Australians go to the polls this Saturday to choose the next government. The Australian Labor Party, the Liberal-National Coalition and the Australian Greens have a variety of different policies for education in the funding, content and management spaces.
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Analysis from The Australia Institute said 10 universities together spent more than $390m on travel in 2023 and 27 institutions spent $410m on consultants amid executive pay and wage underpayment scandals.
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It’s nearing the end of the academic year at Harvard University, where I teach in the Graduate School of Education. Students are preparing for final exams and finishing up capstone projects. Awards ceremonies are being held and celebrations, formal and informal, have begun. The weather has finally warmed up in Cambridge, and the outdoor tables at restaurants and coffee shops are crowded. The women’s tennis team clinched the Ivy League title.
It all feels normal. Yet it all feels discordant, like a scene in a M. Night Shyamalan movie that infuses the quotidian with a barely detectable feeling of dread.
This discordance is of course especially powerful at Harvard, the current epicenter of a ferocious and lawless attack on higher education that might make Viktor Orbán blush. But it is not unique to Harvard. At colleges and universities across the country, classes continue, clubs meet and Frisbees are being tossed even as the government sows fear and confusion by revoking, then restoring, then warning that it might again revoke the visa statuses of more than 1,800 international students.
Lawyers continue to do what lawyers do, while large firms are essentially signing on to be instruments of the government, individuals are being targeted because the president of the United States holds a grudge, bigly, and court orders are being ignored.
Doctors continue to treat patients while billions of dollars of funding for medical research and experimental trials are being withheld and the secretary of Health and Human Services is declaring that autism is preventable and the measles vaccine is maybe, sort of OK.
We get in our cars or on our bicycles and go off to work while the government is pressing before the courts an argument that would allow it to send anyone, citizen or noncitizen, to a foreign prison without cause or legal recourse.
When many of us think about authoritarian takeovers, we imagine military coups and declarations of martial law. But the truth is that the most powerful tool of the aspiring authoritarian is not shock, but normalcy. How bad can things be if we can still shop at Costco or take our families out for Italian food? How bad can they be if we can still download Maya Angelou onto our Kindles or watch Jimmy Kimmel Live!? How bad can they be if I can still publish a piece like this one, critical of the federal government?
Look around not only at the campuses, but at the streets and bars and hardware stores in any city or town in America and it appears to be the same as it was last year and the year before. The NBA playoffs have begun and there’s a new film starring Michael B. Jordan. Normal.
Except it is not, in ways of which we are vaguely aware but unable or unwilling to fully credit.
For most people—the ones not scooped off the street by men in masks or ousted from their jobs with the federal government without cause or forced to stop their research because of the loss of National Institutes of Health funding—life feels more or less the way it did when we were a reasonably functional democracy. This is the way it works: Keep 99 percent of the lives of 99 percent of the people undisturbed for as long as possible so that they will remain unaware of or indifferent to what is happening at the margins. By the time they recognize that the edges of normalcy have drawn closer, it will be too late to do anything about it because the guardrails will have been destroyed.
Begin with the least sympathetic targets. Who will shed tears for the fate of Venezuelan gang members (real or imagined)? Does anyone really like Big Law? Government employees are the problem, not the solution. Harvard, with its giant endowment and Ivy League arrogance, is rarely anyone’s idea of an underdog. Why should we concern ourselves with any of this on the way to McDonald’s or Starbucks? I work at Harvard and most of the time I find it difficult to take seriously the reality that the federal government is trying to destroy a private university simply to prove that it can and because its appetite for both control and chaos appears to have no limits.
Be sure to cite rules and regulations that few people care to understand. What is 501(c)(3) status anyway? “Indirect costs” seem sort of like a scam. The “Alien Enemies Act” sounds like something pulled from the latest Marvel movie. Then cloak it all in the guise of causes to which it seems difficult to object—fighting antisemitism, because Donald Trump and the party of Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Proud Boys are the first things that come to mind when one thinks about protecting Jews. Or perhaps national security, given the threat to the republic posed by international students co-authoring op-eds for the campus newspaper.
