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The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has told the Education and Employment Senate Committee that the sector regulator doesn’t have the correct functions to address staff underpayments, amid calls it needs more power.

Union policy and research officer Kieran McCarron said there are two general issues with Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) that impact staff.

“The threshold standards are too high-level and vague, especially when it comes to governance and staffing,” he told the Committee.

“The second issue is that either the enforcement powers are too weak, it’s too complicated for TEQSA to access them, or they’re just simply inappropriate. For example, deregistration is just inappropriate overkill to deal with the issues that our members face.

“Having everyone lose their jobs and the universities shut down doesn’t solve wage theft and it doesn’t help the community, so it’s not an appropriate power.”

He said there needs to be changes to TEQSA so it can “ensure compliance with appropriate penalties,” and better reflect current staff conditions.

TEQSA chief executive Mary Russell told the same Committee her body needs more powers to wrangle universities and help it to deal with staff-related issues, giving an example of a teaching issue that can’t currently be resolved by TEQSA under its existing powers.

“There’s actually already a legislative requirement that any person teaching in higher education needs to be engaged in continuing scholarship and research. That’s your traditional “40:40:20 academic.”

“How is it that at least half of the teaching performed in our universities is performed by casual staff who are hired on an hourly basis and who are only paid for the hours in which they are directly engaged with students?

“How is it being ensured that they’re performing scholarship and research – because they’re not paid to do that. There’s an assumption made that they’ll just do that in their own time, and that’s unpaid work. This is an example of an issue that TEQSA is aware of but doesn’t have any appropriate tools to deal with.”

Wage underpayment and financial management

Wage underpayments and high vice-chancellor pay are the two biggest money-related issues universities have.

The Fair Work Ombudsman Anna Booth later told the Committee her office has recovered $180.9m for 99,000 university employees as of February 28, 2025. The NTEU has estimated wage underpayments, paid or unpaid, are set to exceed $400m.

Ms Booth said the most common “trends” Fair Work sees when dealing with underpayments include: high numbers of casual staff; poor governance and management oversight practices; a lack of centralised human resources functions; pay related issues commonly dealt with by academic managers who lack appropriate expertise; and lack of investment in payroll and time-recording systems.

“Our investigations have largely concerned casual professional and academic staff and have largely included unpaid work – unpaid marking activities, lecture and tutorial attendance, and other student interactions – as well as the application of incorrect classifications, unpaid entitlements and the improper use of piece rates,” she told the Committee.

Universities Australia, which is the vice-chancellor’s membership group, in its submission said debate about VC salaries, which average $1m, are solely political and distract from issues of underfunding degrees and research.

“Debate over vice-chancellor salaries, for example, distracts from the conversation we need to have about funding our universities properly,” chief executive Luke Sheehy wrote.

“Their salaries are set by university councils. I don’t believe they should be the sole focus of parliamentarians, certainly not at the expense of the policies and funding needed to keep our universities strong.”

Related stories: La Trobe most recent uni to reveal it underpaid staff | Monash underpays $7.6m as ‘expert council’ on uni governance members announced

Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi, who disclosed she is an NTEU member, said she was “pretty outraged” when she read the UA submission.

“I think this debate is fundamental to how universities operate, especially given the exorbitant pay packets of executive staff and VCs on the one hand and the systemic wage theft, rampant casualisation and insecure work on the other,” she said.

Fear and secrecy

NTEU branch president at Federation University Dr Mathew Abbott said constant cuts and restructures throughout the sector has created a workplace culture that fears retribution.

“University staff fear for their livelihoods, and that creates a culture in which staff become more compliant and less likely to speak out,” he said.

“This is something I’ve tried to raise – the psychological toll it takes, the professional toll, and, of course, the impact of this on students.

“When staff are placed under this kind of pressure, along with other issues like workloads and so on, it has a flow-on effect to the quality of the education that we provide to our students.”

He said there is a “culture of secrecy” in university councils and senates, something NTEU member Professor Fiona Probyn-Rapsey from University of Wollongong also said is exacerbated by largely non-staff elected boards.

There were multiple calls made for university council meeting minutes to be available to all university staff.

“We have very little access to what university councils are discussing and how decisions are made. We don’t see minutes, and we barely get any interaction with university council members,” Professor Probyn-Rapsey said.

“They don’t operate in the same way that the rest of the university does – in a collegial manner – or in the way a university should be behaving.”

Management should also let staff have more say in teaching decisions, Professor Andrea Lamont-Mills, University of Southern Queensland NTEU branch president, added.

“Staff feel disempowered because they’re not using their expertise – it’s not valued, and their professionalism is not valued,” she said.

“It’s disempowering when you get excluded from decisions that actually impact you, or you have limited input into decisions that directly impact you.

“Our staff are highly skilled and highly knowledgeable, and they want to be part of developing decisions and coming up with solutions, yet they’re disempowered – they’re not able to do that.”

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