“Access to safe and effective anaesthesia is something many Australians take for granted, but as recently as the 1980s there was limited training for Mongolian anaesthetists,” the University of Melbourne newsroom, via Twitter, yesterday.

The University of Tasmania advises recruitment service provider PageUp may have been hacked.  Information on the PageUp system that could be at risk is from people who successfully applied for uni jobs between January and June may include; bank details, tax file number, address, mobile phone number and licence number.

PageUp started investigating the possibility of a data breach on its site after May 23 and advised the university on June 2 – which seems a bit of a gap. The university went public with its warning yesterday – which also seems a bit of a gap. UTas has contacted/is contacting people direct who may be effected.

The University of Queensland is spending $125m to less cut than end its electricity bill. The university will commission and when built manage a 154 000 megawatt hour solar generator, more than offsetting the university’s $22m existing and projected electricity consumption.  The plant is planned to be operating in 2019, at Warwick in the state’s Southern Downs region.

Back in 2015 the university commissioned the state’s then largest solar array, with 37 000 power panels at the Gatton campus.

The federal government has reappointed John Pollaers as chair of the Australian Industry and Skills Committee, which is charged with “demystifying the VET system.” Sometime corporate chief Professor Pollaers is an enterprise fellow at the University of Melbourne. Tara Diamond will also continue to demystify VET, being reappointed as the Commonwealth’s representative on AISC.  She is service director with resources and energy industry group AMMA.

Manufacturer Siemens will extend its engagements in South Australia, with a major investment at the University of South Australia. The manufacturing giant already engages with Flinders U at its Tonsley Park Innovation Hub and now it will provide UniSA with product management software, which academics and students can use for research and training in manufacturing, including naval shipbuilding.

The grant is Siemens third supply of intellectually immense systems to an Australian university. Last August it gave Swinburne U software to create a digitalised “factory of the future” for students from apprentice to PhD, to study manufacturing processes (CMM August 15). And in November it announced the same sort of software would be installed at the University of Western Australia, for programmes including a “virtual twin of an LNG plant, (CMM November 6).

University of New England management is giving staff a 1.5 per cent pay-rise, an advance on a new enterprise agreement, in which UNE is expected to want significant changes to conditions (CMM, Monday).

But the campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union is way less than impressed. For a start, the union argues, the increase is 35 per cent behind the average for public sector payrise. And management needs to pick up the pace on talks’ “by dropping claims around workplace change, redundancy review, and misconduct and unsatisfactory performance procedures.”

Union vice president Kelvin McQueen says management must start addressing union claims for improved superannuation, job opportunities for casual and fixed term staff, workload regulation, redundancy rights for professional staff, “and a salary increase that isn’t laughable.”

The union also demands management drop proposals for workplace change.