Embrace worker reforms, Birmingham tells universities

The Education Minister has urged universities to modernise their academic workforces.

Education Minister Simon Birmingham. Picture: AAP

Education Minister Simon Birmingham has urged higher education institutions across the country to modernise their academic workforces and seize the opportunity presented by a ruling that strengthens the hand of university managers.

Senator Birmingham yesterday “backed and welcomed” Tuesday’s Fair Work Commission ruling at Murdoch University that sweeps away decades-old restrictions on how academics can be hired, fired and restructured. Similar conditions won decades ago by the National Tertiary Education Union apply across the sector.

A key factor in the commission’s decision was the parlous state of Murdoch’s finances and commentators quickly pointed to three other institutions with deficits — Victoria University, Southern Cross University and Charles Darwin University — as likely to benefit from the precedent.

But union president Jeannie Rea said she would be “very surprised if there are any other universities contemplating going down Murdoch’s path — they would have to be weighing the reputational costs of such a move”. She said a university without protection for academic roles would find it hard to attract quality staff.

Senator Birmingham said reform would allow universities to absorb a proposed 2.5 per cent cut in federal funding for teaching. Productivity has become a battleground as the government argues the sector can absorb a modest cut to funding while universities insist they have been unrelenting in their search for savings.

Consultant Andrew Dempster said the ruling would encourage universities to make more use of academics who focused on teaching rather than research. “Most university enterprise agreements are highly prescriptive in regulating what can be done, by whom, how and when,” he said.

Stuart Andrews, executive ­director of the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association, the university employers’ body, said it would “strengthen the ­resolve” of other institutions.

Former vice-chancellor Jim Barber said the union had insisted on academics’ research rights even though there was a sizeable minority who did no research at all. “The slack was being picked up by an army of casual teachers who can’t find tenured academic jobs,” Dr Barber said. “You get two classes of citizen — a very privileged older generation, tenured with a nice comfortable position, largely unaccountable, and a new generation, smart, bright PhDs who can’t get tenured jobs, only hand-to-mouth teaching.”