From Sports Media. I'm Daniel James. This is seven AM. When Bill Shorten finally gave up his hopes of ever becoming Prime minister. One door closed and another much more lucrative door opened. In his new role as Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, he could earn up to
three times as much as the PM. His appointment comes amid a fight about the exorbitant salaries Australian vice chancellors receive, and at a time when his own government's new cap on international students raise big questions about funding shortfalls and higher education. Today National correspondent for the Saturday Paper Mike Sekham on how much vice chancellors earn and how they
justify it. It's Wednesday, September eighteen. Mike, in his new role as the Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra, is rumored that Bill Shorten may receive a hefty pay rise. How much money are we talking about exactly?
Well, we don't know the exact figio. They're still negotiating that. But his predecessor, Patty Nixon earned just over a million dollars if you consider short and tried twice to become Prime minister and lost both times. Well, now he's going to be earning more than the Prime minister, quite a lot more than the Prime Minister. Anthony Albanezi gets an annual wage of six hundred and seven thousand dollars five hundred unshortened as a minister would earn a bit less
than that. I forget the exact number, but essentially shortened stands to roughly treble his earnings.
So a million dollars, of course, is nothing to sneeze at.
No, no, indeed I wish I had it?
Is Paddy Nixon just an exception? Or is this the case for all other university chancellors?
Well might seem overly generous to some, especially when you consider that the University of Canberra is currently ranked four hundred and third in the world. This is not a particularly prestigious institution, and still a million dollar salary, But that's actually about part the course for vice chancellor paychecks in Australia. In twenty twenty three, the average vice chancellor pay was just over a million. The highest pay was for the vice chancellor of the University of Melbourne, which
was just shy of one point five million. At least, you could say in the case of the University of Melbourne. They came in thirteenth in the world rankings and have a very big student body. So there is that.
I suppose there's a bit of the dark art. It's about what vice chancellors actually do. In my mind anyway, what warrants the million dollar salaries.
Well it's a good question. I actually looked up a couple of university websites, you know, and just googled what does the vice chancellor do? University of Sydney had a little thing that said, and I'm quoting the vice chancellor lead it's the university and determines its overall direction in close consultation with the chancellor and other fellows of the Senate, senior leaders and the academic board. So in other words,
the sort of chairman of the board. I guess you'd say, but they actually do more than you know, set broad direction. I spoke to one vice chancellor who couldn't be named so they could speak freely, and they said they actually spend a lot of their time hunting for money. Was
the way it was put. Hunting for money on behalf of the university, which means, you know, schmoozing business lobbying government, that sort of thing, and that role I think has changed in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands, as government funding was withdrawn, the internal structures of universities changed a bit. So you know those boards and senates, I think the universities have various names for them, but essentially they fulfill the same function as a board of directors
and a private company. Well, it used to be the case that those boards had lots of internal appointees, and what's changed is that they're increasingly fewer of those and many more external appointees over the years. So a lot of those people come from the corporate world. The thing is, of course that those people you know, coming from the c suites of large private businesses and financial institutions are used to huge paychecks, you know, well over a million dollars.
The CEO of the Commonwealth Bank, for example, earned seven point three million dollars in twenty twenty three. So my point here is that when someone coming from that world enters the remuneration committee for a university, they think that giving a million dollars to a vice chancellor is actually pretty cheap, you know, And when one vice chancellor gets a million dollars. It then sets a benchmark for others to ask for the same, if not more. I mean,
that's essentially human nature. So, you know, a lot of money. But in their defense, that anonymous VC that I spoke to highlighted that, you know, senior departmental secretaries in government earned salaries similar to vice chancellors, and that's true. The head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, for example, receives just over a million dollar. The head of Treasury receives just under a million dollars. I think there's a dozen or more other senior bureaucrats who pocket more than
nine hundred thousand. So, you know, my vice chancellor was making the point a that it's not enormous in the scheme of things, But their bigger point was that and the word they used was furfey. That's distracting from the real issue with universities, which is that they're grossly underfunded by government. And they're not wrong about that. You know, right now, universities have far bigger problems on their hands with money than just the paychecks of vice chancellors.
