Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on two important issues in my electorate. Firstly, I have been overwhelmed by the response to a petition I organised to seek the government’s providing funding to fix the intersections on the Calder Highway in my electorate. To date, the signatures of 1,563 petitioners have been provided to me. The petitioners have asked the House to acknowledge that a section of the Calder Highway is in desperate need of upgrading, to guarantee funding for the construction of the proposed interchanges at Kings Road, Calder Park Drive and Sunshine Avenue and subsequently to enable the intersection with Robertsons Road to be closed and to support general improvements to the Calder Highway.

Whilst I was overwhelmed, I am not surprised by the level of concern shared by the constituents of the electorate of Gorton with respect to the Commonwealth’s failure to provide the rather meagre amount of $20 million and join with the state government in the construction of aboveground intersections on the Calder Highway. It is in fact entirely a Commonwealth responsibility, but the Commonwealth has not been forthcoming in providing the resources required. The Victorian government said it would meet the Commonwealth half way. Unfortunately, although that offer has been there for 12 months, the Commonwealth has refused to provide any funds to ensure the construction, which would remove congestion but, more importantly, reduce the incidence of injury and mortality on that important freeway. I call on the government to listen to the petitioners of the electorate of Gorton and provide the resources required to fix this major problem. I will be attending a public meeting at the Sydenham Community Centre on 6 June to discuss the issues.

I also want to mention concerns raised with me about staff cuts at the Victoria University in my electorate. Victoria University has a number of campuses. The St Albans campus is in my electorate and many of my constituents go to a number of the university’s campuses. There have been efforts by the university to reduce staffing levels through the forced and voluntary redundancy proposals that have been put on the table. Under the guise of so-called workforce renewal, the university intends to get rid of between 50 and 100 senior academic staff and replace them with junior and less experienced staff. The justification for this is that the Victoria University staffing profile includes too many senior academic staff and not enough junior staff. That is not the case. The university seems to forget that it employs many casual employees—many sessional staff—who are not senior staff and it does not take them into account when it considers the ratios. The university is not taking into account that it has the highest proportion of casualised academic staff of any university in Australia.

Getting rid of senior academic staff and replacing them with a smaller number of less experienced staff is likely to lower the research output profile in the short term, rather than raise it, and negatively affect staff-student ratios and student outcomes. It is really just an exercise in replacing expensive staff with less expensive staff. The university seems to have caught the Commonwealth government’s disease. It is cutting labour costs at the expense of future growth and future benefits—certainly for students who reside in the electorate of Gorton. I call upon the university’s management to abandon its current workforce renewal process and return to its earlier stated objective of converting casual staff to ongoing positions to clarify the university’s staff profile. I would certainly be willing to meet with the management of the university to talk to them about the problems they may have, but I think it is critical that they focus on a better way of providing education services to the western suburbs of Melbourne. (Time expired)