I’m a casual tutor in the School of Mathematics and Statistics. I’ve been organising in Maths & Stats for just over a year now. Last year, we managed to get over 50 tutors to strike during the second weeklong strike. This knocked out classes for over 1,500 students that week. More recently, I’ve been involved in running a campaign to stop 9 fixed-term teaching associates from losing their jobs. This has involved lots of flyering, posters, open letters and marches on the bosses. I’ve also been involved in the UniMelb Palestine working group and have helped to build the rallies to support the student Palestine campaigns, and have also been working on making BDS core union business.

Ultimately, I’d like to see our branch become a majority union. I think this is our biggest weakness and our power against management will always be limited until we can convince a majority of workers at UniMelb to join the union and strike. No amount of stunts or clever tactics will be able to outmatch the sheer power of a majority of workers at the University withdrawing their labour and going on strike. Obviously we have a long way to go to get to this position, but I think we can get there if we all start organising our co-workers.

In addition, I’d like to see more democratic structures within our union. I think we need to build up a strong delegates network which should not only act as the central hub of organising around campus, but also allow for information about union campaigns to be shared across all work areas.

I would use my position on the Branch Committee to enable this goals, as well as to continue the fight to free Palestine through the NTEU.

I’m a professional staff member in Student Enrolments where I am a Senior Adviser, and I’m standing for re-election to our branch committee. I’ve worked at the University since 2019. Pre-2019 I worked at Monash University where I was also an active part of the NTEU branch. There, I helped build union membership in the university call centre for the first time.

Outside of work I’ve participated in campaigns and protests in support of Palestine, for refugee rights, and against attacks on women's rights.

I’ve been part of growing the union to record levels in Student Services, building our historic industrial action in 2023, opposing the plan to get rid of our deserved pay rise in 2021, helping members stand up for their rights at work, and more. One of my proudest days as a member was organising our census day rally outside Stop 1 during the August 2023 week long strike.

It’s obvious that management of this multi-billion dollar institution are not on our side and on the branch committee I’ll keep fighting to hold them to account. I’m also not afraid to speak up against our union leaders when they aren’t acting in our interests. I argued against reducing our log of claims last year, and against accepting things like a below inflation pay rise in our final agreement. I believe we can win decent pay rises, an end to out of control workloads, job security, and a University run in our interests - I’ll keep organising towards this on the branch committee.

In terms of areas of focus for the branch over the next two years, I’d like to see us focus on growing in professional staff areas, both in numbers and confidence. There are areas that can have incredible power, but have historically been underrepresented in our union. I believe having this as a focus will put us in a stronger position leading into our next round of bargaining in 2026 (hopefully it will also lead to some big wins!)

I’m Lyell Durkin and I am running for re-election to the position of Branch Committee Ordinary Member. I currently work in a shared service area (Future Students/Student and Scholarly Services) as a staff member embedded in both the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. I have been part of the NTEU Branch Committee and Professional Staff Network since 2021. I have 10 years of experience at the University as a Masters's student, casual tutor, and professional staff member. During this time I have worked in causal, fixed and ongoing roles. I joined the union during the Professional Services Redesign (PSR) after seeing how a workplace restructure can quickly intensify work without sufficient union density to push back.

In my role, I work closely with academic and professional staff across SASS, Chancellery and Faculty. I see firsthand how issues facing professional staff in my area impact professional and academic workloads across the entire university. I have seen how the move towards a shared service model disrupts the union’s traditional organising structures and is used by Management to obfuscate the root causes of overwork. In my last term on the branch committee, I provided insights into the shared service model and an important connection to the staff working within it.
Nathan Gardner - Branch Committee Member

I am proud of all the key wins in our EBA, particularly those directly affecting professional staff, such as our improved targets for Casual and Fixed-term conversion, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Employment, and a commitment from Management to conduct an evidence-based review of workload practices between now and the next EBA negotiations. While these wins are great, there is still a lot more work to do. We must enforce our newly won rights, and use our new workload data points to organise and win greater protections in our next EBA.

If re-elected to Branch Committee, I would like our union to:

- Increase professional staff membership

- Ensure our newly won rights are enforced

- Build our industrial power in key professional staff areas

- Continue to support the Palestinian movement on campus, pressure the University to cut all ties with organisations enabling the ongoing genocide in Gaze and call on the NTEU national movement to do the same

If you are a professional staff member who wants to see your concerns represented, or an academic staff member who wants enough administrative support to protect your own workload, please consider voting for me in this election.

