish Mullins


We are keenly interested from a social justice viewpoint as well as for the interests of our members about what direction the education system is taking. My background is that I was lucky enough to get to university in New Zealand, at the time when it was pretty well free. You still had to work part-time during the year, and have a job over the breaks, to pay for you accommodation and everything.

When I look at students these days, and see that they are working three jobs, plus during the holidays, and that's just to keep ends together before they then have a HECS debt, it is just incredible. So I was lucky enough to come through that system and to benefit from getting involved in student activism. That was a way to become politically active, politically aware, to get into left wing politics, compared to my small-l liberal background. Through that I got involved in trade unions. Then I came over here, and have been working with the NTEU for eight years, primarily as organising, bargaining, doing some of their legal work.

My focus will be on universities, the sector where I work. John Kaye has covered the appalling realities of privatisation at the school level, and the tragic funding in TAFE, which the universities are trying to emulate. What is the state of the universities before this next 'bad news' hits them?
Universities have been chronically under-funded for years, while student numbers have been going up. You've heard the figure of 20 per cent, and the funding just has been going up anywhere near enough to meet it.

There are people here who have lived and worked and are coming through universities, so you have experienced it yourselves - the crowded lectures where people are crammed in so much that it is a fire safety hazard. Days when you used to have small tutorial groups are over - this workshop is now a 'normal' tutorial group. When tutorial groups were 10 or 12 you could know the names of your students, actually engage them, find out are they really hearing the content of the lectures, critical debate. How can you do that with 30 or 40 in something called a tutorial?

So tutorials are becoming like lectures. Lectures are becoming like the rugby stadium. The other way to deal with resourcing other than getting bigger and bigger groups to deliver to, is to change the nature of the assignments. Your method of checking how the students are going is to use check boxes - it's easier and quicker. Doing less assignments less assessments of students is easier. The time you can spend on each essay you get - you have to race through each one to get to the next.
Universities are starting to look for money wherever they can get it, and students are the obvious answer. They try to creep in expenses on students that used to be free - cost of photocopying for example, or the cost of hiring things - pretty much they charge for anything they can. They look for sponsorship, so you get research centres set up by anyone from BHP through to the drug companies. Clearly they are trying to influence outcomes, are influencing them or at least putting them in doubt.

There is a desperate attempt to get overseas student money. I think it is the fourth highest earner in the country, earning billions of dollars. They are running overseas looking for more students - hey, there's a crisis in Indonesia so can we go over to China and get more students there? Eastern Europe is a new area - can we get people from there?

Universities are marketing. The consequence is that students are coming here - as if I was popped down in Paris, where I couldn't do primary school let alone university - with high expectations on them, needing English, and these students need more help. They are being charged, and so they want an outcome. The pressure from students to the lecturer is: 'look, I've already paid for this degree, it is your responsibility as an academic to get me through it. What are you doing wring? It's not me'.

The expectation comes not only from the student, but also from the managers, where it is bums on seats in the factory, the more money. The more rumours and comments that go back with the student to the effect that 'yes, you too can get a degree', rather than: 'don't go to Australia, it's a dud, it's bad standards and they won't even pass you', the better. So the pressure from management on the academics is to say, 'whatever you do, make sure that you pressure them'. Years ago that pressure came on, but in the media you see that the pressure is on academics. Sometimes it is indirect, but sometimes it is direct pressure to pass students. There are more and more cases of marks being changed, of pressure on academics and overseas students being passed who maybe shouldn't have passed. It is not the fault of overseas students, but the pressure is on.

You also get pressure about funding to ridiculous levels. There is one regional university where they went to the academic staff and said, 'Our department is out of money for photocopying. If you want to photocopy anything, it is out of your own pocket. That is the state of some of the regional universities. We are starting to emulate the TAFE sector where casualisation is the answer. What do you do when money is tight? You put pressure on the salary bill. How do you save on salaries? You get casuals in. Casuals used to be a concept where you largely brought in guest lecturers who were specialists, giving one or two lectures. Now casuals are the way to enter the profession, desperately crawling out of your PhD, with your HECS debt ties to your ankles like concrete boots, crawling into academia. And what do they give you - casual work. Casual work for an academic is between 12 and 14 weeks work, go away, come back for 12 to 14 weeks work, go away again. In one year you would get 24 to 28 weeks work and then you go away.

I know casual academics who have worked in the sector for 15 years and are still casual. They have to do things like car washing and any other casual jobs they can get in between. Of course, they also go onto social welfare, but they don't get the benefit until the money has run out to a certain point.

It is quite scary to see how much like the TAFE sector that universities have become, with so much casualisation. Some program have up to 30 per cent of the teaching delivered by casuals. If you go to places like UTS and UNSW, there are literally thousands of casuals. These are not guest lecturers just popping in. These are people who desperately want permanent work but can't get it.

The consequence is that casuals work their butts off but are only paid for the contact time and a little bit of preparation time. They are not paid for student consultation, to be there when a student has a problem or a question. The pressure is on them, and the impact is on the quality. How can you have quality when you are just there for 14 weeks and paid for the hours of the lectures or tutorials that you do. The students complain because they can't find these people.

Then the people employed on a continuing basis are meant to supervise the casuals. So the more casuals you have the more work that creates on your workload. When you talk about workloads, when you get student loads going up by 20 per cent on average, and no staff replacement, there is an immediate workload issue. Add to this that you have to be accountable for a lot of things, and you have to write a hundred and one reports for the people who want to audited everything you can possible do - student evaluation, annual performance assessment, reports for increment.