Above all, lie. Constantly, relentlessly, shamelessly lie. Since most people don’t spend a majority of their time lying about a majority of things, they appear to find it difficult to recognize when other people do. It’s hard to question a time-tested strategy.
The fight against our current level of inertia is painfully difficult because the allure of the normal, the desire to believe that things are just fine, is so powerful. A tank in the street is hard to ignore. A steady eroding of legal and ethical norms just beyond the limits of our daily vision is easy to miss.
Our greatest hope might be the tendency of authoritarians and those without any moral compass to overreach. If they can change life by 1 percent without much resistance, why not five or 10 or 20? If they can, through executive actions, free hundreds of convicted felons and strip away environmental protections, why not impose arbitrary and irrational tariffs? What made the reaction to tariffs different and what has, at least for the moment, slowed their progress is the fact that they tore a hole in the illusion of normalcy. Plummeting retirement accounts and worries about the cost of groceries will disrupt the normal in a way that canceling student visas or defunding Harvard will not. It was a mistake, and they will, out of arrogance and stupidity, make more.
The set of demands sent to Harvard, for instance, which Harvard refused to comply with, resulting in headlines around the globe, was apparently sent in error. You could make that up, but no one would believe you.
Meanwhile, I wonder whether we can afford to wait. Is it sufficient to hope that they will make things abnormal enough for a large enough group of people to provoke resistance, or do we have to do the difficult work of wrenching ourselves, somehow, out of the reassuring comforts of familiar routines? David Brooks, hardly a radical, has called for a “comprehensive national civic uprising” to counter the war being waged on our national civic fabric. Do people, organizations and institutions in the United States, so certain for so long about the permanence of its democracy, even have the energy or the will? Can that happen here or is it something that happens in Seoul or Istanbul and is shown on CNN?
Meanwhile, I have laundry to do and a class to teach this week. Maybe I’ll catch something on Netflix. Pretty normal stuff.
Universities today have access to more data than ever before to assess student success and graduate outcomes. But having data is only part of the equation. The real challenge is turning insights into action.
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Regional and rural Australia’s doctor shortage is being targeted as an election issue by the Coalition, which is promising to fund an extra 200 students to train as general practitioners to work in the bush.
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Melinda Cilento is the chief executive of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia and Skills and Workforce Ministerial Council Chair.
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Quality Teaching in Practice returns for its fourth consecutive year, as one of the leading educational research and practice conference for teachers, school leaders and policymakers.
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Australia’s higher education sector is highly dependent on casual and contract staff. As of 2021, 43 per cent of higher education employees were employed as casual or fixed-term contract employees. This puts education among the top 10 industries in terms of casual employment utilisation.
While this workforce model provides flexibility for universities, it also introduces significant payroll complexities, including managing multiple roles under different awards, ensuring accurate timesheet approvals, and meeting compliance obligations for both domestic and international employees.
For staff, payroll errors – such as delayed payments, incorrect classifications, or missed superannuation contributions – can have severe financial and emotional consequences.
To mitigate these risks, universities are looking to adopt modern payroll systems that automate compliance, improve accuracy, and enhance payroll transparency. Without effective payroll management, institutions risk financial penalties, reputational risk, and damage to staff wellbeing.
Campus Review readers will no doubt be familiar with the many stories of underpayment in the education sector.
Dubbed ‘wage theft’ in a report by the same name in 2023, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) reported underpayments of $159 million since 2009, across 97,500 staff, 55 separate incidents and 32 different institutions.
The union blamed these underpayments to casual workers on ‘conditions of the awards not being followed’, bit in reality, it isn’t so simple.
In its response to the NTEU report, the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (AHEIA) found that “complex industrial agreements and government policy and funding arrangements had contributed to the [wage underpayment] issue, however, institutions have an obligation to ensure appropriate governance settings and frameworks to avoid these circumstances emerging.”