I’m a long-time member of the union, I became significantly more active within the union near the beginning of the most recent enterprise bargaining campaign. I have a background in software engineering so have extensive experience with exploring extensive and often conflicting goals of a wide range of people driven through structured conversations, as well as navigating complex legal requirements and principles. I co-chaired the Insecure Workers Network last year with a few other wonderful union colleagues and joined the branch committee during bargaining later in the year – working on extensively analysing and discussing claims proposed, particularly in relation to their operation on casual staff.

I am an academic staff member in the Faculty of Engineering and IT and have taught for over a decade, teaching in undergraduate coursework, postgraduate project work and postgraduate research subjects. I have also researched in the area of Agent-Based Planning.

I’m running for branch committee as I think my skillset aligns well with the demands of branch committee. My approach to growing the union is generally driven by data-backed analysis and conversations with other members – an approach long a part of successful union organising and further honed through practice in the enterprise bargaining process. I am also happy to carry out much of the work the branch committee picks up and give it my all

I’m also running for national/division council as the structure of the union is such that decisions made at higher levels often affect the allocation and availability of resources for local levels of the union such as the branch. I believe an active and engaged national and division presence from the branch is critical to ensuring the support is most aligned with effective union operation.

In the longer term, I see the branch focusing on the enforcement stage in preparation for the next round of bargaining – with limitations and challenges present in the agreement we most recently managed to win likely to come to the surface most clearly as we strengthen the union and build towards the fights that matter most to members. Building to have capacity for what we know we need in the next round strengthens our ability to win what matters most to members now – even where that isn’t a part of the agreement, allowing more of the issues we know exist in the University today to be resolved closer to how we know they should be.

My name is Nathan, I’m a post-doctoral researcher at the Melbourne Law School and I’m nominating for Branch Committee and National Council.

As a casual tutor, I became a delegate during our branch’s landmark campaign on wage-theft. Through that experience I witnessed the strength of collective decision-making and collective action and saw this strength reach new heights during our recent industrial action. I want to see greater reflection of these participatory ideals at the national level and greater transparency around the NTEU’s decision-making processes. I believe these factors are key to building union power and I am eager to strengthen our delegate network and promote delegate training to underpin this development.

Our union must be active to grow – that the University of Melbourne’s recent history of activism has made it the largest branch in the country is proof of this fact. Taking further action around working conditions and social justice is the natural direction for our union to be moving in. As an activist, delegate and Branch Committee member, I’m proud that I have been a part of the movement so far and am eager to work with my comrades here and at other branches to keep this movement going.

I am a tutor and research assistant in the School of Social & Political Science, and I have been employed casually each semester since 2019. I was inspired to join the union after learning about the successful wage theft campaign during 2019 and 2020, learning that when workers organise locally we can tangibly and meaningfully improve our working conditions. I was involved in helping organise our historic strikes in SSPS last year and was again inspired by colleagues, and the power of working together. This work isn’t over. I’m running to be on our Branch Committee because I want to help continue this work, and create a workplace that values all of us.

Hi! My name is Rory. I’m a casual professional staff member in the libraries, with experience and connections at the Parkville and Southbank campuses. I became active in our union because it is the voice for the insecure and exploited professional and academic casual workers on which the University’s entrenched business model relies. As a rank-and-file union member, I organised across multiple libraries to engage precariously employed colleagues in the historic industrial campaign of 2022-2023. I was extremely proud to rally, march, strike and picket alongside many of my coworkers and, with them, promote a stronger culture of industrial militancy in our union branch. In recent months, I was at the forefront of union activities to support and defend the Unimelb4Palestine student campaign for divestment from weapons companies, again engaging coworkers in this struggle.

While our branch has achieved impressive membership density in certain work areas, including the libraries, much of the University has not yet benefitted from such extensive unionisation. And despite our branch having over two thousand members, we are still far from a majority union member workforce.

