Dear UWAASA members,
To celebrate the shutdown, your UWAASA committee thought it might be a good time to send out a bit of a newsletter with some commentary on the latest UWA news, and some good wishes for the holiday season!
In this newsletter:
- Nin Kirkham elected as academic staff representative
- The Philippa Maddern Award is back in 2026!
- Some initial steps forward in transparency and the prospect of mergers
- A marketing debacle
- The recent all-staff Town Hall
- And then… parking
- NTEU bargaining update
- Teaching preparations for 2026
1. Nin Kirkham elected as academic staff representative to Senate!
Having put forward her nomination, we are delighted to report that Nin has been elected for a 3-year term as the academic staff representative to the UWA Senate. We will support Nin as she gives a voice to academic concerns in the halls of power. The University will benefit greatly from having a strong, reasoned, and critical voice at the heart of its decision making. We are very grateful to Nin for taking on this difficult job!
2. The Philippa Maddern Award is back in 2026!
Please note that nominations are now open for the 2026 Philippa Maddern Award!
The award recognises academic citizenship, as evidenced through positive influences on colleagues, university processes, students, and the wider community.
Award Categories
- For an Academic still working at UWA
- For an Academic no longer working at or retired from UWA
- Posthumous Award
Visit our website for further information and to make your nomination: https://uwaasa.org.au/the-philippa-maddern-award.
Nominations must be received by 5:00pm AWST on Friday 3 April 2026.
3. Some initial steps forward in transparency and the prospect of mergers
As always, we continue to send observers to the meetings of the UWA Senate, and we are pleased to share that our most recent experience in that capacity was certainly different to our previous ones. Our observer was in the room for over 20 minutes (compared to the usual 5 minutes or less) and heard discussion of several relevant matters, including prospective improvements to the Policy library; substantive reports on building works including the student accommodation under construction on Hampden Road in the Nedlands campus; and the normal update on finances. While we cannot really discuss the details of those discussions, the observer was privy to some real and at times heated debates, particularly around investment strategies, which will be revisited in the new year through the formation of a bespoke sub-committee of the Senate.
There is still a long road ahead before adequate levels of transparency are achieved in Senate’s decision-making processes – in line with the recommendations of the recently released final report of the parliamentary inquiry into the quality of governance at Australian higher education providers. However, as a committee and as an association, we can take pride in the fact that our perseverance, both in attending Senate meetings and in advocating for greater transparency, is starting to bear some fruit.
Speaking of future prospects… right before shutdown, we met with the State Minister for International and Tertiary Education Tony Buti. We had a frank exchange of ideas on the possibility of mergers, and more importantly on how any hypothetical merger would need to be governed. We conveyed the view that any process would need to be inspired by the principles of genuine transparency, inclusiveness, and accountability (i.e. not left to current leadership operating behind closed doors). We also insisted that the matter cannot remain uncertain for long, or it will consume every ounce of our already very depleted energies. The Minister and his staff seemed receptive to our ideas, and we understand that we can expect an initial announcement (one way or the other) in early 2026.
4. A marketing debacle
Now onto some less congratulatory matters… We’re sure that you were all pleased to see UWA feature prominently on the front page of the West Australian on the 17th of November. Even if you happened to have missed it (does anyone at UWA even read The West??), the lightning-fast same day reaction from the VC, by way of a reassuring all-staff email, would have guaranteed that you knew the general gist of the article. What may not have been so obvious, was that the words of the headline “Elite, Aloof, Standoffish” came not from our worst critics but straight from the mouth of our Chief Marketing Officer. In a shocking turn of events, much of the text of The West’s hit job was not the fruit of tireless and rigorous investigative journalism that is the usual trademark of that fine outlet. Rather, it was taken verbatim from a presentation given by our very own CMO at the livestreamed Spring Convocation meeting, which was then put up on the UWA website. Apparently, extensive research into ‘consumer’ opinions of UWA, by way of focus groups and a survey, had unsurprisingly revealed that some students feel that UWA (the only Go8 in the state) is a bit elite. In fairness, the CMO was at pains to suggest that ‘elite’ can be rebranded as ‘quality’ or ‘tradition’, but this nuance was lost on The West. While we are all for transparency and telling it like it is (see above and below), surely context and knowing your audience are also key aspects of marketing? This unfortunate series of events felt like an unnecessary self-inflicted wound that provided more grist to the mill of mergers…
5. The recent all-staff Town Hall
Casting your mind further back, you might have had the pleasure of attending the most recent Town Hall, where we got an update from the DVCESE (these acronyms are getting out of hand even by Australian standards) on the progress of the two new India campuses. Inspiring pictures of shiny buildings provided renewed commitment to a ‘go live’ date for our first courses of mid-2026 (yes, you read that right, in a University that takes six months and four levels of committee oversight to change a set of unit outcomes…), and a nothing-to-see-here about the loss of our Indian establishment partner (communicated to Academic Board in late September). All very reassuring, and definitely no one should have any concerns about the financial risks of this venture and their potential negative implications for the funding of our main campus and core business… And let’s be very clear: these tongue-in-cheek remarks are not aimed at the idea of opening offshore campuses per se (there is a variety of views on the topic among our members). They are very much focused on how this venture is being managed. So far, all we know is the (very) aspirational starting date and the exec’s commitment to add yet another PVC to our stable (we seem to be collecting them). The rest is just details really – like, you know, what, how, and why are we going to teach over there aside from the fact that (presumably) there may be some money to be made?
