ABC NEWS | 11 December 2015
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The University of Western Australia (UWA) will lay off 300 staff as part of sweeping cuts aimed at reducing costs. The university will slash 100 academic positions and 200 professional positions early next year. Fifty new academic positions will be created to enhance the university’s “capability and impact in areas of comparative advantage”.
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UWA Vice Chancellor Professor Paul Johnson said in a statement that 2015 had been a challenging year for the Australian higher education sector:
UWA, like many universities, has a budget challenge.
As highlighted during the recent fee deregulation debate, there remains a long-standing under-funding of Australian universities amid a climate of greater competition at home and abroad.
We need to confront these financial challenges head on, which means changing how the university operates.”
University staff were told of the planned redundancies on 11 December 2015.
National Tertiary Education Union WA secretary Gabe Gooding said the union is “outraged” and that there is no justification for sacking 300 staff when the university made a $90 million operational surplus in 2014.
This is yet another poor decision of an ideologically-driven vice-chancellor who is becoming increasingly known for making bad decisions.
In the four years of his tenure he has effectively trashed the reputation of what was one of the country’s most formidable institutions.
The vice-chancellor told staff that he planned to significantly increase the intake of international students, but with fewer staff to teach them, this can only be interpreted as cynical exercise in treating international students as cash cows.
The worst thing of course is a couple of weeks to Christmas, and of the thousands of UWA staff none of them are going to know whether they are in that 300 or not.
The university has not finalised which roles would be made redundant, the statement said.
It expects the redundancy process to be completed by the end of next year.
The university recorded a $90 million net result in 2014, down from $125 million in 2013.
See:
UWA’s planned sacking of 300 staff unjustified and cynical