The branch’s 2022 Log of Claims had a transformative ambition and, if fully achieved, would have displaced the University’s business model. Of course, the 2024 EBA delivered significant benefits for casual, fixed-term and ongoing staff – but it notably fell short on, when compared to the branch’s initial claims, pay rises, secure employment, casual leave, manageable workloads and restructure limits.

To better maintain the ambition and intergrity of our demands in the next round of bargaining, the rapid growth of our membership – and thus our collective industrial power – must be central to everything we do as a union branch. The past two years have shown that our colleagues will join a union that is not afraid to fight. The strikes of 2023 recruited many members literally at the picket lines; new union activists have emerged to organise with our stridently pro-Palestine branch. If elected to the Branch Committee, I would take this lesson seriously by continuing to promote industrial militancy and bold interventions around the issues deeply felt by University staff, whether casual, fixed term or ongoing. The University can be about so much more than profits for executives – but we must grow our branch and commit to the struggle. This is why I am running. Thank you for your consideration.

I have been a lecturer in the School of Social & Political Science since 2021, first on rolling fixed-term contracts; as of this year, ongoing. Before that I was a casual at Swinburne Uni where I regularly had my wages stolen and had my employment essentially ended because I became eligible for conversion.
That experience at Swinburne convinced me I had to be an active unionist. At Melbourne I put in a lot of work organising my school for last year’s strikes. It was an incredible experience. I got more and more involved: I became a delegate and was active on the strike committee. Since then, I’ve been working with other delegates in Arts on casual conversion and workload campaigns, and I have become an elected Health & Safety Representative in the faculty.

I am running for the Branch Committee because I want to support more local area organising. This was the model that I think produced the most effective action during last year’s EBA, and I think it’s the model that will win us more next time. At times this model got less than full support within the branch—at times some voices were more in favour of a one-size-fits-all approach. I don’t agree with that mode of campaigning. I think we are at our most effective when we are working locally with our workmates, and taking action that actually fits the work of each area.
Over the next two years I think our number one priority needs to be growing grassroots networks amongst professional staff. We have lots of magnificent prof staff comrades and some hot prof-staff-shops, but we also have many areas where there’s a lot of unrealised potential in terms of union activism. We need to do more listening and devote serious resources to building organisations in those areas.
Priority two for me is workloads. I think we did not generate enough effective pressure last EBA to win a big breakthrough on workloads. To me that was a lesson learned—we will only get transformative change on this if we build a stronger organisation next time. I think there is a lot of work to do over the next two years to plan for a more effective workloads campaign—including working out clear, strong workload demands, but also raising the level of commitment amongst members to do what we need to win them.

After becoming more engaged with NTEU work through the casuals and wage theft campaigns, I was elected as an ordinary Branch Committee member for the first time in 2021, and again in 2022. In 2024 I am once again standing as a candidate to represent members on the Branch Committee, and asking for your vote.

I’ve worked as an academic at the University since 2013, working sessionally for 5 years, in fixed term contracts as a Lecturer in the Gender Studies program from 2019-2022, and in an ongoing position as a teaching-focussed Lecturer since 2023. My experience in positions across the spectrum of job security affords me with insight into the varied concerns and needs of the branch academic membership, and understanding the institution’s deployment of insecurity in academic labour and the impact it has on our careers and wellbeing means I am attuned to this aspect of the Branch’s mission.

I’m proud of the enormous growth our Branch has witnessed in the last few years, both in terms of membership and in terms of organisational development. The Branch as a whole, as well as the Branch Committee, navigated an extensive and prolonged round of EBA negotiations and industrial action with a commitment to a new approach which valued grassroots democratic participation in bargaining. With our next EBA round in 2 years time, we have a rare opportunity to immediately build on our learnings and experiences and to enter the next round in a much stronger position. This will require leadership and coordination comprising of a mix of new and experienced Branch Committee members, and a commitment to representing the many perspectives across the membership of the Branch. We are strongest when we refuse to be divided or Balkanised by management and when we are united in struggle.

I am an academic based in the Faculty of Education. I have been on the branch committee at Unimelb for approximately 8 years and have been actively involved in two rounds of Enterprise Bargaining negotiations. This has included organising my workplace for industrial action, sitting on the union bargaining team, sharing updates with members, being part of the team to run members meetings and organising rallies and direct action.

