When a new government is being formed, the appointment of senior bureaucrats to the public service often tells you as much about how the country will be run, and in whose interests, as does the allocation of ministries to politicians. 
Anthony Albanese has appointed former University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis to lead the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. The appointment has produced murmurs of excitement about a new era of “independent” advice and “data driven” social policy. But anyone familiar with Davis’ record of running public institutions will be filled with a deep sense of foreboding. Within this mild-mannered policy wonk beats the heart of a ruthlessly pragmatic technocrat.
Davis began his career as a doctoral researcher contributing to the Liberal Fraser government’s 1982 review of the federal public service. He later cut his teeth as director-general of the Queensland Department of the Premier and Cabinet during a period of profound restructuring of the state public service.
As Melbourne University vice-chancellor in 2005-19, Davis would occasionally lament the lack of government funding for universities. In practice, however, his strategy for the university was to entrench, and gain competitive advantage in, the “education marketplace” at the direct expense of employees, disadvantaged students and poorer universities.
Soon after his appointment as vice-chancellor, Davis launched the Melbourne Model. This shifted undergraduate education from three-year specialist bachelor degrees to three-year generalist degrees, followed by two-year specialist postgraduate qualifications. While there was some lip service paid to producing graduates with broad knowledge, the change radically narrowed the range of subjects taught, and hundreds of specialist undergraduate degrees were reduced to six. 
The increased amount of time required to complete a specialist qualification, and much higher fees universities are permitted to charge for postgraduate degrees, significantly raised the cost of a University of Melbourne education. This was the intent of the strategy: poorer students would struggle to afford a Melbourne qualification, but the historic prestige of the university meant that it could always attract students who could afford to pay. 
The election of the Rudd Labor government in 2007 presented Davis with an opportunity to influence broader higher education policy. He had worked closely with Rudd in the Queensland public service, and Labor had come into office promising an “education revolution”. Rather than use this moment to advocate the restoration of public funding to universities, Davis pushed for the radical marketisation of funding allocation. Under Davis’ proposal, direct funding of university places was cut in favour of giving students a partially subsidised “learning entitlement”, which they could use to “shop” for a place at any university. Once adopted by the Rudd government, this funding model exacerbated the existing crises in the education system, leading to ballooning class sizes at the larger universities and accelerating the decline of universities in poorer and regional areas. 
To attract students, including lucrative international fee-paying students, Davis set up slush funds to poach well-published academics from other institutions. Universities’ rankings on international league tables are a major factor in international students’ choices about where to study, but are largely determined by academics’ research outputs rather than indicators of teaching quality. So by hiring already established researchers, Davis could game the rankings. 
He could have funded these positions using the university’s massive surpluses, or by taking a cut to his own $1.5 million salary, but insisted that they come from the existing staffing budget. This resulted in the savage 2014 “business improvement plan”, under which 540 university support staff (administrators, counsellors, librarians etc.) were laid off in what was then the largest mass sacking in the history of Australian higher education. 
For teaching staff, the Davis years were no better. The academics who worked in Davis’ reforged degree factory were not the comfortable professors of popular imagination, but were precariously employed and hyper-exploited. By the time he left his post, more than 70 percent of University of Melbourne employees were on casual or fixed-term contracts. 
The university was also rocked by wage-theft scandals as it emerged that casual tutors had been deliberately underpaid during the Davis years. In a rare 2020 court win for the National Tertiary Education Union, the university was found not to have paid tutors for work performed, such as marking student assignments, and was ordered to repay millions of dollars to at least 1,500 workers. 
The Albanese government has been elected at a time when job insecurity and cost of living are key concerns for most people. By hiring Glyn Davis to run the public service, it has sent an unambiguous signal that “user pays” and “living within our means” are the order of the day for working-class people. We can expect no innovative solutions to social and environmental crises from Professor Davis, only a proven willingness to cut costs in order to insulate the wealth and prestige of the powerful.

