However, staff have accused the university of a lack of transparency that has seen key concerns go unanswered and raised fears of a shortfall that could be seen across the organisation if the cuts are implemented.

Dr Jonathon Mackay, an academic in the School of Business and Branch Secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), claimed the university openly refuses to answer difficult questions.

“Staff are utterly furious that they get invited to consultations to raise concerns, but then the concerns that the university doesn’t agree with just get ignored.

“This was confirmed by a member of the senior executive who told staff at a forum that they won’t respond to feedback that they disagree with.”

It comes as Chancellor Michael Still appeared in front of a Senate inquiry looking into the quality of governance at Australian higher education providers, where he admitted he wasn’t sure how staff were feeling despite claiming to be conducting a thorough and transparent process.

“I don’t know what they’re feeling,” he said.

“We are driving the most open, transparent, engaged and careful process one can imagine in any institution.

“This is by far the most careful [process] on behalf of staff that I have ever seen.”

Mackay disagreed, claiming the university had failed to adequately justify the measures being made, and forcing staff to explain their value to the organisation.

He said women in lower-paid positions would be particularly impacted.

“The university consistently says how much consultation they think they’ve had, but it’s about quality, not quantity,” he said.

“Most of the workshops were run by senior managers who were essentially asking staff to justify why they should not be made redundant, and there has been zero transparency around the actual decision-making process of these changes outside of vague, repeated answers.”

He also believes the cuts will leave the university shortchanged, which could actually have more of a financial burden than a benefit.

“We’ll pay out millions in redundancy packages to save millions in recurrent costs but then incur millions in hiring the same people we gave redundancies to,” he said.

That the proposed cuts have come despite the high salary on offer to executives has caused some angst among staff.

Still claimed high salaries had to be offered to executives to entice them to join the university and that high executive salaries and job losses were not linked.

“We need the best people we can get to be the executives of the organisation; that is a competitive environment, and if we don’t offer a competitive salary, they’ll go somewhere else and we won’t have the quality of people to drive the institution,” he said.

“That there are job losses is indeed a great sadness for many of those – a great happiness for others – but the two are not the same issue at all.”

UOW has been approached for further comment.

Pause lifted after SafeWork intervention

“We’re balancing two stressful circumstances: the stress of people who want to know what the proposal is so that they can engage in a conversation around it, and the stress of those who are potentially uncertain about the process,” he said.

“So we engaged with the SafeWork inspector on Friday to adjust the timing and the nature of the communication.

“We had thought that we had adequate provisions in place, but the SafeWork inspector thought otherwise.”