After the success of the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland (and by popular demand), an alternate union for teachers has just been announced, the TPAQ. We hear from its freshly minted #2 member, Cameron Murray.
TRANSCRIPT:
(This is derived from an automated process. The video recording is authoritative.)
I am member number two of the TPAQ. I tried to get in to be number one, but that was already taken. President is member number one, and I'm, uh, member number two on my, uh, membership card.
Teachers as a rule aren't really strong unionists. We aren't out there on picket lines. We don't do, um, demarcation disputes. We don't do those things. And that's very much the nature of teachers as it is of nurses there.
Client isn't a building or a screwdriver or a coal mine. It's a person. And for that reason, anytime there's a dispute in the offering, the teachers, the nurses tend to err on the side of, well, we'll do it for the kids, we'll do it for the patients. And if we are forced into industrial action, well, the employer saves the swagger money, uh, the, um, client, the nurse provides, or the teacher provides to the student and the, um, patient, they suffer. So we're not a militant union type. And the person that goes into teaching, and I'm sure the person that goes into nursing is generally not. So any industrial protection, sorry, I've got my notes here, but I need to change hands in. Teaching, as it was in nursing until very recently, was on a take it or leave it basis.
You joined the union and got all the protections that come with unions or you didn't join the union and then you didn't have those protections. And, um, The union that provided that for teachers in Queensland is the QTU or in the independent schools, the IEU. So very much that take it or leave us, leave it basis was the norm. Now, in 1973, and I wasn't aware of this until fairly recently, but Australia ratified two conventions from the International Labor Organization. They all have catchy titles, but the Freedom of Association and Protection of the Right to Organise Convention of 1948. So it took 'em a while And the Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention of 1949. So things, it must've been before the internet, they moved slowly. So in 1973, we ratified those conventions.
And those conventions are enacted now in Commonwealth Fair Work Act of 2009 and the Queensland Industrial Relations Act of 2016, as well as in the Australian Human Rights Commission Act of 1986.
So those international labor freedom of association laws that allow us to form a union at all came into Australian law in those various forms. So my organization, the Teacher's Professional Association of Queensland is allowed to exist.
There isn't law that says there's a monopoly on unions that only one union can represent employees in any particular, um, organization system. So we are permitted to exist and we are permitted to represent our membership under these longstanding, wide ranging international, national and state laws and conventions.
And the core tenant of the TPAQ will be to liaise with our members, the teachers, to seek workable solutions to the issues they face at the chalk face and the things that prevent them doing their job, which is teaching the students in their care.
There's minimal, it's a very flat hierarchy. We don't have a large set of employees. We've got the executive of which I am a member, and then we are going to recruit in schools representatives there, and they will be able to organize in local areas, and that will not cost wages.
They'll be volunteer members and other unions do that as well. The, the local representatives are volunteers and they're able to consult with the people that they work with and say, what are the issues?
How do we address these? And some of them are statewide, some of them are international. Some of the challenges are the same everywhere. Mobile phones in class. Do you bring a mobile phone? Don't you, can you, should you, all of those things. Access to the internet, air conditioning in classrooms, all sorts of things everyone faces.
Some things are much more local and need a local finessing and a local, um, a local approach. And I've worked in some schools where the local approach is the only way to do it.
What do you do in the Torres Strait when a child goes to primary school, hits the end of grade six and then he is got to go to high school.
You can't build a high school on every one of those islands. So you build one on Thursday Island, then you have to fly the kids in zin, then you have to accommodate the kids on the island.
You need boarding houses and things. That's a local approach that wouldn't be done in any other state school anywhere else. And it's very effective. This weekend there would've been charter aircraft paid for by the government out on the outer islands at a certain time, ready to pick up Johnny and bring him in to start school.
And there's a lot of clever Johnny's and they don't always make the plane. And it takes another three weeks before the charter plane gets back out there. And uh, so there are tactics and there are challenges everywhere, but there are ways of addressing them.
Our constitution expressly forbids donations to any political party and any financial association with any political party. And the idea is that's up to the members and their own conscience. Until now, the only union has been closely affiliated with a particular political party.
And anybody that was a teacher that was a member of the union was contributing some of their own wages in their fees towards those organizations and they had little say in it. So we are all for, if you have a political conscience and you wish to donate, do it with your own money.
We will keep our fees significantly lower in order for you to make that decision yourself. I personally discovered TPAQ last year and I was, I was reading articles around issues facing nurses. 'cause we all, like, we all know teachers, we all know people that are involved in the medical industry and nursing.
