Education

The University of Melbourne has hit back at the Fair Work Ombudsman’s allegations that it took adverse action against two casual academics to prevent them from claiming payment for extra hours worked, but admitted a supervisor penned an email referring to one of them as a “self-entitled Y-genner”.

Vocational education provider Box Hill Institute has reached an in-principle settlement in a class action by disgruntled students who allege the licences they obtained through the institute did not provide them with the requisite knowledge or training to obtain a commercial pilot’s licence.

A judge has called off a pre-trial hearing to determine whether the new serious harm element in Australia’s defamation laws is satisfied in a case brought by a weight lifting coach, citing an “unfortunate turn of events”.

A judge has granted the liquidators of Cornerstone Investment Australia leave to sign a funding agreement for the insolvent tertiary education provider’s $56 million professional negligence claim against accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.

The Fair Work Ombudsman has taken the University of Melbourne to court, alleging it took adverse action against two casual academics to prevent them from claiming payment for work performed outside of their contracted hours.

PwC partners are facing “very serious” allegations that they had actual knowledge that a $30 million dividend payment to the director of now defunct tertiary education provider Cornerstone was unlawful.

The federal government wants to shut down an underpayments class action brought on behalf of postgraduate research candidates at universities across Australia, but the Federal Court has reluctantly agreed to first entertain the self-represented applicant’s bid to strike out the strike-out application.

In its first decision applying a landmark High Court judgment redefining the test for when a worker is employed, the Federal Court has found a sessional lecturer for a higher education institution was an employee.

The Fair Work Commission has overturned a finding that an Australian National University professor was unfairly fired over a 30-minute “intimate” beach encounter with a student, saying the student was unfairly cast as an “embittered seductress.”

The National Tertiary Education Industry Union has brought proceedings against the University of the Sunshine Coast for allegedly allocating teaching and research work to academic staff that did not “accurately reflect the time taken to do the work”.