Sounds like academics are as poorly funded as when I was in academia years ago, tho I did hear that postdocs get paid better in oz.

> Spare A Thought For Your Broke Professor

https://www.persuasion.community/p/spare-a-thought-for-your-broke-professor

> Precarity has become the norm in academia. That’s bad for everyone.

...

> It is difficult for prospective parents or students to get a straight answer about the faculty workload at different institutions. But a reliable benchmark of fairness is the ratio of tenure-track faculty to contingent employees. If you see a lot of different titles—many “research professors” or “teaching professors” in a department with regular professors, or a high percentage of lecturers and instructors—that is a sign of a caste system. This does not mean that your child will not have a good experience there. Chances are good that all of those teachers are going to be giving their best, trying to make a difference. But chances are also good that your child will benefit from exploited labor.