Kurt Iveson for Branch President

(Kurt has been elected unopposed for another two years as Branch President. Here's his candidate statement.)

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I’m an Associate Professor of Urban Geography in the School of Geosciences and have been the Branch President since 2016. I started at the University of Sydney in 2004 and I’ve been an active member of the NTEU since then. Prior to becoming the Branch President, I was Vice-President (Academic), Chair of the Branch Cases Committee, and a member of the Enterprise Bargaining Team in 2012-13.

I am standing for Branch President again because I want to keep growing our union and building our power and influence. Our university is a precious and important public institution, and I believe a strong NTEU is vital to both protect it and to shape its future.

Building a Strong Union

Key union organising principles have informed my approach to being Branch President:

  • Collective action – the union is its membership. So, when we say “the union should do something”, that means us! We win when we take action together.
  • Solidarity – the NTEU is a vital space in which academics and professional staff, casual and on-going staff, junior and senior staff work together as equals to establish and enact our common interests. We win when we support one another. 
  • Outcomes – we need to be focused on outcomes. This means using our principles to define, and then campaign for, winnable improvements to the big problems that face us. We win when we know what winning looks like.
  • Growth – as well as getting results on our issues, our actions have to make our union stronger by increasing our membership and engagement. We win when we emerge from any given campaign with more capacity to build the next one.


What have we achieved?

Applying these principles, I believe we have achieved a lot together in the past two years. Our Branch has:

  • negotiated a new Enterprise Agreement with improved rights and conditions in areas like parental leave, casual rights, job security, staff participation, change management, and flexible work. These have set precedents that have been pursued by other NTEU branches around the country;
  • intervened effectively in several major change processes, forcing management to make major revisions to their plans, to the benefit of staff;
  • grown significantly to become the largest NTEU Branch in Australia. 


My priorities for the next two years

While we’ve had successes through our work together, many of us still have plenty of frustrations about the conditions in which we work, and ideas for making things better. During the next two years, my priorities will be:

  • Working with professional staff to push back against changes that are imposed without consultation, and to ensure that rights, skills and experience are respected in the way that work is organised and managed;
  • Working with academic staff to combat overwork in the face of constant workload ‘creep’;
  • Working with casual staff to enforce casual rights and with all members to improve job security and fight casualisation;
  • Taking on the top-down managerialism that is at the root of all of these problems and many more besides;
  • Working with members to develop and pursue positive staff-directed agendas for change. 


Our union is not only important for fighting the things we don’t like. It’s also important for articulating our values and hopes for our university, and for fighting for the changes that we want to see. I hope to have the privilege of leading our Branch for another two years to do that with you.





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