The end result is higher and higher expectations, and we are seeing more and more academics and general staff becoming stressed and going off on stress claims, heart attacks and more. That's now.

Then we get the government agenda to solve all this. The traditional answer from students and academics is for funding to be significantly increased and indexed for inflation, wage increases and increases in student numbers. The government's answer is: 'no, we'll come up with a new funding scheme which is linked to the cost of each discipline'. A law student will be funded for $1,400, and a medicine student for $15,000. That doesn't cover all the costs.

John Kaye has explained about the $1.46 billion. When you claw away the sneaky hand thing, it comes down to about $750 million, and then much of the rest has strings attached. What's the result? You have chronic underfunding, the government's not going to give you enough money, let's charge the students! That's a good old fashioned technique and they will see how much they can keep on squeezing it out of students. That is going to be the worst aspect of the coming scene - an underfunded sector and charging students means you only get the rich students going to universities.

John Kaye has talked about the hierarchy of universities that is being created. That will be a definite outcome. If you go to Charles Sturt, Southern Cross, UNE - they will be the teaching and nursing universities with no funds for research. Their teaching contact hours will go up. They will be like TAFEs. Then you can go to Sydney University and UNSW, University of Western Australia and so on - they get money from sponsors at the big end of town, they get money from rich people when they die and give back because they have fine memories of going to that university, they get money from overseas students, they get big research grants. They only rely on the government for less than 50 per cent of their income. But places like the University of New England rely on the government for virtually all their money. They have very little in the way of bringing in overseas students and other funds.

Now university money is starting to be thrown to the private sector - Bond University is completely private. There are peculiar little rightwing religious places getting funding - they are teaching nursing and teaching, and taking money out of the system.

If we go the way of New Zealand, just as you see in the school sector, more and more government money will go to private universities. In New Zealand, in the equivalent of TAFE, it became a free-for-all. Anyone could put up their hand for money, and the private sector profit-makers put up their hands for the profitable areas, and left the public sector to handle the course that it is hard to make any money from.

An area not focused on in the Nelson Review is the government's effort to silence two vocal critics - the student movement of the National Union of Students and campus unions, and the National Tertiary Education Union and some other campus trade unions, like the CPSU and ASU. But they have named the NTEU in parliament, so we are funnily enough up there with the wharfies as a great threat to the government.

Things on their agenda directly attack the voice of those two groups. For students they want to bring in voluntary student unionism. Clearly taking the money away silences students immediately. It will be difficult for them to get that past the Senate but we can't take anything for granted.
The other aspect is that they want to limit the right of workers to take industrial action. They say that if your industrial action is going to impact a particular group of people, then they make it very hard for you to take industrial action. If you are a nurse, an ambulance driver, a teacher, a social worker, and health worker, what does industrial action do?

Automatically it hurts someone. That is the point, you want to say, 'hullo, I'm really upset about something. I want you to change something'. The government is trying to change the law to make it virtually impossible for us to take industrial action. The excuse they have is that we had a ban on producing results at about eight universities in the last round of bargaining. They are now trying to amend the Act for people in education taking industrial action. Of course that goes against all your International Labour Organisation conventions, all your rights to take industrial action.
They are tying $404 million of the new funding to the promotion of individual contracts and to lessening the role of any student, union or state government representation on university councils. So if you don't give those two things - provide for individual contracts and remove students, staff and political appointments from the governing bodies - you will get an even more repugnant situation.

They talk about flexible working arrangements - that's means longer working hours. They talk about a focus on the direct relationship with employees - that means no involvement of the union. They talk about a fair and open performance management system - that means filling out endless forms to prove that you are doing what you know you are doing anyway. They talk about salary movement linked to the individual's performance - that is gender discriminatory and rewards the people who were going to do well anyway, and for the people who are not performing well, that is not going to make them perform any better - and it keeps money out of a general pay rise.

They also want to actively offer individual employment arrangements, the Australian Workplace Agreements. Many people may not realise the impact of AWAs, but basically they are saying: 'here are your conditions, take it or leave it'. If you want the job, you take it. If you don't want the job on those conditions, you can walk away. If I want a promotion as a n academic, they can say, 'sign this individual contract or you won't get the promotion'. If I want to change my hours coming back from maternity leave, they can say, 'sorry, can't do that unless you sing this individual contract'. So employers are put at a real tactical advantage to get you to sing up to worse and worse conditions. People will say, what's the problem with individual contracts? Academics especially should be able to look after themselves. But if you look at what we've done through collective bargaining for bereavement leave for instance, we've got grandmother listed, sibling, parents, de facto relations and so on - that took 20 to 30 years of collective bargaining. Four weeks annual leave eventually in law - that was through collective bargaining, not through an individual asking their employer.

Incrementally through collective bargaining we have improved parental leave and obtained better wages, academic and intellectual freedom. As soon as its an individual contract, the first thing you are told is that you can't talk to anyone else about the terms. You don't know what they are paid, what annual leave, what sabbatical leave, and you are doing the same job.

The government is trying to use its money to impose its industrial relations agenda on people, and that is scary.

Trish Mullins is NSW Legal/Industrial Officer with the National Tertiary Education Union, which covers over 25,000 employees, primarily university staff, but also TAFE staff in some states. In other states, TAFE is covered by the Australian Education Union.