Coming up after the break, will Bill Shorten fight his old colleagues on university funding. When he takes on his new job, Bill Shorten is going to be the vice chancellor of the University of Canberra and he's going in at a time when there's a lot of criticism about the huge pay packets that vice chancellors receive. But you've been speaking with people who say that master much more significant problem. Can you tell me about that?
Yeah, sure, Well the heart of the problem is that universities, in the absence of other funding, have come to rely on the revenue from the fees paid by international students, you know, to compensate what government isn't giving them. And of course now the government is talking about cutting that revenue stream as well by capping the number of overseas
students that can come to Australia. The Head of Universities Australia, Professor David Lloyd, talked to the National Press Club about this about a week ago, and you know, he said, the stark and frightening reality was that two thirds of publicly funded universities in Australia were in deficit in twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three. The Other and Easy government and the Peter Dotton Coalition are now outdoing one another in a roush to reduce the number of overseas
students studying at Australian's Australia's universities. You know, he made a very strong case. Universities were hammered during the COVID period when the Morrison government pushed overseas students to leave Australia and denied university's access to the job Keeper income support scheme. So they suffered badly from that and now, of course, just as they're recovering, both the major parties
are engaged in this pol driven attack. Was what Lloyd called it, making international students, you know, scapegoats to blame the housing crisis on. But really, you know, the problem began long before the pandemic. I think the pandemic just brought it into sharp focus. In the decade to two thousand and seven, under the Howard government, public investment in universities in Australia fell seven percent, and across the rest of the OECD there was an average increase of forty
eight percent. So you know, you can see a big difference there.
For us friends and this movement, the labor movement.
Education is the engine room of the economy. Then of course, in two thousand and seven, Labor one power, and it came in, promising an education revolution and warning that Australia's prosperity would hit a wall unless the quality and funding of education was raised substantially.
Mean by an education revolution. Let me take you through it.
You know. From two thousand and eight, the enrollments of students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds rose by two thirds, enrollments of indigenous students and those with disabilities more than double, enrollments from regional and remote areas jumped fifty percent, and spending as a share of gross domestic product also went up. So Labour's promised revolution was in part realized, but it
didn't last. By twenty twenty, when the coalition parties were again in power, the share of GDP being spent on higher education was lower than it had been in two thousand and eight.
So it's an obvious question, Mike, what has been the impact of the successive cuts to universities and how they operate well?
To start with, academic staff are increasingly employed under very tenuous conditions, with casual or fixed term contracts now the dominant form of employment as of June one this year, also there had been confirmed under payments of staff at thirty public universities totally around two hundred and three million dollars, So you know we're talking big, big bucks here in essentially wage theft. So you know that's a pretty big
deal for university staff. The NTEU, which is the Academics Union, is currently advocating for a cap on executive salaries and improved working conditions for tertiary staff. On top of this, we're already seeing impacts from Labour's cuts to student numbers, even though the legislation imposing caps is yet to pass. The former Minister for Home Affairs, Clara O'Neal, last December issued a directive which effectively slowed the granting of visas
to potential overseas students dramatically. According to Universities Australia, visa numbers are down twenty three percent, which is equivalent to almost sixty thousand students and their suggestion is that the way things are going, there's going to be big job losses. They have nominated a figure of about fourteen thousand jobs in the sector that could be lost, and bear in mind this is one of Australia's major export in this street. You know, it's up there with coal and iron ore.
It's a huge international money earner for Australia and you know, essentially during COVID Morrison told international students go home, and the way Lloyd puts it is what Albanizi is now doing is telling the international students stay home. You know. So the chances are this could get ugly.
