This is the NTEU’s opening statement to the NSW Legislative Council inquiry into the state’s universities, 7 Novermber 2025.
Thank you, Chair and Members of the Committee.
The NTEU NSW commends the committee for this inquiry, and thank you for the chance to contribute.
Universities are among the most significant public institutions in NSW. They educate the professional workforce that underpins our health, education, research, justice, infrastructure and public administration systems. They manage tens of billions in public assets, and together make up the State’s second largest export. Their stability and capability are directly tied to the economic and social future of NSW.
Across the sector, governance has shifted toward insular, decision-making, concentrated in small executive groups, without the transparency, oversight or participation expected of large public institutions. Universities are being governed like private corporations without the accountability frameworks that corporations themselves are required to operate under. When decision-making is centralised and unbalanced, predictable failures occur.
The evidence is clear:
- Mass job cuts and course closures with limited justification or consultation.
- Wage theft on a massive scale, in the context of wage theft being recognised as a criminal offence under the Fair Work Act.
- A structural reliance of insecure employment, with nearly 70% of all uni staff, mostly women, casual or fixed-term
- SafeWork NSW issuing prohibition and improvement notices at UTS and Macquarie due to psychologically unsafe change processes.
- Vice-Chancellors being paid well above public-sector leadership benchmarks, and more than the NSW Premier
- A quarter of a billion spent on private consultants in 2023 alone, alongside documented conflicts of interest.
These are not isolated operational issues – they are systemic governance failures. The Auditor-General’s Universities 2024 report shows 36% of governance problems were repeat findings, year after year. Universities were told what to fix and simply didn’t.
And the risk and the impacts are real: thousands of people are being damaged and public confidence in universities, especially in regional communities and cities, is being eroded.
We urgently need reforms that balance institutional autonomy with representative transparent decision-making, strong external oversight and legislation clearly aligned with the public purpose.
Good governance is not just about principles. it determines whether universities remain stable, whether they are trusted and capable of delivering the knowledge, teaching and community benefit that NSW depends on. Strengthening governance now protects the future of one of the State’s most vital public assets.
