I think the main blame for the shittyness of RMITs Linux,Unix and etc. support could be blamed on a few things the craptactular novell system (and those staff members who grew up with it) in place, the culture of ignorance and resistance to change that the majority of staff in college relationship ITS (the people who actually interact with staff and students ) and (certainly not finally just all I can be arsed writing about in this post) a failure of middle managers throughout ITS
I think that RMIT will continue to have a "subscription of stupidness and incompetence" due to the hiring (and promotion) policies currently affecting ITS and the Zero training available just pushing anyone with skill or intelligence away from RMIT-ITS. In the words of someone overheard over the partitions in one of the large ITS offices "Would you really recommend someone else come work here"
But maybe stuff will change. the new ED of ITS seems decent (and some of the staff he has been dumping work on) and it's possible that he (and the rest) might be able to change stuff for the better but they have a very long uphill battle and a significant part of the resistance will be internal to the IT department.
P.S.
You can connect a nix box to the wireless it's actually less work (in some-ways) than windows machines (no additional shitty secure w2 required) though the proxy settings are completely retarded and hopefully they will put in a transparent proxy soon. The hell desk should be able to assist you with OS X and you can take the PDF for OS X off the stupid wireless website and apply to any decent Linux with ease