The Senate committee inquiring into ATEC was supposed to file yesterday – they missed deadline. The report is now due today.
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Jason Clare used the Universities Australia conference to announce a UA-Department of Education working group “to reduce red tape and improve efficiency.” This is perhaps the lowest-cost announcement at a major event ever made. Except, that is, for the price to hire the MCG to accommodate meetings of agencies, from ATEC to WEGA, that will have a patch to protect.
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The University of Melbourne has had a terrible time in the Fair Work Commission of late, losing two unfair dismissal cases.
Long-serving academic Angela Paladino was sacked for serious misconduct, citing dozens of issues and incidents but Deputy President Masson found the majority were not established or did not justify dismissal. He also was critical of some evidence for the university and of the way management had never formally warned or counselled her over leadership of staff. The judgement is HERE
And a fullbench dismissed in comprehensive detail the university’s appeal against a ruling that it had unfairly dismissed engineering academic Stephen Matthai in 2024 over contact with a student in 2017 which breached the workplace behaviour policy.
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“Simply interacting every day with people from all over the world and from vastly different backgrounds has been incredibly valuable,” Ohio State U student Abbe Newman on her study abroad experience at UNSW. She must be hanging out with other Internationals, not the Kensington locals, who would fit right in with a Buckeye.
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Every Australian Research Council grant announcement is accompanied by criticism of process, what with it regularly taking time for applicants to get the bad news. So, on Wednesday the ARC took to LinkedIn to announce the first cut of Discovery Grant applications (“expression of interest”) would be on the RMS Thursday, with emails to Chief Investigators, “staggered during the day.” Those who made the cut for full application (probably 40%) will now have to file by April and then sweat it out until first Q 2027 – a case of hurry up and wait.
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The Senate education committee is not the only one having a look at the ATEC legislation. The Scrutiny of Bills committee has a couple of points. For a start, it wants to know why ATEC’s power to suspend a university’s mission-based compact is not subject to the merit review process. This applies when a decision affects individuals. The committee also proposes spelling out that while ATEC commissioners will have civil immunity, the Commonwealth should not, “where there is likely to be an adverse impact on an individual’s rights and liberties.”
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U of Q scientists Elizabeth Aitken and Andrew Chen have found a chromosome that resists soil-born Panama Disease in a wild subspecies of bananas. It could save the farmed Cavendish variety. No, you only think you already know about this. What you are thinking of is decades of research by James Dale, across the river at QUT, on disease resistance and improved nutrients in the fruit. Aitken and Chen’s breakthrough gives FC his once in a decade opportunity to use his fave fruit headline, “Yes! We have lots of bananas.”
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There is about to be a new super-power in education policy, the national Teaching and Learning Commission. State and National Education Ministers agree that work will continue this year, to combine ACARA, AITSL, AERO and ESA. For anybody who wasn’t in bureaucracy class the day they did acronyms, that’s the Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership, the Australian Education Research Organisation and Education Services Australia. The commission will surely report to Jason Clare, what with him chairing the minco, despite his not employing any teachers.
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Scott Bowman is out at Charles Darwin U. “This decision will enable CDU to work through its current challenges and fulfil its responsibilities to students, staff and the Northern Territory community,” the university states, without specifying what these “challenges” are. The local ABC reports his resignation follows an “accreditation scandal,” with 300 or so TAFE students being announced as qualified when they had not completed all units of their courses.
Whatever the reason for Professor Bowman being banished, it is a sudden end to his tenure, extended in November through to 2031.
There was glee around the Territory traps about the announcement and Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro has been critical of Professor Bowman’s plan to diversify CDU’s revenue, in part by opening a campus in London. Certainly, Bowman has a career-long habit of putting powerful noses out of joint. He upset the campus establishment at Central Queensland University when he arrived to save it from imminent financial failure in 2009 – he left a hero a decade later with the University expanding. At CDU his legacy will be the successful bid he led to secure a medical school for the NT. And despite criticism of his management style, staff at CDU are happy enough. Last year CDU won the “Change Champion” award from the national staff survey provider for the second time in a row. And a recent union-backed psycho-social risk survey found CDU had the least stressed staff in the country. Plus the finances were ok in the last published Annual Report, for 2024, with a consolidated loss of $3m on $422m income, 10% up on ’23.
So what went wrong for Bowman? A close CDU observer suggests he did not want to tough things out, lest it detract from the coming medical school and that when he decides it is time to go, he just goes – it is certainly what he did at CQU. And now he has done it CDU.
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While Universities Australia hosted most members at its annual lamentathon, the Group of Eight was lobbying internationally. Chief Executive Vicki Thomson was in London, “to discuss how government and Australia’s leading research-intensive universities can best work together to deliver on national priorities.” Maybe the UA invite was lost in the mail.
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Coalition Education Shadow Julian Leeser spent a great of his UA Conference address yesterday criticising university leaderships for their failure to deal with antisemitism on campus, referring to “Quislings.”
He went on to set out areas across education where he agreed with the government. But not on ATEC. “Every dollar spent on the ATEC is a dollar not spent on educating a student, paying a lecturer or contributing to the research that drives innovation and productivity … When your grand vision for sector reform is just another Quango – you need a better plan.” Mr Clare will need to make-nice with the Greens in the Senate.