A new recreation centre, with an initial price tag of $320 million, opened on Friday at the University of Auckland. Outside, members of the Tertiary Education Union held placards saying ‘negotiate living wage’ and ‘white elephant building’.

At the University of Auckland’s central city campus on Friday, vice chancellor Dawn Freshwater and minister for infrastructure Chris Bishop pulled down a little piece of velvet to reveal the plaque for the university’s new recreation centre, Hiwa. In the vast and light-filled sports hall, on the southern hemisphere’s first glass sports floor with integrated LED markings, they’d each spoken about how the facility would help position Auckland as a “world-class” city. To the eager and mainly suited crowd, Freshwater said that sport and recreation were “critical parts” of education for “that mindset of discipline” that can be applied to academic success, critical thinking and future leadership.

Two floors below, jets moved hot water around a tiled spa pool, steam mooched around the wood-panelled sauna and in a chill-out area, black hammocks swayed under blue lights. Described as a “vibrant community hub”, the Hiwa recreation centre is an impressive eight-storey building on Symonds Street with rooftop turf, a glittering view of the Waitematā, an eight-lane, 33-metre pool, a dive tank, state-of-the-art sports halls, dance studios with sprung floors, a bouldering wall, group exercise studios, a combat sports studio, expansive cardio and weights areas and a cafe. Construction began in 2019, and last November the gym softly opened its doors to staff and students who wanted to work out, swim or simply look around.

It’s a remarkable facility, and even Bishop, who has been to a number of sports facilities around the world in his former capacity as sports minister, said he was “blown away”. But such projects come at a cost. The initial cost outline was $320m – the final sum has not yet been revealed – and some are questioning whether the university should have spent such a large sum differently.

“I can only describe it as becoming a luxury resort,” said Java Grant, a PhD student at the university and spokesperson for student activist group We Are The University. In Grant’s view, the investment in such a “fancy gym” signals that the university isn’t focusing on a university education but rather a “university experience” catered to wealthy international students who they see as “cash cows”. It’s not that he, or his group, are against the gym entirely, he said – despite the fact they set up a protest on the pavement when it softly opened in November. “It’s an awesome gym, people are stoked. But at what cost? What are the things that haven’t been acknowledged about what is being sacrificed for this?” 

Grant pointed to years of cost cutting from the university – the closing of the Epsom campus last year, specialist library closures in 2018, cuts in staffing and the casualisation of technical and teaching roles, “course cuts after course cuts after course cuts” in the arts, increasing rent at student accommodation, and the current stalled negotiations with the Tertiary Education Union for living wages. And according to reports, more cuts could be on the way at universities across New Zealand when the budget is announced in May. “The university’s management cries poor so frequently, on so many huge and significant issues, and yet is able to justify $300-400 million for a gym,” said Grant. For students, this was “really hard to hear”.

Sean Sturm, associate professor at the university and TEU member, is involved in the current negotiations, which began in July 2024 and are now at a standstill. “The university keeps on saying that it’s got no money,” he said. The union is pushing for pay offers that match inflation, the living wage for all employees, including casuals, who tend to be students, and a pay system structured on time rather than performance, because research shows that “Māori staff, Pacifica staff or Asian staff don’t get performance pay at the same rate that Pākehā male staff do”. 

Last year a pay offer was made that wasn’t acceptable to the union because it was “way behind” inflation. That increase has been applied to non-unionised staff since the beginning of February, so the 1,600 staff that the union represents are now getting paid less, and have been told they won’t be back-paid, said Sturm. “I’m guessing that they’re just hoping that we will eventually give in,” he said, “because we’re losing money all the time.” Despite regular meetings and strike actions last year, Sturm said there had been no progress on negotiations for months, and further industrial action was likely this year.

Union representatives have suggested the university’s unwillingness to meet their demands at the same time as opening a multimillion-dollar recreation centre illustrates a wider trend. A TEU analysis of University of Auckland annual reports showed that the proportion of revenue spent on people costs (such as salaries) had dropped from an average of 55% between 2015 and 2020 to an average of 50% between 2021 and 2023 . For the 2023 operating revenue of $1.5bn, that works out to be $75m less than in 2015. Yet in the past five years, the proportional spend on capital works (construction, renovation or maintaining physical assets) has more than tripled, rising from 6% of total revenue ($79m) in 2019  to 20% ($307m) in 2023. Sturm said the university appeared to be “making savings at the expense of staff, rather than at the expense of fancy building projects”. 

During her speech on Friday, Freshwater front-footed the question of funding for the recreation centre project. She said that a charge on the student services levy since 2003 means that students have contributed more than half the estimated cost. The levy, officially the compulsory student services fee, is a fee paid by all students towards student support services. The university collects about $30m in student levies each year. This year, it sits at $9.24 per point – for a typical full-time undergraduate that’s $1,108.80 per year. In a breakdown of the forecasted expenditure of this levy for 2024, sports, recreation and cultural activities takes the biggest chunk of the pie, ahead of childcare services, counselling and pastoral services and health services. 

The levy is determined by university management, though there is an online student survey as consultation. “We’re constantly seeing these performative consultations, where portals open up online for students and staff to submit feedback,” Grant said. “There’s no dialogue, so it can’t be informed feedback, and there’s no capacity to engage with others about the ideas.” Even if someone was keen enough to submit online, Grant said there was no process to let submitters know if or how their feedback had been taken on. “There’s a lot of strong systems at play to minimise the influence and power of students and staff,” he said.

Anyway, Freshwater was quickly onto the next thing – since November, 100,000 people had come through the doors. Thanks to a line of bulky security guards at Hiwa on Friday, that number does not include the protesters.