Kirne
Woods
Kunkler
Made by Members —
Built to Win.
Over the past two decades, Vice Chancellors and their senior executives have systematically transformed our universities. They've treated them not as public institutions, but as real estate developments and financial investments — all while cutting "soft" staff costs to the bone. Buildings and "Estate plans" have multiplied; job security and stability has evaporated. International student revenue is used to fuel massive capital works, not to invest in the academic and professional staff doing the actual work of the university.
When the pandemic hit, this house of cards collapsed. The Morrison government left universities out of JobKeeper. The current Albanese government has deferred action on the failed Job-ready Graduates scheme — a policy that has cut university funding by around $1 billion a year, saddled students with lifelong debts, and driven students away from the humanities.
Our Platform.
Our vision is for a majority of staff in the sector to be NTEU members — a union with influence, led by empowered members. Power on the ground means power at the bargaining table.
As members, delegates, organisers and leaders, we have transformed our union. We exposed the wage theft scandals at Melbourne and Deakin that have returned over $77 million to workers. Under our stewardship the union has grown from 8,900 to over 10,400 members. We have defeated non-union ballots, enforced workloads, and trained over 200 workplace leaders across the state.
NTEU has always been a minority union. Employers use this to argue we are not genuinely representative, giving them cover to justify increasingly punishing conditions. We have written and deployed a plan to change this — and it's working. From numbers comes the power from which all positive change follows.
Workload is the number one issue for staff in our sector. Our approach is twofold: actively prosecute straightforward breaches of enterprise agreements, and roll out transformative workload clauses that provide genuine, simple-to-enforce protections for everyone.
Too often, employers treat consultation as a box-ticking exercise. We will fight for a new right — the Stability Guarantee — limiting employers' ability to roll out major workforce changes without staff endorsement. Staff voice belongs at the centre of the university.
Recent changes to legislation (Closing Loopholes 2) and bargaining wins have radically reduced reliance on casual employment — but too often this has meant staff ending up on dodgy fixed-term contracts. We will identify and fix these issues where they stand, and keep working for secure, decent work across the sector.
We need meaningful staff and student voice, genuine transparency, and effective safeguards against management capture. We will also lobby to restore funding and reverse the damage of the Job-Ready Graduates Scheme, which has needlessly collapsed enrolments across the sector.
We built and rolled out Building Union Power — the first NTEU member training program in many years — training over 200 members across the state. We want to deepen it, giving members the knowledge to enforce their agreements and grow power in their own workplaces.
Who We Are.
This ticket was built from the ground up — from campaigns won, wages recovered, and members organised. Click any name to read the full story.
I came to the union as a casual academic teaching across RMIT and Deakin. At Deakin, I discovered we were being paid by formula — not by the hours we actually worked. Everyone knew it was wrong, but nobody knew what to do about it. The answer I got wasn't good enough, so I went back and built a casuals' network from scratch.
We met every week, built the numbers, and eventually lodged at the Fair Work Commission. The university's response was to blacklist me. I went from teaching 180 students a semester to fewer than 20. I had a choice: walk away or dig in. I dug in.
Just in the last twelve months, $5 million has been repaid to the roughly 150 Deakin members whose wages were stolen. For some, that's tens of thousands of dollars — a life-changing amount to receive.
Working 0.6 FTE as a local area organiser, I defeated Victoria's first and only non-union ballot in Round 8, alongside local delegates. We then negotiated and won a return to 40-40-20 in Deakin's Arts faculty. When the university tried to water it down the following year, we took them to the Commission and won again.
I developed and have begun to deliver the growth strategy, reversing membership decline across the state. But quantitative growth is meaningless without highly skilled, empowered members. That's why I have also trained 150 workplace leaders across Victoria's universities, TAFEs and non-higher education providers. That's what this campaign is built on.
Ben Kunkler is an organiser who has spent the last decade building power for higher education workers. He first joined the NTEU as a PhD student and casual tutor at the University of Melbourne. Like so many others, he experienced firsthand the insecurity and underpayment that had become normalised in Australian universities. He quit his PhD to pursue organising full time — a decision he has never regretted. For Ben, organising is not a job or a duty; it is a craft and, at its best, a joy.
A Strategic Approach
Ben's approach is shaped by a commitment to concrete analysis of real conditions. Universities are not monolithic — deans have their fiefdoms, heads of schools have theirs, and HR is often in conflict with both. The task of an organiser is to map this terrain, identify the cracks, and apply pressure in the right places.
This thinking has informed his written work. In articles for Jacobin magazine, he has analysed how Australia's universities were transformed by an executive class that treated them as real estate developers and financial speculators — investing in buildings while treating staff as costs to be minimised.
Creativity in Campaigning
In 2019, Ben helped build the Casuals Network at UniMelb — a rank-and-file body where meetings were chaired on a rotating basis by members, not organisers. The network debated every step, voted on every move, and built a culture of collective ownership.
When negotiations stalled in late 2020, the network combined Fair Work Commission hearings with creative outside-track pressure. Members discovered that the Vice-Chancellor's newly renovated mansion — purchased for $7.1 million — was worth roughly the same as the wages stolen from Arts Faculty tutors. A protest was organised at the mansion. The morning of the rally, management called to concede.
The result was an initial $6 million in back pay, which eventually grew to $72 million in wage remediation for tens of thousands of casual staff.
A Record of Delivery
Ben led the University of Melbourne's 2023 bargaining campaign, delivering reductions in insecure work, research allocations for teaching-focused staff, the highest participation strikes at the university in decades, and hundreds of new members.
He then worked on the Victoria University bargaining campaign, winning cultural loading for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff, pathways to teaching-and-research positions, and hybrid work rights for professional staff.
Since moving into a full-time organising role, Ben has worked across the state to build delegate capacity. He helped grow the Victoria University branch to its highest membership since 2015, and has been integrating safety organising — using the OHS Act 2004 — into the broader delegate development program.
Ben lives in North Melbourne with his partner and their unsociable cat, Fran.
Our Track Record.
Campaigns are won by the people running them. Here's how this ticket stacks up.
| Measure | Kirne / Woods / Kunkler / Woolford |
|---|---|
| Wage theft recovered for members | $77 million+ $5M Deakin · $72M UniMelb |
| Members recruited | 8,900 → 10,400+ members under our stewardship La Trobe, VU & Federation: sub-20% → 30%+ density in 2025 |
| Non-union ballot campaigns defeated | 1 (Deakin, 2023) |
| Members trained | 202 Building Union Power program, across Victoria |
| Organising team led | 11 organisers, Victorian Division |
Figures verified against NTEU records.
Built to Win.
Kirne · Woods · Kunkler · Woolford — Victorian Division 2026
Who's With Us.
We're backed by a coalition of members and branch presidents from across Victoria who have chosen this ticket to lead.
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