Parliamentary comments by Don Nardella, Labor MLA for Melton

PARLIAMENT OF VICTORIA
LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY
DAILY HANSARD
Tuesday, 28 October 2008
Adjournment motion, Don Nardella, Labor MLA for Melton
Victoria University: campus closures

Mr NARDELLA (Melton) — My adjournment matter matter is for the Minister for Skills and Workforce Participation. The action I seek is for her to have discussions with Victoria University, following its decision yesterday to close the Melton and Sunbury campuses, to force the university to institute transitional arrangements to retain higher education, TAFE courses and community activities at the Melton campus and to do what she can to stop as many redundancies of the 270 forced redundancies as possible.

Victoria University vice-chancellor, Professor Liz Harman, is destroying this great institution. She has presented a fait accompli to the university council regarding the campus closures and the 270 redundancies. Professor Harman and her sycophant management team announced the forced redundancies last week and then presented this fait accompli of the closures to the council yesterday. The council had toaccept the proposal or take a no-confidence position with regard to her. The vice-chancellor would have been forced to resign if her decisions had not been adopted. Professor Harman and her management toecutters took the easy decision in the Thatcher mould to implement economic rationalist policies that weaken local communities and to take away a critical piece of infrastructure that adds to the social capital and lifelong learning opportunities available in the disadvantaged and growing areas of the outer west where greater access and equity are needed.
She has form in the 2006 sackings and now these sackings two years later. Professor Harman is selling and closing the heritage, the assets and the legacy of generations of western suburbs residents, students and communities who have built up this great institution. She is just selling it off. In two years time she will move on. She will leave once her contract ends, but her legacy, her disaster and her scorched-earth policy and practice will remain from heringlorious wasted term of office.

Since being appointed to Victoria University (VU), Professor Harman’s modus operandi has been to sell,sell, sell — like an auctioneer — the campuses under her control. She is shutting down the Newport VU campus, not caring about the students in automotive studies who have nowhere to go next year. Who will train the western suburbs motor mechanics in the future? Certainly not VU! Professor Harman does not care, does not undertake real consultation or listen to reason, and is callous about sacking 270 people, with real families, just before Christmas. This is heartless. This is the Christmas present awaiting 270 families this year, following in the footsteps of Kennett, who sacked 1600 school cleaners just before Christmas in 1993. It is cruel and heartless.

For an intellectual, Professor Harman has not done any hard thinking in conjunction with local communities, students, staff and other stakeholders to build this institution, not to disassemble it and weaken it, to sack great committed hardworking staff at all levels, and to bring this great institution to its knees and into disrepute, where all staff are scared for their future and where VU will have real difficulty attracting staff in the future. It is a real tragedy that VU is disappearing into its own orifice and becoming unviable, where in the near future it will be taken over to survive long after Professor Harman and her sycophantic managers are gone.