Lambie Bid to Cap VC Salaries

Jacqui Lambie may have called it badly wrong on the Covid vaccines – ludicrously claiming that vaccine mandates were ‘fighting for our freedoms’ – but occasionally she hits one out of the park. She is right, for instance, to blast the government over its treatment of veterans and defence’s shameful collective scapegoating of Afghanistan veterans in particular.

She’s also right to attempt to reign in the disgustingly lucrative salaries paid to university vice-chancellors.

The Tasmanian senator has a bill in parliament to cap the salaries of new vice-chancellors below $430,000; the Treasurer makes $438,000.

But there is more than money involved in the senator’s suggestion, her bill includes parliament having ultimate power over VC pay.

The cosy little club, that is the university management sector, award themselves astonishingly well. Most VCs make over a million a year. Australians might well ask, for what?

Given the state of our universities, these silver-tail clowns should be grateful to get lunch money and a bus fare home.

Labor’s Tony Sheldon makes the case for the [Senate inquiry into university management], “there’s no other job in Australia where you can be paid so exorbitantly while performing so badly, with seemingly no consequences or accountability for the impact on university staff and students”.

Except politicians, maybe. But he’s right – and Jacqui Lambie is right to want to cut the golden purse strings.

It’s not just the jumbo pay packets, it’s what critics say they represent. “The culture now, especially in the Group of Eight, is not that of public education in the national interest, but rather the institutionalised greed of investment banks and corporate law firms,” Lambie said in the Senate.

She pointed to the string of stuff-ups where administration errors led to universities underpaying staff and deplored what degrees now cost students. “It’s clear that the top university bureaucrats have blown away much of the social licence their institutions once enjoyed.”

The most obvious example is anti-Semitism. Long before Hamas ran bloodily amok on October 7, 2023, universities, University of Sydney most especially, were notorious hotbeds of anti-Semitism. Student newspapers feted Jew-killing terrorists on the front pages and Jewish students were denied places at open days. Many reported instances of verbal and physical intimidation. Academics were in the thick of it: notably deplorable instances include an academic who superimposed a swastika on the Israeli flag in his lecture slides, and another who was filmed waving money and screaming abuse at an elderly Jewish woman.

It’s gotten far, far, worse since October 7. Much of it the result of years of clandestine funding and propaganda from Muslim organisations.

Universities are a sucker for a tyrant’s money. Through generous funding for ‘Confucius Centres’ and ‘China studies’ programmes, the Chinese Communist Party has poured a river of gold into vice-chancellors’ grasping hands.

What has Australia got in return?

In tandem with that other cash cow for universities, fee-paying foreign students, standards have been steadily dumbed down and the curriculum bowdlerised, partly to accommodate foreign students who barely speak English (if at all), but have deep pockets, but also to pander to the demands of the CCP. Not content with tailoring course content to the CCP’s demands, it’s an open secret that CCP goons posing as students keep a close watch on Chinese students in Australia.

And not just Chinese nationals. Swimmer Mack Horton was subjected to an organised campaign of abuse and intimidation after refusing to share a podium with a Chinese drug cheat. The harrassment included broken glass dumped in his family’s swimming pool.

Student activist Drew Pavlou was bullied and harassed by his own university, clearly at the behest of CCP figures in the university administration, after organising anti-CCP rallies on campus. Clearly eager to keep their Chinese funding, the university trumped up bogus charges of theft then suspended Pavlou.

There are presidents of top US research universities who make a lot less (ex the exchange rate) than leaders of academically way more modest Australian institutions.

But money is now a metaphor for community trust and Lambie seems to sense that universities in general have lost it.

Lambie – like most of us – also clearly doesn’t trust the university club to put their own houses in order.

It’s why her bill includes giving parliament authority over VC pay. She proposes allowing a minister the power to pay people more than the Treasurer but only subject to parliamentary approval […]

Lambie’s bill has been sent to a Senate committee, which will take submissions and ask to hear evidence, probably including from vice-chancellors. “I look forward to seeing some of those fat cats squirm as they try to justify the unjustifiable,” she says.

The best thing university leaders can hope for is that the election is called and the committee does not continue.

The best thing the rest of us could hope for is that a government finally has the gumption to bulldoze the thoroughly corrupted universities into the ground and rebuild the whole sector from scratch. Including a clean-sweep of academics.

Current vice-chancellors need not apply.