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SafeWork NSW’s first prohibition notice on the grounds of psychological safety, made against staff cuts at University of Technology Sydney, is emblematic of a higher education sector in meltdown. By Rick Morton.

UTS’s dirty laundry

Unionists rally at a University of Technology Sydney Open Day on August 30.

Credit: NTEU UTS Branch

On the last Saturday of August, as the University of Technology Sydney opened its campus to show prospective students what it could offer in the next enrolment year, academic and professional staff were baking cakes and washing their underwear.

It was a small but potent act of defiance, throwing back at management the self-care advice staff had been given to sustain them through a long, chaotic and consultant-driven effort to cut $100 million in costs – largely by axing 400 employees and slashing course content.

Staff were told they could stay mentally healthy by focusing on routine things like washing their delicates or their hands, keeping a gratitude journal and baking. This guidance was issued in the weeks following an announcement by UTS senior leadership that enrolments for more than 100 courses would be suspended – including all Department of Education offerings during a critical national shortage of teachers. Academics considered it an absurd response to a genuinely harmful process.

Less than 72 hours after the UTS Open Day, SafeWork NSW appeared to agree, and issued its first prohibition notice on psychological safety grounds, ordering the university management to halt planned job cuts temporarily and to suspend the release of academic staff change proposals until it had moved to protect employees from harm.

“Workers are, and will be, exposed to a serious and imminent risk of psychological harm from actions taken, and planned, relating to the UTS Operational Sustainability Initiative [OSI], specifically the release of the Academic Change Proposal [ACP] which are not being managed so far as is reasonably practicable,” reads the prohibition notice obtained by The Saturday Paper.

It records that about 800 workers were given one day’s notice to attend a meeting on September 3 “to discuss the potential impacts to their roles” of the ACP, which was announced at that meeting, to be released the following day. The notice also pointed out that “the ACP includes a possible reduction of approximately 150 academic roles”.

UTS’s problematic overhaul, developed on advice from consulting firm KPMG at a cost of more than $7 million, is emblematic of diminished governance structures in higher-education institutions across the country. Faced with the Coalition-era Job-ready Graduates Package, which hiked certain course fees and curtailed Commonwealth funding, and Covid-19’s retrenchments in international students – numbers that rebounded only to be threatened again by Labor’s student visa “prioritisation” caps – universities have been forced to shore up their budgets.

“There’s lots of things that have not really added up very well for us, because … last year or so, when the VC [Vice-Chancellor Professor Andrew Parfitt] had started to flag this problem, it was because of the international student cuts,” National Tertiary Education Union UTS branch president Dr Sarah Attfield tells The Saturday Paper.

“But then at the same time he said UTS will probably be able to weather that quite well, because we don’t rely on international students the same way Sydney Uni does. So we thought, Okay, there’s a bit of a deficit here, we probably might need to do some belt-tightening, right?

“And then all of a sudden, it became $100 million, and we’ve got to do it now, right now.”

One UTS academic, who asked not to be named, tells The Saturday Paper the worry is that there will be little left to offer if the university cannibalises itself to achieve a short-term financial turnaround.

“The VC has actually told us, originally, that there would be no position cuts. And then in terms of teacher education, he allowed thousands of hours to be put into new course development and approval by the Senate, and approval in the case of teacher education, by the regulator NESA [New South Wales Education Standards Authority].

“These are significant hoops to jump through. It’s a nightmare doing this stuff. It’s a huge amount of work. And he ticked all those courses off, and now they’ve all been paused, which is code for suspended. We know that they will never be continued, because we’ll teach out students enrolled currently, but we had no table at Open Day, and there’s nothing in the handbook. So teacher education is no more at UTS.”

In response to questions from The Saturday Paper, Vice-Chancellor Parfitt said, “We are undertaking a comprehensive organisational review to address [UTS’s revenue issues] and will be consulting fully with our staff on proposed approaches.

“Universities are facing unprecedented challenges, but I acknowledge there is also a need to re-establish public trust and ensure governance arrangements are fit for purpose in this rapidly changing environment”.

For many of the institutions that have embarked on cost-cutting reforms, the justification has rung hollow: if the universities cut central courses and carve out staff, what is left to provide students who pay the lion’s share of fees for education?

Australian National University professor of economics and public policy Nicholas Biddle told a federal parliamentary inquiry into quality of governance at Australian higher education providers that a “madness” had taken over at his and other universities.

The Saturday Paper revealed last week that ANU Vice-Chancellor Professor Genevieve Bell is negotiating an exit from her role following a series of scandals – her resignation was announced on Thursday. Among the catalysts was an email she sent to staff that suggested involuntary redundancies had been halted. Staff later learnt the cuts would proceed and that new voluntary redundancies in other parts of the ANU would not count towards the cost savings required from the targeted faculties.

The episode, Biddle wrote in his late-August submission to the inquiry, “illustrates in miniature the governance failures that now characterise ANU leadership, and by extension, many Australian higher education institutions”.

“Poorly planned decisions, ambiguous communication, lack of transparency and absence of accountability have become defining features of a governance model that prioritises executive discretion over academic community. The result has been plummeting morale, reputational damage and outcomes that undermine the very mission universities are supposed to serve.

“While the details are specific to ANU, the broader lessons are applicable across the sector. Weak governance structures, unrepresentative councils and executive capture have created an environment in which poor decisions go unchecked, and staff and students bear the costs.”

