Teachers in Darwin and Palmerston walk off the job in pay protest

NT teachers walked off the job last week, demanding a pay rise. See how their salaries compares to interstate teachers.

IT WAS a sea of red shirts and signs as hundreds of teachers gathered to protest a four-year wage freeze.

Lead by Australian Education Union NT branch president Michelle Ayres, teachers from across 160 schools in Darwin and Palmerston walked out of classrooms on Friday morning.

Chants of “this is what democracy looks like” and “stand up and fight back” rang out through the Parap market district.

All candidates in tomorrow’s Fannie Bay by-election were invited to speak to the crowd, but only the Greens’ Johnathon Parry attended.

The crowd also heard from Tabby Fudge from the Northern Territory Council of Government School Organisations and Beverly Ratahi from the Taminmin School board.

Michelle Ayres addresses the crowd during Friday’s strike in Parap.

Ms Ayres said the four-hour stop work action was necessary as the current rate of pay for teachers would be detrimental to the future of education in the NT.

“We are struggling to recruit teachers and we are seeing teachers leave and our survey data shows that if we don’t see a change to this we will see teachers leave in droves at the end of the year,” she said.

She said 87.5 per cent of teachers had voted against a four-year wage freeze and after more than a year of negotiating, they had still not received what they asked for.

“We are asking for them to break their wage freeze and offer a real pay rise to our teachers that will keep us competitive with the rest of the country,” she said.

The current salary for Northern Territory teachers is between $77,047 and $110,496.

In Victoria the pay scale is between $72,058 and $108,003, in QLD between $75,471 and $100,186, and in South Australia between $74,769 and $108,441.

Ms Ayres said introducing a four-year pay freeze with cost of living increases continuing to climb will have a huge impact.

“We have a unanimous agreement that we need to be the highest paid teachers in Australia to attract teachers here because the NT is one of the toughest jurisdictions to keep teachers here,” Ms Ayres said.

“We estimate that roughly 90 per cent of our teachers come from outside the NT so we need really strong wages to keep them from leaving and going back to where they come from for better pay, better living conditions, better amenities.”

She said other jurisdictions already had brought in incentives to attract staff.

“We are hearing rumours of offers and bonuses of up to $50,000 to move to places like Bendigo — Darwin is more remote than Bendigo so we need to have our Government stand up and face the fact that the wage freeze is not good for education in the Northern Territory,” she said.

Acting Education Minister Nicole Manison said the government would continue to work with teachers on a solution.

“Unlike the CLP, who sacked 500 teaches and hundreds of millions from the Education budget, we value our amazing teachers and will continue to negotiate with the Union to find a way forward.”

Originally published as Teachers in Darwin and Palmerston walk off the job in pay protest