In the latest sell-out move by Australia’s teacher unions, the Queensland Teachers Union (QTU) has told its members they have until Friday to vote on the state Liberal National Party (LNP) government’s award offer, which is virtually identical to the deal teachers overwhelmingly rejected in July, voting almost unanimously for a series of 24 hour strikes to oppose it.
This is a thoroughly anti-democratic operation. The union has rushed the vote, providing no time for meetings or discussion. And teachers do not even have the full text of the agreement, only having been provided with union curated “highlights.” The QTU is cynically claiming to be “neutral” on the agreement, even while orchestrating the conditions for it to be ratified.
That underscores the fact that teachers should vote “no” as the first step in a fight against the government’s pay-cutting drive. In opposition to the union leadership’s attempts to steamroll the agreement through, teachers should establish their own rank-and-file committees, to disseminate information, develop discussion and prepare political and industrial action against the attack on their pay and conditions.
The government offer to public school teachers is the same 8 percent over three years below-inflation deal put forward to nurses and other public sector workers, tweaked to benefit teachers beginning their employment in 2026 and school executives.
While media headlines are misleadingly trumpeting the government’s claim that the “historic” deal will see all teachers offered a minimum of $100,000 annually, the reality is that the top amount for beginning teachers even by the end of the award will be $95,000.
Others, the vast bulk of school staff, will get nothing but the derisory 3 percent until October 2027, that is, for almost two years.
The pay offer does nothing to address the soaring cost of living, including housing or rents, nor the below-inflationary amounts teachers have been awarded in previous sell-out award deals. Recent estimates show that renters need an annual income of $130,000 to afford an average home unit.
A similar deal to the current LNP government offer was rammed through by the New South Wales Teachers Federation (NSWTF) in 2023. Pay rises varied from 4.3 percent to 20.6 percent with that state Labor government warning the pay increases would have to be paid for through significant cuts to the education budget. Since, New South Wales (NSW) teachers report that principals are cutting sick leave and the hire of casual relief teachers to cover absent colleagues.
The award deal does nothing to address the depth of the crisis confronting public education in Queensland and every state and territory which has resulted in Australian teachers ranking second highest in terms of workplace stress in the OECD.
Government schools in north-western Queensland face funding shortfalls to the tune of $1.6 billion in 2025 alone; crumbling classrooms and failing facilities; teacher shortages almost double the average in advanced countries; teaching a grossly disproportionate number of students with high needs and low-socioeconomic backgrounds who are provided with little if any support.
On classroom violence and workload, working conditions teachers have rated the biggest issues in teacher resignations, the government, with the QTU as a key stakeholder will “work towards” addressing these by establishing a safety taskforce. In other words, nothing will be done and teachers will continue to leave schools in droves. Such a taskforce, even if established, will do nothing to address the underlying causes of anti-social behaviour, in poverty and oppression.
As the World Socialist Web Site warned, the QTU only called an August 6 strike, the first such action in 16 years, in an attempt to let off steam and maintain control over teachers angry at worsening pay and conditions resulting from previous sell-out deals under the state Labor government from 2015.
In 2022 the QTU struck a below-inflationary pay deal with the then Palaszcuk Labor government which put off any measures to address staffing, workloads and the funding crisis until a departmental review, the Comprehensive Review of School Resourcing (CRoSR), was completed at the end of 2024. That report has still not been published. In the latest EB11, the agreement that the union is seeking to impose, the QTU pledges to “consult” with the government, if the latter ever releases the report.
In 2025 the QTU held multiple closed-door meetings with state education officials over the upcoming EB11 but refused to outline any concrete demands over pay and conditions. This was to create the conditions where any improvement, no matter how minimal, or no improvement at all, could be hailed as a “win.”
When the LNP state government attempted in July to impose its rotten award deal, teachers voted almost unanimously to take a series of 24 hour strikes in response. In August as many as 50,000 teachers throughout the state walked off the job in what was described as the largest teachers strike in the state’s history, demanding higher pay, increased staffing levels, safe working conditions and a reduction in intolerable workloads.
Immediately after the strike, the QTU, having refused to set a date for the next strike or allow any debate or discussion among its membership, went into talks with government representatives in the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission (QIRC), an arm of the capitalist state, where it has conducted closed door talks since.
Following the QTU’s summary of the deal sent to its members on Monday, hundreds of teachers have flooded the union’s Facebook page angrily denouncing it and reporting they had voted “no” in the union-controlled ballot which closes Friday afternoon.
Others derided the union’s so-called “neutral” position on how teachers should vote. One quoted the union executive comment, “‘The package represents real progress for our profession.’ Is that not an endorsement?”
Another wrote, “Does anyone feel like the entire system has been designed to control us rather than support us? We’re pushed into conciliation, where the rules prevent us from being involved or even informed—and then threatened with arbitration, where rejecting an unfair deal means losing our right to protected industrial action. We’re being told: 1. We can’t strike. 2. We can’t know what’s being negotiated on our behalf. 3. If we stand up for ourselves, we’ll be punished through arbitration. This is not consultation—it’s a system that takes our voice, our agency and our dignity.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has reported that the QTU leaders have warned that if the deal is rejected, “an alternative could take years to hash out before the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission.”
The union is attempting to browbeat its members into voting for the offer by threatening them with even worse outcomes if they reject it. The QTU is also isolating teachers from their colleagues in Victoria and Tasmania who face the same dire working conditions. In Tasmania, teachers and other public sector workers are undertaking strike action in opposition to a similar assault on their pay and conditions.
What is required is a unification of these struggles. In every state, whether the government is Labor or Liberal, they are attempting to impose the cost of budget deficits and an underlying crisis of the capitalist system on the backs of teachers and other workers. Given the crucial role of schools, hospitals and other social facilities, this is an assault on the rights of the entire working class.
The role of the union bureaucracy, in every instance, is to isolate teachers and subordinate them to backroom negotiations with governments intent on enforcing austerity. The union bureaucracies, allied with the big business Labor Party, are a privileged stratum that collaborates with governments and the ruling elite against the workers they claim to represent.
New organisations of struggle, rank-and-file committees independent of the union leadership, are needed. Such committees can link up the struggles of teachers nationally, as well as other public sector workers and the working class more broadly. They can counter the misinformation of the union bureaucracy and prepare action to fight for what teachers, workers and public education needs, not what governments say they can afford.
The Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network, advances the necessity for a political fight against the subordination of all human needs, including education, to the profit demands of big business.
For assistance to establish rank-and-file committees, please contact the CFPE:
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