Unfortunately for staff and students, university governance is itself subject to somewhat weak oversight. With the exception of ANU, which is a Commonwealth entity, the enabling legislation for public universities is enacted by state and territory governments, while broader higher education policy is set by the federal government.

Funding comes from a mix of all of these, with universities historically using international student revenue to cross-subsidise research and other programs. For example, in NSW average full-time student load revenue is almost $43,000 a year for international students, compared with $24,000 for domestic students.

At a NSW budget estimates hearing on August 29, the state minister for skills, TAFE and tertiary education, Steve Whan, faced questions about whether he should overhaul university legislation to require stronger governance arrangements, especially among university councils that act in a manner similar to – but far less rigorous than – company boards.

“I am concerned about the viability of the sector in NSW,” he told the committee chair, Greens MP Abigail Boyd.

“I am not considering the creation of an action plan by government, no.”

He added that he is “not going to be intervening in the day-to-day management of the universities” but defended his state’s unsuccessful plea to UTS to have it reverse the suspension of teacher training programs.

“The issue there is that we were concerned about the pipeline of teachers coming into the NSW system, essentially. It was directly relevant,” he said.

University vice-chancellors, including UTS boss Parfitt, also gave evidence at the hearing. He said the $7 million spend on KPMG was for an operational sustainability project that was “intended to return about $350 million to the university” over five years.

Consultants are increasingly prevalent in a revolving-door capacity for the higher-education sector. While UTS tapped KPMG, the ANU used Nous – a firm with a vertically integrated data platform it uses to book work – and then failed to disclose the extent of the consultants’ work when senators raised questions. At the University of Wollongong, the former interim vice-chancellor Professor John Dewar was still working part-time for corporate restructure firm KordaMentha, which was engaged by UoW on its “rightsizing”. Western Sydney University chancellor Jennifer Westacott, formerly Business Council of Australia chief executive, serves as a special adviser to KPMG. University of Tasmania vice-chancellor Rufus Black, whose five-year term expired in 2022 and was renewed indefinitely, was engaged as an independent director with Deloitte, as of September 1.

Professor Black offered to reduce his $1.1 million university salary by the commensurate amount but the university’s council, which has overseen Black’s abortive attempt to close the Sandy Bay campus and move students into the Hobart CBD, declined the offer. Black has since announced plans for a new $500 million STEM building for the campus, and for the sale of two city sites. The university reported a $47.5 million loss last year.

Black himself started his career with McKinsey & Company, becoming a partner advising on “strategy and large-scale organisational change”.

There is little doubt universities across the country are under financial pressure. In NSW, the auditor-general found six universities have “less than three months of cash reserve to fund operating and financing activities”, even as cumulative revenue outstripped expenses across the 10 public universities. Six institutions also had no documented policies on “key governance processes for capital projects” and in some cases could show no business case for capital investments or evaluations of projects once completed.

The share of employee-related expenses as a proportion of total income from continuing operations is declining again in NSW, as it is across many universities in Australia. The auditor-general said this might be a sign that there is more money available for other expenses.

“However,” it continued, “it may also indicate potential understaffing risks.”

This is the crux of the problem for academics and professional staff who say they are bearing the brunt of restructure costs designed to respond to mistakes made by management.

UTS, for example, has finished a $1 billion revitalisation of its city campus in the past decade, but part of its cost rationale now is to move more classes to an online learning model; cheaper to run but less popular with many students.

Last year, UTS had the worst results of any university in the state for investing in property, plant and equipment and intangible assets against writedowns. The auditor-general found five universities struggling on this measure, indicating that “the current asset replacement levels at these universities are much less than the rate at which they are being depreciated”.

“This may pose a risk to these universities’ long-term sustainability, with potential impacts on their teaching and research quality, student experience and overall competitiveness.”

SafeWork NSW lifted its prohibition notice on UTS late on Friday, September 5, and NTEU branch president Sarah Attfield said the university is expected to release change proposals soon. Despite theoretically being open for consultation, however, the “decisions have largely already been taken”, she says.

“We’re going to fight because we think it’s the university’s reputation on the line. The ability to do what it’s supposed to do is really under threat,” she says.

“If the university goes ahead with a plan to remove teacher education or international studies or courses in public health, we think that’s absolutely devastating, not just for the individual staff but for prospective students, current students and the communities the university is supposed to serve. That gets forgotten, I think – that universities are a public good.”

The Labor government has acted on some recommendations from the Universities Accord process it established in the first term of government, but it chose to prioritise student debt relief as the first act of its second term. Its measures included a one-off 20 per cent reduction to benefit existing, but not future, students at a cost of $16 billion “over coming decades”.

What it has not yet done is remove the worst aspects of the Coalition’s Job-ready Graduates Package, recommended as a matter of urgency two years ago by the same accord.

It would cost $765 million a year to remove the highest charging fee band, or $1.7 billion a year to fully remove the fee distortions introduced by the Coalition – a program University of Western Sydney Vice-Chancellor George Williams told the Senate governance committee on Monday was one of the top five worst public policy mistakes made in Australia in the past 20 years. The legislation officially establishing the body to steward this discussion has yet to be introduced to parliament.

In the meantime, universities are panicking, slashing jobs and telling staff to wash their undies.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on September 13, 2025 as "UTS’s dirty laundry".

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