Charles Sturt University (CSU), one of Australia’s largest regional universities, last month became the latest of the country’s 39 public universities to announce or foreshadow damaging job losses.
Without specifying the numbers of retrenchments, CSU vice-chancellor Renée Leon said the “distressing” cuts flowed from the Albanese Labor government’s policies to restrict the number of international students.
Leon cited a sharp drop in the number of overseas students, whose fees had previously been used to subsidise students from regional, rural and remote locations. “In 2019 Charles Sturt had 8,460 international students. In 2024, we had approximately 10 percent of that number.”
For more than six months, despite outraged protests by staff and students at many individual universities, managements have continued to unveil the destruction of academic and professional staff jobs—now over 3,000 nationally.
These retrenchments are mostly a direct result of the Albanese government’s reactionary cuts to enrolments by overseas students, on whose exorbitant fees the chronically-underfunded universities have increasingly relied for the past decade and a half.
By cutting the enrolments, the Labor government is deliberately applying financial pressure to the universities, in order to restructure them to align with “national priorities” set out in last year’s Universities Accord report.
The plunge in numbers at CSU indicates that the government’s measures—setting enrolment caps, more than doubling visa fees and rejecting thousands of visa applications—are having a particularly severe impact on regional universities and communities.
The CSU cuts will hit hard in areas where there is little alternative employment, especially in the education sector. CSU has campuses in regional centres across the state of New South Wales, in Bathurst, Wagga Wagga, Albury-Wodonga, Dubbo, Orange and Port Macquarie.
Even deeper and wider cuts are to come. Education Minister Jason Clare has boasted of slashing the number of new international students by 30 percent this year, but the government has vowed to halve them, to 270,000 a year, from the level of 548,000 in 2023. That means greater job losses for 2026 and 2027.
Other regional universities are among those suffering the most. At the University of Southern Queensland, a proposed restructure would eliminate 150 full-time positions, after an earlier round of cuts in late 2024 terminated 109 roles, including 85 redundancies and 24 pre-retirement arrangements.
This would mean major course cuts and bring the total loss of jobs since the start of 2024 to just under 20 percent of the university’s workforce.
At Federation University, which has campuses across Victoria, management is moving to cut 200 full-time equivalent positions, despite spirited protests by staff and students. The number of international students attending Federation fell by 49 percent between 2019 and 2023.
Job destruction is also intensifying at major city universities, including most recently at Western Sydney University and Sydney’s Macquarie University.
At the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, the management last month formally launched the first of several rounds of job cuts.
It issued “change proposals” under its enterprise agreement with the trade unions to eliminate 37 jobs in Information Technology Services, the Information Security Office and the Planning and Service Performance division. That represents a reduction of between 9 and 14 percent of staff in each of those three areas.
ANU management this week unveiled 59 more academic and professional job cuts in the College of Science and Medicine, the College of Arts and Social Sciences, and the Research and Innovation Portfolio.
ANU is expected to announce hundreds more job losses by the end of September, also to be executed via “change proposals.” ANU’s staffing levels already have been reduced by 635 full-time equivalent positions since March 2024, mostly through misnamed “voluntary” redundancies.
Nevertheless, the leaders of the main campus unions, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU), are continuing to oppose any unified fight by university workers and students against the flood of job destruction and accompanying course closures.
Instead, the union apparatuses have sought to blame individual vice-chancellors for the job destruction, blatantly trying to politically shield the Labor government.
At ANU, the NTEU Australian Capital Territory division secretary Lachlan Clohesy even urged Education Minister Clare, the chief enforcer of Labor’s cuts, to intervene under federal legislation to sack Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell. Clohesy accused her of “single-handedly destroying one of the world’s great universities.”
At the same time, the NTEU is offering to assist the managements to achieve the required cost-cutting by other means, including “voluntary redundancies,” just as the NTEU did at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to each previous attack on jobs and conditions.
In fact, the unions have lined up behind the Labor government on every front. They have refused to oppose the overseas student cuts. The Labor government is vying to outdo the opposition Liberal-National Coalition in blaming students, along with migrant workers, for the housing affordability and cost-of-living crisis that is still devastating working-class households.
The unions have remained silent on another significant contributor to the government’s financial pressure on the universities. The number of commencing domestic undergraduate students also fell to 262,396 in 2023, down by 8.9 percent since 2017.
That is largely due to the punishing fees of nearly $17,000 a year inflicted on arts, humanities, business and law students. Labor has maintained the previous Coalition government’s “job ready graduates” program to push students into “priority” and “skills” courses such as maths, science, teaching and nursing.
The Albanese government’s promise to introduce legislation this year to cut ex-students’ outstanding HECS fee repayment debts by 20 percent will do little to offset this burden.
Without any opposition by the unions, the Labor government also advised universities and researchers to comply with a questionnaire sent by the fascistic Trump administration threatening to cut off joint funding for research unless their projects served the needs of US foreign policy and military objectives. At least 11 universities have suffered research funding cuts as a result, which will mean deeper job losses.
This assault is set to accelerate. July 1 saw the inauguration of an interim government-appointed Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC). As of January 1, each university’s funding will be tied to a “mission-based compact” with ATEC, setting out how the university must contribute to Labor’s “national priorities.”
These priorities were outlined in last year’s Universities Accord report. They include servicing the narrow “skills” requirements of employers and meeting the needs of the AUKUS military pact and military-related industries in preparation for a US-led war against China.
While starving the universities of funds, the government is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into military spending, while backing the Gaza genocide, the criminal attacks on Iran and the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine.
Fighting Labor’s destructive agenda requires the building of new organisations, rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions. This is part of a broader necessary struggle against capitalism itself and its program of ever-greater billionaire wealth and a turn to war and Trump-style dictatorial rule.
To discuss and develop this fight, the rank-and-file committees at Western Sydney and Macquarie universities will soon announce a national online public meeting. To join this campaign, contact the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network.
Contact the CFPE:
Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: CFPE_Australia