Brendan Nelson Tells the Sydney Institute How Its Gonna Be; So You V-Cs, Just Watch It! (April 16, 2005)

    The Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, fronted Gerard Henderson's conservative public affairs forum The Sydney Institute on April 14, "We are determined to complete the industrial relations agenda."

And according to Tim Dodd of The Australian Financial Review he went on to say, "Any university which has recently signed [a new enterprise bargaining agreement] should not assume they will not be forced to revisit it."

He told Dodd after the formal address that he intended to bring back the original legislation "nothing more, nothing less". The legislation would require universities to offer staff an Australian Workplace Agreement that would, in the case of inconsistency, override the provisions in an enterprise agreement.

Dodd also reports that Dr Nelson said "[the legislation] would also ban industrial action that damaged third parties, such as the withholding of exam results; unions would not be permitted to take part in industrial negotiations except with the agreement of the participants; and commonwealth university funding would not be allowed to be used to subsidise union activities."

Dr Nelson also said that while he prefer[ed] that the states referred their powers over universities to the commonwealth he donned his hobnailed boots in threatening to test the corporation's power in the commonwealth constitution to assert federal government control over university governance and auditing which with the exception of ANU is the province of the states and territories.

Perhaps sometime in the future when the good doctor writes his memoirs he will explain how all this has reversed the decay infesting the Australian universities' infrastructure, staffing, basic research, and morale and made them better placed for research and the transmission of learning. We can only assume that like God he is working in mysterious ways.

Oh yes, the Minister did also mention that "in the long-term, the ANU could stop taking undergraduate students and become a research-only university." But there's a caveat -- it could/would entail becoming fully merged with the CSIRO. Dr Nelson has instigated a review to be chaired by the the vice-chancellor of the University of London, Professor Graeme Davies to detail how the merger should be implemented. In the circumstances perhaps ANU's vice-chancellor, Ian Chubb, will be wary of Nelson bearing gifts.