I am also actively involved in addressing a number of workplace and broader political issues through my branch committee role, including workload problems, issues associated with teaching intensive contracts and insecure work, Palestine solidarity, Indigenous solidarity, racism, ableism and gender equality. I bring a range of teaching, scholarly and organising experience to contribute to these struggles. I work hard to communicate the experiences of academic, professional and casual staff to conversations and debates in the branch. I believe in the need for collective effort and action to bring about change and encourage my colleagues and comrades to contribute what they can to our common struggle. I always aim to speak truth to power.

The last few years has seen a greater democratisation of our branch processes and practices and I am committed to continuing to develop this work. I hope to see the branch grow in member capacity so that more members feel confident to actively participate in building better work conditions and a better world more broadly. The next two years should see the branch build and prepare for the next round of bargaining and show members how our efforts towards addressing the injustices of the corporate university are tied to other injustices of capitalism and colonialism, such as Israel’s treatment of Palestine and through institutional ableism and racism. I hope to see the branch continue, and strengthen, its commitment to getting the university to demilitarise and divest from all weapons manufacturing relationships.

I am running for Branch Committee to advocate for better inclusion and equity while supporting our continued growth. I am proud of everything we have built here at the NTEU UniMelb branch and wish to continue to contribute on branch, harnessing my experience working in diversity and inclusion, and my passion for transparent and accessible communication.

Communications is what initially involved me with our union. I was reading updates, offers and proposed agreements during bargaining and thought – but what does this mean in reality? What could it look like, and on the other hand, how much will be given up if we don’t get it? Thus I began the Comms working group, creating posters and info sheets to support our EBA negotiations, rallies and briefings.

My current work at the University, combined with my wider experiences, bring an intersectional understanding of the barriers faced by staff at UniMelb.

I am passionate, community driven and genuine person who cares deeply about making UniMelb a better and more equitable place for all of us.

My name is Liz Strakosch and I am a senior lecturer in politics at the School of Social and Political Sciences. I’ve been a teaching and research academic for ten years, first at UQ and now at UniMelb. Since first starting work in higher education, I’ve been a union member and involved in grassroots organising, especially in relation to insecure employment and racism within the workplace. Last year, I was involved in organising industrial action in the Faculty of Arts, including co-running the Racism in the University workshop during the second strike week.

I also work in antiracist spaces outside the university. As a white settler scholar, this involves doing my best to prioritise the leadership of and collaborate with First Nations and racialised people. I am a founding co-director of the Indigenous led Institute for Collaborative Race Research, which aims to put research to work in antiracist struggle, a board member of the Institute for Postcolonial Studies, and an Executive Officer of the Jewish Council of Australia, which seeks to provide an alternative Jewish perspective advocating for justice and Palestinian freedom.

I am running for this position because I am committed to building a fighting union and transforming the higher education sector. I believe we need union representatives from amongst the permanent academic staff who prioritise insecure and professional workers’ needs, and are not afraid of taking strong industrial action.

All workers face the corrosive effects of insecure employment and huge workloads, and we can only change this through industrial pressure and continued activation of members. I also believe the NTEU can do better in the area of antiracism, and that we need to build a labour movement that works for and includes all marginalized groups. Finally, I support our branch’s strong stance on the genocide in Gaza. As a branch, we must be brave and vocal on this issue, and fight fiercely to defend academic freedom. I have been impressed by the energy, openness and commitment of the UniMelb branch of the NTEU, and would love to continue to contribute as a member of the branch committee and national council.

I am an experienced union activist and branch committee member, who is running for the branch committee role. Currently I’m the Acting Branch Vice President (Academic Staff), after having previously served on the Branch Committee as the Insecure Worker (Casual and Fixed Term) Representative. Last year I was one of the Co-Chairs of the Branch’s Strike Committee, planning our industrial campaign. I originally became an NTEU delegate in 2019 as part of the Casuals Wage Theft Campaign and played a role in the Casuals Network.

I’m now an Assistant Lecturer in Philosophy – a continuing “Education Focused” role – after being converted at the end of last year from a fixed-term Periodic position. Before that I worked as a casual for five years across four different universities, including UniMelb.

I’ve seen and personally experienced how transformative union organising can be within the workplace. We can build a better University for both staff and students, and I believe that my experience as both a longtime local workplace delegate and member of the UniMelb Branch leadership team will be best utilised in the Branch Committee position.