So University's Australia is saying thousands of jobs will be lost because of a policy announced by the government. Bill Swan's a part of it. Will be a vice chancellor in a few months, likely earning more than a million dollars or so a year. How's it going to navigate all that?
That's a very good question if I might start with the observation that he doesn't have to take a million dollar salary. Back in twenty sixteen, the Nobel Prize winning astrophysicist Brian Schmidt whocame VC of the Australian National University,
a very prestigious organization. He negotiated his salary down to six hundred and seventeen five hundred dollars, which was a cut of more than three hundred thousand on his predecessor Ian Young, and throughout his career, Schmidt continued to be one of the lowest earning vcs over eight years, despite the fact that you Know A and You is a global ranking of thirty and. In a twenty twenty one interview with The Australian Financial Review, Schmid said, I just
don't care that much about money. All my excess money I donate, It's just not that important to me. I've got enough, he said, you know, meaning I've got a Nobel Prize. I guess good for him. More recently, the newly appointed Vice Chancellor of the Western Sydney University, Professor George Williams, revealed that he also had negotiated down his salary.
He said that when he went into talk money, the chancellor was looking at a high figure and George was looking for a lower figure, and they eventually negotiated and came out somewhere in the middle. He said that his starting point when negotiating his wage was that a university was a public sector organization. It wasn't a business, so
you couldn't look for business type salaries. And he said that you know, VC salaries were evidence of the fact that the university had lot lost their way, and that the sector was too inwardly focused and it needed to reset its conversation around students and staff and the community. So anyway, remuneration is only one of Shorten's considerations. The other bigger ones that put him in a very interesting position, I think is that before he entered politics he was
a union official. He spent decades advocating for better pay and conditions for workers. Well, for a long time university managers have been screwing their staff and now Shorten is going to become part of that university management. So will he back the NTU and it's fight for fair wages and better working conditions for university staff? You know, is he going to be vociferous on the subject of wage theft by universities. Then there's of course a matter of
caps on the number of overseas students. If there's one subject on which almost everyone in the tertiary sector agrees, it's that caps are a dog of a policy. I mean, the Vice chancellors say that, Universities Australia says that, the TOU says that, And of course this has been Labor Party policy. And Shorten is at the moment still a Labor Party senior minister. So will Shorten joined the chorus of opposition or copies big bucks and stay silent.
It's a good question, Mike, given what we know about Bill Shorten and how he's operated in his career to day, what's your view about how he's going to work with government. Are we going to see him how spoken on some of these issues.
Well, I don't have a crystal ball here. I do think it's interesting that Shorten seems to have been a bit freed up in his rhetoric since he's announced that he's resigning. But I suspect, you know, if he's a good operator, what he will be doing is not saying too much that will embarrass the government publicly. But I would think, and I might say, I would hope that behind the scenes he will be trying to bring a little more rationality to some of these policies.
Mike, thanks for your time.
Thanks very much, Daniel.
Also in the use today, a secret audio recording of a meeting between former Liberal leader Mara Deeming and her then boss, Victorian opposition leader John Pisuto, has been heard in federal court. In the recording, mister Pursudo tells Miss Demi has serious concerns about her attendant at to Let Women Speak rally, which was attended by international anti trance rights activist Kelly Jade Keen and gate crashed by Victoria
and neo Nazis. He says Deeman's attendance was causing him to be clobbered on social media for the perception that the Victorian Liberal Party was in lockstep with Nazi protests. Demi is suing Piseudo for defamation. She claims he tired her with the Nazi brush in a campaign of destruction. The trial is expected to continue for two weeks and Wait Watchers has confirmed it will have to cut staff positions from its Australian operations as it discontinues in person
events and focused instead on its app. While the company did not specify how many jobs would be lost, a recent Company of report said it had one hundred and seventy six staff in Australia. The announcement follows news in January that weight loss drug Ozimpic's parent company, Novo Nordisk, is valued at more than five hundred billion dollars, making it Europe's most valuable company. I'm Daniel James. This is seven am. Thanks for listening,