By Paul Clifton (NTEU National Office). The NTEU's 2014-2015 financial year tax guide, specially prepared for our members by Teacher Tax, is now available.
NTEU Tax Guide 2015. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). An Issues Paper released by Bruce McKenzie and Neil Coulson last week, as part of the Victorian VET Funding Review, confirms that the introduction of a demand driven fully contestable market for the provision of vocational education and training (VET) in Victoria has failed students, industry, public TAFE institutes and the Victorian community. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). While donations by external benefactors to our universities receive much deserving positive publicity, the in-kind donations of uncompensated overtime provided by university staff goes virtually unreported. The results of an NTEU survey in relation to university workloads shows staff donate in order of $1.7billion to Australian higher education each year in the form of 27 million hours of uncompensated labour.
State of the Uni Survey 2015: Workloads. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). The centrepiece of this year’s Budget was a $5.5 billion jobs and small business package which included tax cuts, instant depreciation for assets worth less than $20,000 for small business, as well as making it easier for employers to take on job seekers by simplifying work experience arrangements and introducing greater flexibility into wage subsidy payment arrangements. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). In a fascinating article entitled “Wisconsin controversy: with fewer tenured positions, who benefits from academic freedom?“published inThe Conversation on Thursday June 26 2015, Cathy Sandeen, Chancellor at University of Wisconsin Colleges and the University of Wisconsin-Extension provides a succinct summary of the dangers we face by going down Christopher Pyne’s path of Americanising our universities. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). Scholars at Risk (SAR) has released a report entitled Free to Think, which published the result of its Academic Freedom Monitoring Project, which after four years of monitoring and analysis by SAR staff and researchers around the world, analysed 333 attacks on higher education communities in 65 countries. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). Clause 4.2 of Provider Course Accreditation Standards of the Higher Education Standards Framework (Threshold Standards) 2011 requires that providers ensure that academic staff “are appropriately qualified in the relevant discipline for their level of teaching (qualified to at least one AQF qualification level higher than the course of study being taught or with equivalent professional experience)”.
A number of universities have been selectively ignoring or interpreting the “equivalent professional experience” part of this clause and attempting to dismiss staff on the basis that they do not have a qualification one AQF level higher than the course in which they are teaching, despite in a number of cases having successfully taught in those courses for many years). More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). After a five year absence, the NTEU welcomes the return the Department of Education’s Higher Education Report 2011-13.  This is long overdue with the last Higher Education Report related to 2010.
The Higher Education Reports are important because they provide a detailed breakdown of student load and public funding of higher education by program and by institution. More...

By Paul Kniest (NTEU National Office). The prospect of the government’s ambitions to deregulate higher education and open up Commonwealth funding to non-university higher education providers suffered another blow in the Senate today when a motion, moved by Senators Wang (WA), Day (SA) and Leyonhjelm (NSW), to extend Commonwealth funding to not-for-profit private higher education providers (see below), failed to pass the Senate. More...