And I read an article about this new thing called the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland. And the footnote at the very end said, they're talking about one for teachers. And that, that set my alarm bells ringing.
And I got onto the computer and I looked around and I found Graham Haycroft and I sent him a message and he called me back and we spoke, and that would've been in June or July last year. And he said, listen, we're trying to get some things sorted out. Gimme a call in October if I haven't got back to you by then. So come October, I was up there at their offices meeting them, meeting the team, and finding out all about this. Now launched TPAQ.
The NPAQ is six years old. It has 5,000 members. So it's grown very well. And that makes it actually Queensland's 13th, largest union. So it's not the top 10 yet, but it can grow.
There's plenty of nurses that aren't members yet, and there are probably many that are considering it, but these things sometimes move slowly. Um, the TPAQ, which is a sister organization to the NPAQ is one month old.
We launched in the last week before the school holidays. There was a Courier-Mail ad. We got the message out there to teachers before they went on holiday. And as Jewel pointed out, we've made the decision to make membership open for free until, um, February 20th.
There you go. Uh, we look forward to growing in a similar fashion to our nurses professional association. And in a marketplace, in any marketplace, no choice isn't as good as some choice.
Too much choice can be a problem. We all admit that it's just too hard sometimes to make a decision when you're confronted with many, many choices. But some choice we believe is important and we want to provide teachers with the same potential choice as the nurses have.
Now, I will personally spend quite a deal of time with my insurance providers, uh, with my tax trying to save a hundred dollars. That's worth my time. If I can save a hundred dollars a year, that's worth putting some effort in, I think, and maybe changing my insurance policy to a different provider and shopping around a little bit.
With my membership of the TPAQ this year, I have saved upfront $600. So it's substantial. Now, there's a reason for that, and that is that the, the way union fees are calculated in other unions is it's a percentage of your wage.
So they all know our wage because they know how long you are and they know what your uh, um, experience level is and so on and so forth. They know exactly what everybody earns and they take that amount from each particular person. So a first year teacher doesn't earn terribly much and their, their fees are proportionately lower as they progress through the automatic increments with experience, they go up in, in pay grade, the union fee increases and increases and increases.
And that's one of the things the TPAQ are about is we offer our members a fee for the cost that it costs to provide the services that we provide. Now, those are flat. So I pay as much as a first year teacher, as a second year teacher, as a senior principal.
And that is a yearly fee that will be held. And we hope as membership builds and the size of the organization increases, that the cost to the individual would even potentially come down.
At the very least, it won't have to go up. So that is, that is an important, um, I think the, probably the single biggest selling point for teachers. You can get yourself a 200, $300 saving immediately with equivalent service and in many cases a lot more personalized and better service.
So to conclude, what we offer is, one, it's an alternative. It's choice. Absolute guarantee that we will not affiliate with any political party at any time. And it would, it, it creates, it's written into the constitution.
It creates a bit of a constitutional crisis. Were that to be the case. There is absolute legal support in state and federal and international law for our existence and for the right of our organization to represent our members in the workplace.
Six years of NPAQ, we've got a tried and tested team of industrial law support for our members. So they've, they're, they're battle hardened. They've, they've gone up against Queensland Health and continue to do that.
There's things in the offering as the courts start up this year. They're, um, they're, they're going hard about their members' rights to be represented and hundreds of dollars in savings for anybody that changes their membership out of a, an existing union that is a percentage of their wage and goes into the flat fee of the TPAQ.
And that's a flat fee. No matter how much experience or how much pay the individual member takes home. Uh, we scale it down for part-timers and for contract teachers and so on and so forth. So there's a full-time rate and then a part-time rate.
And students who are engaging in pracs and education, teacher education, they're free. So they're the, um, the fees. So my message to leave you with this evening is if you know teachers and everybody has teachers in their wider, um, family and their friends and their neighbors, and if they're seeking a real union of employees and not simply the government anointed representative of the, uh, state employees, then the TPAQ should be their choice.
If you know a teacher, let them know that we exist. I have some flyers here, I haven't got many, but I've got more if you need them. And, uh, you can send them to the website. There's a call center. It's a, they've got one of those catchy numbers, 1300 classroom and that'll get you through to the TPAQ and they can find us relatively easily anywhere in the internet. So, uh, it shouldn't be too hard. We're on all of those things, the Facebooks and the Twitters and the things, all the different venues.
So again, Jewel, thank you for the invitation. Thank you for my first speaker. And I'll hand over, I believe back to Jewel. Yes. And say thank you for coming.
