It was a privilege to Conference last week as the AEU NT’s Federal Conference delegate along with Amanda Vrymoet, our Indigenous Councillor on Branch Executive and our Federal Conference delegate for the Yalukit Yulendj national committee from the AEU NT Branch.
AEU Federal Conference looks and feels quite different from our AEU NT Branch Conference. Before Conference commences, delegates chose two or three Special Interest Caucuses to take part in where they discuss key issues and concerns from across the country and suggest amendments to the Conference Statement. Caucus groups included: Early Childhood, Principals, Support Staff, Women, LGBTIQ+, Beginning Teachers and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders.
Our Federal President, Correna Haythorpe opened Conference celebrating the achievements of many Branches across the country over the past year.
In the successive formal sessions of Conference, politicians The Hon. Jason Clare, MP Minister for Education; Adam Bandt, MP Leader of the Australian Greens and The Hon. Andrew Giles MP, Minister for Skills and Training addressed delegates with a focus on recent wins in the schools and TAFE sectors whilst being mindful of the jurisdictions which have yet to finalise their school funding and preparation which has to be done for the forthcoming Federal elections. The Hon. Linda Burney MP also spoke very movingly about First Nations Matters.
Prof. Nareen Young of the Jumbunna Institute and UTS Sydney spoke to the issues of cultural and colonial load and the importance of the Gari Yala (2) survey to be released later this year.
Sally McManus, Secretary of the ACTU celebrated the fact that overall union membership had increased 12.5% this year with an increase of 0.5% density. Kevin Bates, our AEU Federal Secretary noted increases of 25% and 20% across membership in Vic and WA respectively and a national increase of 90 members in the TAFE sector.
Delegates from NSWTF, ECEC, AEUVIC, QTU described how they had been able to finesse and then enshrine the Right to disconnect and Reproductive rights in their respective EAs and how they had successfully been able to use multi employer bargaining.
News from our international comrades was mixed. Mugwena Malueke, President of Education International, (the Global Union Federation the AEU works in partnership with) gave us some very sobering statistics: in Sudan, 90% of children have no access to any education leaving them very vulnerable to being recruited by warlords; 220,000,000 children are affected by war and displacement worldwide; some 78,000,000 children are out of school worldwide and in just April – May last year 210,000,000 children lost school days due to climate crisis. Worldwide there is a shortage of some 44,000,000 teachers.
However, EI’s work across the world has in no small part enabled Mongolia to increase their teachers’ union membership 50% over three years and prompted the Indonesian government to convert 1,000,000 from casual to contract status recently as their senior officers told us.
Kamalakanta Tripathy, President of AIPTF, the Indian Public Teachers’ Union representing his 2,300,000 members spoke fulsomely of the work AEU and EI had done in raising the status of female teachers and increasing their participation in the union in his country.
Rachael Metcalfe, AEU NT Branch Secretary