Alex McAulay

Labor hires evil professor as top public service boss

Less than 12 months after sacking more than 500 non-academic staff, the University of Melbourne has started a new wave of restructuring. Management is attempting to rush through major changes to staff numbers and job roles in at least 10 different areas.
The cuts target central non-academic work areas that provide services such as IT support, building supervision, timetabling, academic advice and career advice. It’s difficult to extract hard numbers from the numerous proposals presented, but the number of staff facing the sack could go as high as 100, including the entire career advice team. The most conservative estimate is that 50 jobs will go – a big hit to a workforce already decimated.
Between December 2014 and December 2015 the university implemented its so called “Business Improvement Program”. The BIP was the largest mass sacking in the history of Australian higher education. One in five non-academic staff were sacked, and their numbers have been strictly capped since. The resulting “savings” were invested into poaching well-published professors from other institutions. This has the effect of providing a short term boost to the university’s rankings in international league tables.
While the BIP has improved the university’s brand, it has made life on campus significantly harder for staff and students. Morale among general staff remains at rock bottom. Staff are overworked, and the loss of a critical mass of long-time employees has left gaping holes in organisational knowledge and experience.
Academics have experienced an increase in administrative responsibilities on top of their already heavy teaching and research loads. Students now wait in long queues to speak to inexperienced and overworked staff at the new student administration centre called Stop1. Satisfaction with support services has plummeted. All this at a university that charges premium prices to its students and promises a world class “educational experience”.
Part of the rationale provided to staff for the new wave of restructures has been that they are needed to address the organisational dysfunction arising from the savage nature of the BIP. The real driver, however, is an “efficiency dividend” that imposed ongoing reductions in staffing budgets following BIP. This has left some areas crippled, unable to fill vacant positions.
The drive towards restructuring has been accelerated by an apparent desire to avoid sacking staff during enterprise bargaining, which begins in June 2017. To avoid damaging staff members’ perceptions of management during bargaining, restructures announced just weeks ago are being rushed through before the end of 2016.
The upshot is that, for the third December in a row, large numbers of staff face the sack. Ever a champion of corporatised universities, vice-chancellor Glyn Davis continues to prioritise branding and padding the surplus over quality of education and working conditions.
Union members will be protesting against Davis, the “Christmas Glynch”, at 1pm in North Court on 1 December. Students and supporters are welcome.

Melbourne Uni’s ‘Christmas Glynch’ strikes again

Within a week of La Trobe University reversing its decision to suspend Safe Schools Coordinator Roz Ward, Deakin University sacked another left wing academic. Journalism lecturer Martin Hirst was notified of his termination on 9 June.
Hirst is both a Marxist and a critic of the Murdoch media empire. His sacking is the result of a five year red-baiting campaign by Newscorp columnists with the express aim of driving him out of academia. After addressing the 2011 Finklestein enquiry into media regulation, Hirst was called by a Daily Telegraph reporter who asked “if [he is] or ever had been a communist”. He has since been the subject of attack articles by Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt and trolling from their supporters on his personal Twitter account.
Deakin has twice taken disciplinary action against Hirst on the basis that his use of invective in response to these trolls brought disrepute to the university. This is just a thin cover for the university’s acquiescence in the political campaign against him.
In 2014, Deakin suspended him without pay following Andrew Bolt’s selective publication of some of his Tweets. He was reinstated after intervention by the National Tertiary Education Union, a flood of petitions and an open letter from academics across Australia.
Since April, Hirst has again been suspended without pay following an anonymous complaint about a Twitter exchange with Herald Sun columnist Rita Panahi.
If allowed to stand, the sacking of an academic on the basis of personal social media posts will set a terrible precedent for workplace rights at universities. After the right’s recent defeat over Roz Ward’s reinstatement, Martin Hirst’s sacking would re-embolden them in their campaign to purge all of our universities, schools and public broadcasters of left wing voices.