“This includes implementing updates and changes to workforce system architecture, such as payroll and time recording systems.”
Universities operate under some of the most complex employment frameworks in Australia. Staff can hold multiple contracts simultaneously, such as teaching undergraduates while working on a research grant, all under separate pay structures.
Without an integrated HR and payroll system, ensuring compliance across these contracts becomes a high-risk administrative challenge. Instead of focusing on past underpayments, the focus should be on modernising payroll technology to prevent future mistakes.
To do this, universities and higher-education institutions across Australia are investing in payroll automation, real-time compliance tracking, and award interpretation tools to ensure correct payments, protect their reputations, and improve staff confidence in payroll accuracy.
Companies that rely on manual data entry and updates to data always run the risk of payroll errors and compliance issues. Relying on paper or even spreadsheets to track time worked and manually keying this data into systems creates a huge risk right from the start of the process.
Errors often stem from these outdated and manual payroll processes, not from negligence or cost-cutting. It’s in these systems where complexities such as irregular working hours, different payment structures, and compliance with visa and employment laws create administrative strain.
By eliminating manual data entry and automating compliance checks, universities can ensure employees receive accurate and timely payments while reducing financial and reputational risks.
Automation also simplifies complex payroll calculations – such as processing multiple roles under different pay scales – ensuring employees are paid according to their specific contract terms without administrative bottlenecks.
Payroll transparency is essential for improving trust between universities and their employees, as is the ability to run payroll in real-time and see the impact of calculations. This becomes possible when organisations automate the process and focus on managing exceptions rather than processing errors.
A real-time payroll calculation allows payroll teams to identify anomalies early in the cycle, chase missing or invalid timesheets, and pinpoint specific employees whose pay data needs to be adjusted without having to reprocess the entire payroll.
The latest technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), will further improve automation and exception handling. These tools will enable payroll managers to identify potential issues earlier in the pay cycle, ensuring errors are corrected before payroll is finalised.
Real-time reporting also allows universities to forecast workforce expenses more effectively, preventing payroll overruns and ensuring compliance with both internal financial controls and external regulatory obligations.
Managing payroll for casual and non-permanent staff has long been a challenge for universities, particularly when employees hold multiple roles across different departments with varying conditions and payment rules.
To overcome payroll complexities, universities need integrated HR and payroll systems, automated payments and improved compliance tracking. A truly integrated system, such as TechnologyOne’s Human Resources & Payroll (HRP), provides:
Universities that are now using TechnologyOne’s Human Resources & Payroll have benefited from a more efficient approach to payroll. Charles Darwin University, for example, transitioned from separate legacy HR, recruitment and payroll systems to a fully integrated HR and Finance platform, eliminating inefficiencies and reducing payroll errors.
Similarly, the University of Dundee in the UK moved from highly bespoke, costly custom systems to a standardised enterprise platform, resulting in cost savings and process efficiency.
As universities continue to adapt to workforce casualisation and regulatory changes, investing in a scalable and automated payroll system is essential. Future-proofing payroll means ensuring that universities have a system capable of handling evolving award structures, diverse employment types, and increasing compliance demands.
TechnologyOne’s Human Resources & Payroll (HRP) helps universities automate payroll, ensure compliance, and reduce payroll errors, delivering a seamless, integrated workforce management experience.
Find out how TechnologyOne HRP can transform your university’s payroll processes.
Andy Cox is TechnologyOne’s General Manager for HR & Payroll Products, leading the development of innovative solutions that help organisations manage the entire employee lifecycle from recruitment to retirement.
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Education Minister Jason Clare’s seat of Blaxland is considered safe, but the impacts of western Sydney’s “melting pot” population on this election remains to be seen.
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A Coalition government would invest $260m to get more high school students to take up trades instead of pursuing university, it has been announced, after it indicated it would cut the Labor’s fee-free TAFE program..
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