Victoria's public school staff are off the job today. Members of the Australian Education Union are staging a 24-hour statewide strike, after rejecting the state government's latest pay and conditions offer, and will gather at Bourke Street Mall at 10.30am before marching to Parliament House.
The walkout follows an online ballot the union says was decisive. Of the 50,677 members who voted — 90.2% of those eligible — the result was 51.18% to 48.82% in favour of rejecting the offer. It is the second such stoppage in a long-running enterprise-agreement dispute that has run for close to a year without resolution.
The rejected deal was not a small one. The government's offer would have lifted teacher, principal and education support staff salaries by at least 28.3% over four years, starting with a 12.75% rise by October, and would have halved required meeting hours from 80 to 40 a year. Deputy Premier and Minister for Education Ben Carroll has framed it as making Victorian teachers the best paid in the country.
Carroll urged staff to call the strike off. "Students should be in classrooms and parents shouldn't be left scrambling for childcare or losing a day's pay," he said last week, arguing Labor was making teachers, school leaders and education staff "the best paid in the country" and adding: "They've earned it."
The union's case is that the fight is about resourcing as much as pay. AEU president Justin Mullaly said the vote sent "an undeniable message" that the government must fully fund public schools, pointing to workloads he described as untenable. "Why are teachers, school leaders and education support staff working an average 12 hours unpaid overtime every week if this is truly the education state?" he said. Mullaly claimed the government had "deliberately ripped $2.4 billion out of our public schools" and that just 3 in 10 teachers plan to stay — figures the government disputes.
For families, the practical effect lands unevenly. With teachers, principals and support staff all covered by the stoppage, government schools across the state face closures, combined classes or limited supervision, depending on how many staff at each school take part — leaving many parents to arrange care at short notice, exactly the disruption Carroll warned about.
Neither side is claiming the dispute is over. The march to Parliament is designed to put the rejection in front of the government directly, and bargaining is expected to continue. For now, the message from a clear majority of the members who voted is that the offer on the table, however large the headline number, was not enough to keep them in the classroom today.
