Consult properly over restructures, Australian universities told

Universities will be expected to pursue “best-practice and meaningful consultation” over major restructure proposals, and to involve staff and students “prior to decisions being made”, under recommendations accepted by the Australian government.

Institutions will also be obliged to set minimum quotas for governing council members who have expertise in higher education and public administration.

In a report tabled in parliament, the federal government has supported all 12 recommendations from last September’s interim report of the Senate Education and Employment Committee’s 2025 inquiry into university governance.

The government has also supported, or supported in principle, five of the eight recommendations from the inquiry’s final report in December.

Canberra had already committed to many of the reforms after receiving a separate report from the Expert Council on University Governance, which urged the insertion of eight new “governance principles” into the threshold standards by which Australian universities are regulated.

The endorsement of most of the Senate committee recommendations appears to further strengthen the transparency and governance obligations on universities, without outlining how these expectations will be enforced.

Joo-Cheong Tham, Victorian assistant secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), said more explicit consultation requirements could ultimately prevent a lot of grief for university administrators as well as their staff.

Tham cited Deakin University’s recent attempt to restructure, which stalled amid upheavals including the abrupt departure of the vice-chancellor. In a mea culpa email to staff, Deakin’s chancellor Claire Higgins and “caretaker” vice-chancellor Matthew Clarke vowed to be more consultative in the future. “Change will still be needed…but it must be the right change, shaped with you, and that is the lesson we are taking from this.”

The Australian National University is among other institutions that have endured turmoil over perceptions of tick-box consultation on poorly premised restructures in which the decisions appeared to have been made in advance.

In a recommendation to yet another university governance inquiry, in Victoria, the NTEU said “major change processes” – including the development of restructure proposals – should be “transparent, consultative and reviewed after two years”.

Regular restructures produce a “hiring-firing yo-yo” with “damaging effects on staff wellbeing”, the union told the Victorian committee.

While the federal government has accepted the bulk of the Senate inquiry’s recommendations, it has shrugged off several including a call for the Education Department to fast-track its work to improve statistical reporting on the numbers of casual university staff and the share of teaching work they perform.

The government also refused to commit to most of the 33 separate recommendations lodged by crossbench members of the Senate committee, including Greens senators and Canberra independent David Pocock.

But the government gave in-principle support to three of Pocock’s proposals, including a requirement on universities to publish “disclosure-of-interests” registers covering their senior executives and governing body members, and to “update them in real time”.

It comes after a recent New South Wales auditor-general’s investigation found over 790 instances of university employees with directorships in organisations that provided services to the universities, of which 30 per cent had not been declared on conflict-of-interest registers. Forty-four involved senior executives, of which 10 had not been declared.

Collectively, these “vendor” organisations earned A$353 million (£184 million) from the state’s universities last year.

The auditor-general said some of the omitted declarations appeared to be genuine oversights – either because the outside directorships “arose by virtue of their role at the university”, or because university staff had left before completing their end-of-year disclosures – but referred the findings to universities’ internal audit units for “further review”.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com