Staff cuts will destroy more than 1,000 jobs at Australian universities

This month, more than 1,000 job cuts were announced at public universities across Australia. This is a direct result of the Labor government’s restrictions on the admission of international students, as well as the systemic underfunding of universities.

Striking NTEU members protest outside the University of Newcastle.

Labor has pledged cuts to international student admissions by more than 50,000 next year, with 15 publicly funded universities most affected. It is a reactionary nationalist movement, supported by the Liberal National Coalition, aimed at scapegoating foreign students for the worsening housing and cost of living crisis affecting working-class households.

The cuts particularly hit universities with large numbers of Chinese students, such as the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. This is consistent with efforts by the media and political establishment to stoke anti-China sentiments amid escalating U.S.-led preparations for war with China.

The cuts to international students are intended to force universities to integrate more fully with the demands of big business and the military, in line with the Agreement on Universities concluded by the Albanian government.

The cuts deprive universities of one of their main sources of income: full-tuition-paying international students, who have become cash cows for universities as a result of funding cuts by successive Labor and Liberal National Party governments.

Among the employee layoffs disclosed or announced so far:

The University of Wollongong has announced a $35 million drop in revenue and cuts “across every part of the university”. National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) branch president Fiona Probyn-Rapsey predicted 200-300 job cuts and said staff would only find out about them on December 20, the last day of work before the summer break, if they were among them.
The Australian National University (ANU) has revealed a projected budget deficit of $200 million this year and called for a $100 million pay cut. So far, it has announced layoffs of 108 people, including 50 at the College of Health Medicine, and another 600 are facing job cuts.
The University of Canberra (UC) has said it will take a $50 million pay cut by the end of next year, representing at least 200 jobs. Outgoing vice-chancellor Stephen Parker said the cuts would affect “all levels of the institution”.
James Cook University in Townsville said it would cut its workforce by around 50 staff.
The University of Southern Queensland will cut about 60 staff to fill a $32 million budget gap.
The University of Newcastle has published a ‘Business Improvement Agenda’ which states there is a ‘need to review our approach to workforce planning’.
University of Sydney Vice-Chancellor Mark Scott said the university expects to lose $1 billion in revenue over five years and has imposed a hiring freeze that will affect thousands of staff on fixed-term or casual contracts whose contracts will not be renewed.

Universities in Melbourne, Federation, Tasmania and La Trobe have implemented similar measures.

This is in addition to cuts already announced at Western Sydney University College, affecting approximately 17 per cent of its workforce and the equivalent of 97 full-time positions at Macquarie University’s Faculty of Arts. At both universities, staff have formed rank-and-file committees, independent of campus unions, to fight these cuts and advance the broader struggle of education workers.

It is no coincidence that the main focus at both Western Sydney and Macquarie is arts and humanities courses. The ruling elite does not want critical and educated working-class students, but fuel for industry or war. This points to the purpose behind the cuts.

As rank-and-file committees warn, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Labor government is failing to provide a vehicle to improve education, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s unions falsely claim is leading a pro-market restructuring, particularly in relation to the corporate elite and the military.

The government’s University Compact report, published in February, calls for course design “taking into account the skills needs of industry,” with particular emphasis on the $368 billion “AUKUS nuclear submarine program,” which is linked to preparations for war against China.

By defunding universities, the Labor government is spending billions to support the US-led war with Russia in Ukraine, the US-Israeli genocide in Gaza, and preparations for war with China, including the construction of US military bases in the north and west coast.

The restructuring is accompanied by a crackdown on dissent on campuses. Earlier this month, police arrested three Western Sydney University students for holding a peaceful protest against the genocide in Gaza and the bombings in Lebanon.

In July, management at the University of Sydney imposed a “Campus Access Policy” that all but bans protests. Although these measures were introduced in response to anti-genocide student camps, these measures set anti-democratic precedents for broader use against youth and workers opposed to the government’s pro-war agenda.

The NTEU and the other main union on campus, the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), are fully complicit in Labour’s attack. In September, NTUE asked its members to sign a petition to the government calling for the “gradual introduction of any restrictions” on international students, rather than their withdrawal.

NTEU falsely claims that cuts in admissions can be made without job losses and that vice-chancellors’ warnings about thousands of redundancies were simply “scaremongering”.

Similarly, in response to recent cuts at ANU and UC, NTEU Australian Capital Territory division secretary Lachlan Clohesy said that “at the heart of all these problems is really bad management (of the university)”. He called on Education Minister Jason Clare to “implement a transition plan to address funding shortfalls resulting from changes in federal government policy.”

It is as if the Labor government itself was not the one responsible for the cuts.

This means deepening the role of trade union apparatuses in diverting political opposition away from the Labor Party. Unions campaigned for and supported the previous Rudd-Gillard Labor governments from 2007 to 2013, which cut university funding by $10 billion and implemented policies forcing universities to compete for admissions.

The union’s reaction to this latest offensive underscores the need for university workers to form independent rank-and-file committees as the only way to express opposition to the attack on public education.

A public online forum organized by rank-and-file committees at Western Sydney and Macquarie Universities and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) passed a major resolution opposing Labor’s cuts to international students, condemning union complicity and calling on workers to take matters into their own hands and created rank-and-file committees in their workplaces.

The resolution called for “a unified campaign led by teachers and students, and workers and young people more broadly, to oppose the Albanian government’s cuts in the number of foreign student admissions and the thousands of layoffs they are causing in the higher education sector.”

The rank-and-file committee at Western Sydney University (WSU) also condemned the arrests of students at the university and endorsed a resolution adopted by a majority vote at a general meeting of WSU students, convened by the IYSSE, calling for the adoption of a socialist strategy based on an all-working-class campaign to fight with the Israeli genocide in Gaza and the descent into a US-led imperialist war.

To join tomorrow’s WSU Ranking Committee meeting, please contact the committee at: [email protected].

If you agree with these resolutions, please contact the Public Education Commission, a rank-and-file educator network, to discuss how to join or create rank-and-file committees and get help:

Email: [email protected]
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: @CFPE_Australia