Deakin academic sacked after Newscorp campaign

After a drawn-out Fair Work Commission hearing found in their favour, NTEU members at La Trobe University have again rallied in opposition to massive job cuts. The university’s Funding Future Ready strategy is its rationale for cutting $65 million in spending, largely by sacking up to 350 staff.
In its 9 September ruling, the commission found that the university did not consult properly with the union and that the imposition of forced redundancies is inconsistent with its job security obligations.
The decision prevents the university from implementing proposed changes “until the employees and the NTEU have an opportunity to respond” to the strategy. Shamelessly, the vice-chancellor, John Dewar, emailed all staff after the decision claiming that the union had been “ordered” to provide feedback. 
On 23 September, close to 100 staff marched to Dewar’s office. A “feedback” banner, painted by the union campaign committee, was delivered. The banner was covered in the signatures of staff and students opposed to the cuts. Unsurprisingly, Dewar was “unavailable” to meet staff, but a union delegation was allowed into the administration building, which had been under lockdown during the rally. 
University of Melbourne
More than 100 staff and students gathered outside the University of Melbourne administration building on 24 September to protest major job losses. Under the university’s Business Improvement Program, 500 – one in five – general staff will be sacked.
The mood at the protest reflected the deep bitterness felt across campus. After an NTEU delegation went in to meet the vice-chancellor, the crowd marched around the building chanting “Glyn Davis: unsatisfactory!” and “Sack Glyn Davis, not librarians.”
Resentment turned to outrage in the week preceding the protest. After months of assurances that there would be no “spill and fill”, management announced on 17 September that more than 2,000 staff would need to reapply for jobs. Hundreds who were initially told that their jobs were safe found out days later that this was a mistake.
Staff anger has also found expression at management’s massive town hall-style staff meetings. These previously polite affairs are increasingly being disrupted from the floor by hostile questioning and cat calls.
The preparedness of staff to stand up to senior managers reveals that there is some potential for this long passive workforce to be organised. If staff are to look to the NTEU, however, the union will need to provide a far more decisive lead and more resources in the fight than it has to date.

Robin Laycock

Small steps forward in NTEU jobs campaign

In a disturbing development for university workers across the country, Swinburne University management has won a staff ballot to endorse a non-union collective agreement.
The new agreement removes academic workload protections, caps on casual staff numbers and the requirement to consult the union about major restructures. In the context of recent campus closures and lay-offs – and with more restructures foreshadowed by management – the agreement represents a significant setback for staff.
The National Tertiary Education Union also lost a ballot last year at Charles Sturt University, where another union on campus, the CPSU, supported management’s proposed agreement. But the Swinburne result is more significant because there the NTEU is the sole staff representative and ran a vigorous “vote no” campaign.
The NTEU’s campaign involved a committed layer of union activists getting the word out to members and non-members alike – previously passive members were brought into union activism, and new members were picked up during the campaign. In the end, the union mobilised 974 “no” votes – exceeding the total number of union members at the university. But management scraped past with 1031 “yes” votes.
Swinburne Vice-Chancellor Linda Kristjanson resorted to usual management tactics to get a “yes” vote out – offering a $1,000 sign-on bonus, threatening to lower the 3.1 percent pay offer if the ballot went down, and including hundreds of ex-employees in the ballot (mostly casual workers who have not worked at the university in some time). The NTEU has lodged a challenge with the Fair Work Commission.
Regardless of the legal outcome, the vote reveals the serious challenges facing unionists in higher education. The massive expansion of the sector over recent decades has caused union density to plummet. Nowhere has the NTEU succeeded in sustaining membership rates amongst the increasingly young and casualised university workforce.
The national “growth team” introduced by the union in recent years has helped arrest a decline in absolute numbers, but not in density. With its small but active casuals’ network, the Swinburne branch has done more than many others to address this problem, but it is no exception to the overall trend. Vice-chancellors feel less compelled to heed a union of declining weight, and will no doubt be further emboldened by the outcome of Kristjanson’s gamble.
Any serious recovery in the fortunes of the NTEU will rely upon encouraging a more active membership confident to recruit their workmates and combat management arguments as they come up. The vibrancy of the vote no campaign at Swinburne demonstrates the potential to draw wider layers of the workforce into union building. But to sustain this activist workplace culture, we cannot just fight rearguard actions during bargaining periods; we need constantly to be trying to mobilise members against every cut, restructure and management attack.

Labor hires evil professor as top public service boss

Melbourne Uni’s ‘Christmas Glynch’ strikes again

Deakin academic sacked after Newscorp campaign

Small steps forward in NTEU jobs campaign

Swinburne loss a major blow for NTEU

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