Preview: My next post on Friday will provide an update on the Premier’s misleading of Parliament.
UTAS’ Annual Report
In my submission (pages 11-12) to the Legislative Council Inquiry Select Committee Inquiry into the Provisions of the University of Tasmania Act 1992 (the LegCo Inquiry) I wrote about the deficiencies in UTAS’ annual reporting. I also noted a decline in the quality of UTAS’ reporting between 2010 and 2021, which largely coincides with the Chancellorship of Michael Field and the Vice Chancellorship of Peter Rathjen and Rufus Black.
In their submissions to the LegCo Inquiry John Lawrence and Emeritus Professor James Guthrie also provided extensive, and withering, critiques of UTAS’ annual reporting.
UTAS executive salaries
There has been criticism of reporting of salaries, particularly VC salaries, across all Australian universities (for example, see this article, also by James Guthrie).
However, I want to focus here on a straight comparison of reporting of executive salaries between the Australian National University and UTAS, to highlight UTAS’ lack of transparency.
I will not offer substantive comment on salary levels, but make these points:
- According to Commonwealth Department of Education figures for 2020, UTAS had 23,399 equivalent full-time students, compared to the ANU’s figure of 17,388, so on this count UTAS had 35% more students (note figures vary wildly between sources; I am using these figures as the most authoritative).
- However, the ANU’s consolidated revenue in 2021 was $1,463 million compared to $865 million for UTAS and ANU’s operations appear considerably more complex than those of UTAS.
- The ANU has an Australia ranking of 1 and a world ranking of 30, while the University of Tasmania has an Australian ranking of 17 and a world ranking of 293 under the QS World University Rankings (2023).
- Contrary to one uninformed comment I have seen, the ANU is not a CBD university: it sits in a consolidated campus in a green fringe of Canberra.
This is the only table provided in UTAS’ Annual Report for 2021 on the salaries of executive staff (page 85):
The ANU provides this table in its annual report for 2021 (page 153):
The ANU also provides the table below (page 154). This is somewhat similar to the UTAS table but also provides a disaggregation of remuneration.
ANU provides detailed remuneration figures for (presumably) its eight highest paid executive staff.
At a minimum, I suggest that UTAS do something similar in their next annual report.
UTAS would also do well to look at ANU’s annual report for other lessons. The only area in which UTAS outdoes ANU is in its profligate use of glossy photos.
I expect that the LegCo Inquiry will look closely at the adequacy of UTAS’ current reporting.
Coda
I note that the remuneration of VC Black (which was in the $980,000 to $989,999 band in 2021) vastly exceeds the Tasmania Premier’s base salary of just over $300,000 (even with the Premier’s other benefits included the broad picture would not change). This may not be surprising, given that UTAS frequently appears to be functioning as a de facto Government.
In a future post I will look at fees paid to UTAS Councillors and to Directors of UTAS companies, where lack of transparency again seems to be UTAS’ guiding rule.