A further delight provided at the Town Hall was the open and forthright presentation of the results of the recent staff survey from our DVCO (yes, we have a DVCO, which is a bit of an oddity, as we wrote a while back). Strangely enough, as invariably seems to happen for unassailable ‘reasons’, the survey that was used was different from the previous one, so this year’s results couldn’t be compared to past results. Hence, while no sense could be conveyed of whether things were improving or not, it was difficult to conceal the core message that staff have widespread low confidence in the leadership and communication of the executive. We’d love to present commentary on this matter with a far more detailed analysis of the survey results but, unfortunately, they have not been made widely accessible for such purposes. We can say however that while the significance of this lack of confidence of staff in the communication and leadership of the senior executive was acknowledged (to some extent), the proposed remedy was to ‘cascade the message’ down to area leaders (i.e. mid-level managers, Heads of School etc.) so that they could deal with it. While this may be because communication and leadership at the local area were reportedly one of the more positively rated aspects of the survey, this response fails to address the core problem, and only exacerbates the already untenable position mid-level managers find themselves in.
6. And then… parking
Then came the message on the new parking arrangements, penned once again by our intrepid DVCO. Doubling down on the condescending corporate comms style, the correspondence elucidates that a 25% fee increase (not once mentioned by leadership at Academic Consultative Committee meetings, despite parking being on the agenda at just about every meeting of that committee throughout the year) coupled with a further shove of staff bays to the outer regions of campus will in fact offer everyone ‘more flexible options’. Aside from the slightly caricatural use of ‘pat pat on the head’ jargon, this came from the same exec who, in the current round of enterprise bargaining, is pushing for a mere 2.5% annual pay rise for staff in the upcoming EBA…
Now here’s the thing. Academics are accustomed to ‘do more with less’ (cit. the Great Simon Biggs – miss him? Here he is in India with our VC). We are asked to show resilience in the face of ever-growing challenges, to suck up increasing workload creep, to be patronisingly chastised when our promotion applications get rejected, to be kindly reminded of the EAP scheme every time our burn out reaches DEFCON1… and because we are grown-ups, we are able to patiently weather these conditions, hoping that the chrysalid frontal lobe of our beloved institution will eventually resolve into something approximating human decency. But we do have our limits and expect to be treated with respect… So, next time, please, say it straight. You might even earn a point or two on comms in the next survey.
7. NTEU bargaining update
Speaking of a pay rise that is an order of magnitude lower than the parking increase, bargaining is happening too! If you haven’t been following the news from our friends at NTEU, the 2.5% offer for an annual pay rise from the university executive should give you the gist of the situation. To know more, please follow NTEU news, and know that we are behind the NTEU bargaining team, and we will support their campaign to be ready for Protected Industrial Action early in semester 1 2026, if it comes to that (and given where we’re at, that’s not a mere hypothetical).
8. Teaching preparations for 2026
Meanwhile, the excitement about our transition to Blackboard Ultra for semester 1 next year is palpable. We are loving the timely delivery of a gargantuan and indigestibly scaffolded architecture that will help us address our students in the universal language of best practice learning design. Please add ‘ameliorating corporate approaches to learning’ to our job descriptions.
Also, please, can we talk about the ‘service improvements’ to timetabling? Reports suggest that the understaffed timetabling team (full power to them) is currently fielding hundreds of change requests from staff who are wondering why the timetabling data requests collected via a hopelessly dysfunctional and time-consuming spreadsheet several months ago, have been translated into timetabling outcomes that bear no resemblance to our painstakingly-made requests. You wanted one 75-person workshop with flat furniture? Sorry, we can only offer you three 25-person workshops, and if you must insist on a larger workshop, it will have to be in a tiered venue – hey look, the Octagon is free! And so on…
And with that, we wish you all a restful summer break.
May you all strictly observe the shutdown! And should you be thinking of squeezing between Christmas and New Year that research output you did not quite manage to finish earlier, remember that People & Culture are taking annual leave out of your balance whether you like it or not. So, you might as well relax… See you in 2026!
Your UWAASA Committee