Peter Chen
Candidate Statement: Usyd Branch, Ordinary Member
Sydney university has come out of a brutalising period of austerity. While management takes credit for the near one-billion-dollar surplus, the exhausted and demoralised staff of our organisation see this for what it is: a basic failure of management to ensure this public institution lives up to its commitment to the community and employees. My colleagues are sick of being unable to perform to the high standards they set for themselves because of management’s constant cuts to our teaching and research capacity, while surrounded by the disingenuous language of “excellence”.
With a change of senior management many members I have spoken with are concerned about the reputation of our leadership, hearing harrowing tails of the “hunger games” approach to restructuring at the ABC and Fairfax: the institutional fate USyd would be wise to avoid. We need a Branch that will take on management on three levels: at the level of individual mistreatment of staff, at the strategic level about what this institution is about and who it is for, and at the community level – articulating a vision for a public institution that serves the public.
I’m an academic working in FASS, a role I’ve held for over a decade. I’ve been an active member of our union during all my time at the University of Sydney, and have stood with you on picket lines, as well as serving the Union as a member of the staff-management workloads committee process. If elected, I hope to be a productive member of our branch committee, making a well-reasoned contribution to our strategy and policy.
Candidate Statement: National Councillor
Australian universities represent an essential service to our community. The way these public institutions have been run over recent decades has reflected significant failures of public policy top-down. While many of the flaws we see in our sector have been apparent to us for years – increasing reliance on insecure employment, degrading workloading, terrible staff-student ratios, rent seeking, managerial self-dealing, and gross mismanagement – the wider Australian public are beginning to see and recognise the sector is in a crisis. The public want us to deliver on our promise to them: the provision of excellent education, undertaking relevant research, and acting as a critical counterweight in the public sphere. This moment represents a major opportunity to turn around the state of the higher education sector, and our union is a critical part of leading the fight. I would like your support to be your National Councillor. I have a background in public policy in both the academy and my professional life, and two decades working in this sector. These are experiences I want to bring to bear at the national level as we increasingly engage in the public fight for the heart and soul of the sector most of us joined out of a genuine sense of public service.