There are three main things to focuse on for the University of Melbourne Branch of the NTEU:

(1) enforcing the new conditions that we won at the last round of bargaining;

(2) building a more democratic union that is representative of all staff at the university; and

(3) growing our union density and organising infrastructure in preparation for the next round of bargaining.

These three goals are best pursued together. By identifying issues in workplaces and enforcing our conditions (1) we can bring more people into the union both as members and activists (2) and grow our union power (3). The Casuals Wage Theft campaign is a good example of this. NTEU branches normally lose members between bargaining rounds, whereas the UniMelb Branch grew by hundreds, along with gaining a network of experienced activists and delegates. This was a big factor in our ability to take more effective industrial action and win better conditions in the last round of bargaining.

I’m a Senior Lecturer in International Relations (Faculty of Arts), and have been at UniMelb for 6 years. Before that I was a fixed-term and casual academic in Canada. I have been a member of academic unions for 14 years, since I was a PhD student/tutor. Here at UniMelb, I have actively participated in activities to build our last log of claims, tracked workloads in anticipation of a possible enforcement campaign, voted, signed petitions, rallied, done a teach-in, organized discussions for ongoing and fixed-term staff, and gone on strike. I have sponsored two motions in the last year (work-to-rule during the bargaining process and academic freedom in response to Israel/Palestine), and have been an observer at Branch Committee meetings for the last several months.

I teach my students that labor rights are human rights, and that’s how I approach the NTEU and my broader service to my colleagues. It’s why I am running for a position on Branch Committee; to make sure that our rights are understood, protected and advanced in the context of law, policy, and practice. I have done this work through my research and teaching, through NGOs and social movements, through service (representing Early Career Academics in the Faculty of Arts and on the SSPS School Executive), and through my general commitment to speak truth to power (did anyone catch me getting yelled at by Duncan Maskell last year at the VC Roadshow for Arts?). That speech can take many forms and happen in many spaces, and can be constructive and collaborative when possible. However, when those options fail, we need our union to stand up for us, and that’s what I want to help it to do.

I believe that the next two years should be spent enforcing our current EBA and getting ready for our next round of bargaining. That means deep and wide consultation. Between rapid decasualization, the new EBA, changes to Fair Work, the Universities Accord, changes to the ARC, possible international student caps, the Estate Master Plan and a coming new VC, our workplace is evolving rapidly, in ways both good and bad. We need to be talking to all our members and reaching out to the whole university community to understand what these changes are, and what challenges and opportunities they provide.

I have been an archivist (professional staff) in the library at unimelb for 16 years. I got active in the union during the first round of redundancies I witnessed, when many long-term, dedicated, ongoing librarians were sacked to make way for new casualised positions.

I’ve been a library delegate and member of the Branch Committee for many years. In my time I have campaigned against job cuts in areas such as the grounds team, research computing services and the libraries; helped organise the successful vote against the university’s proposal to abolish our pay rise in 2021; and was strike committee co-chair in our historic 2023 industrial campaign.

I have also been on the union’s National Council, where I was part of a team that successfully fought the NTEU leadership’s disastrous Jobs Protection Framework, which proposed salary cuts of 5-15% in 2020.

I’m running again for branch committee because I want to continue to keep university management, and our union leadership, to account. I would like to see a university that values its staff – both academic and professional – as the most important factor in providing a meaningful and supportive educational experience. But given the state of our sector, that seems unlikely to happen unless staff stand against the current priorities of the University’s leadership. We need to build our power as a union, to demand and win real, material improvements for all staff.

Over the next couple of years, our branch should focus on building up our capacity to fight for an ambitious set of claims in our next Enterprise Agreement round. We’ll only do this by training and supporting more members to understand and stand up for their rights in the workplace. We need to extend a network of delegates across the campus so that the union is embedded in the day-to-day working life of thousands of staff. The branch should combine a demonstrable commitment to improving working conditions for members with support for social justice.

As an historian, I’ve seen that the best tradition of unionism sees the two as utterly connected. Our university should be taking a lead in divesting from Israel, in protest at the genocide in Gaza. I have and will continue to oppose anti-democratic measures to supress protest on campus. It is more important than ever to uphold the rights of staff and students to demand a say in what happens at our institution.