I'm Daniel James and you're listening to seven AM. One of Australia's most prestigious universities is now at the center of three investigations and could be about to face a fourth. Last year A and You Vice Chancellor Genevieve Bell resigned after pressure over a massive restructure and the hidden role consultants played in shaping it. Now two inquiries are looking at whether the change is meant to save two hundred
and fifty million dollars were ever justified. A separate investigation is looking into bullying allegations against former chancellor Julie Bishop, and Bella herself has been suspended from an ongoing role as Distinguished Professor, accused of serious misconduct. It comes as powerful firms of reshaping higher education. A recent four Corners investigation found Australian unis are spending roughly one point eight billion dollars a year on consultants and contractors. Today, we're
bringing you episode from twenty twenty five. The senior reporter for the Saturday Paper, Rick Morton, examines how consultants came to shape Australian unis and what that's meant for higher education. It's Sunday, April nineteen. This episode first eve in June of twenty twenty five. Rick universities as a sector have been sounding the alarm for a long time. The government policy, including funding cauts and student caps, has been having a
big impact on their ability to function. So can you give me some examples of how consultants fit into that? How are universities using them?
So consultants appear to be coming in and great example of that is one I covered recently at a University of Technology Sydney where KPMG were brought in. But we're essentially told go and look at individual research output from individual researchers and produce a master list of those who are not contributing enough profit to the university, which, as it was put to me, would probably contravene the enterprise bargaining agreement at that university because you can't you can
performance manage someone for not meeting expectations. You can't make redundancies based on performance. That's not how this is meant to work. And so the consultants, of course took a particularly corporate view across the board. They're looking at profit and loss, they're looking at ways to rationalize and centralized services. But the actual structure of the university is incredibly special
for a reason. It's meant to be a kind of a distributed network of knowledge centers, faculties, people who are learned in their field, who contribute to the life of the university and who are cooperative in the way that university is run. And increasingly, particularly with consultants like the NOUS group, which is one that will come to in
quite a bit of detail. The advice is centralize all of your functions and to the degree possible handicap what it is the faculties and the academic staff are able to do and the say they have over the future of this institution, which would make it a lot more like a corporation and a lot less like a university.
Yeah, there are a number of consultancy groups involved in all of this, But you did mention Nowscroup, which is a global consulting firm and they do a lot of work with the Australian National University. So what did you find out about the role they are playing there?
Now?
This is fascinating and I particularly there it in on them because I think they've had the most astounding growth off the back of their participation in higher education advisory services. And of course this story was first being told through the Australian Financial Review. A former colleague of mind, Julie her who's a fantastic reporter, was looking at misgivings, I guess is one way of saying it. Early on within the tenure of the new vice chancellor there, Professor Genevieve
Bell and her chancellor, Julie Bishop. Now Genevieve Bell had announce his kind of two hundred and fifty million dollar restructure at the a and U because they said that they were running out of money structure and they were going to be six hundred to something job losses. But what they didn't do is tell anyone that they were using the Nouse Group's advice or paying them for that advice.
In fact, they were incredibly tricky with how they disclosed any mention at all that they were using external consultants to advise on this enormous restructure.
How widespread is the use of consultants across the Australian university sector. I mean they're everywhere, they are literally everywhere.
I mean KPMG was paid eight and a half million dollars for Business Advisory, which is consulting at the University of Melbourne. Deloitte was another one and a half grief of the university has paid now I think it was almost two and a half million over the last sixteen months. And then lots of boutique ones that are even like
a tier below now, so they're absolutely everywhere. And the irony is that universities themselves offered have their own consulting output, but they won't use them because they're worried to push back from staff and letting their plans kind of leak out into the public. The way the system has been built up, there's so much money flashing around that to the extent that a firm wants to give you the tough advice, they're only prepared to do so if they
think they can still keep getting work. I mean, that's just the sad reality is that you're not necessarily going to be told anything you don't want to hear.
Coming up after the break, David Pocock takes on unibosses.
Rick.
Late last year, the A and U were brought in front of Center Estimates to ask about the real structures you mentioned earlier, and David Pocock was trying to get to the bottom of how much the UNI had paid now Scroup for the very structure.
Thank you question, Thank you chaan. Just finally, is it correct that you've engaged in our scroup and what work are they doing? Is it related to finding savings or what's the scope of that work.
There was one example where the chief operating Officer, Jonathan Churchill, was asked, how much is this contract worth? Yeah, thank you, Soma sev. We have paid now I sort the fifty thousand dollars.
So far this year, okay, seven, fifty fifty to fifty yeah, okay, yeah, you're.
Not with NUS. That's the question. Very easy to understand how much was his contract worth? And what he said was we have paid to date fifty thousand dollars to NUS. That wasn't the question, and there also wasn't correct as a standalone answer. And if he had been asked how much he'd been paid, because the invoices at that point were about four hundred and fifty thousand dollars to NOUS. Now we now know when he asked this question on November seven last year, that a contract for NOUS had
been signed and set in motion. A month before, and that that contract was worth eight hundred and thirty seven thousand dollars. Genevieve Bell was also asked have you used NOUS to advise on the restructure, and the answer she gave was, I would argue deliberately obtuse.
I initially engaged the now scroup a number of months ago, Senator, to help think about how to look at the role and the changing role of universities in a global landscape. I was interested in what were the ways that universities thought strategically and what was a global survey really And that's what.
She said was I brought them in early on in my tenure when I got the VC job to advise on the university's position in relation to other universities and how we're tracking. Now, that makes it sound like that's not involved in the restructure. That's not true. And of course we now know subsequent to that fact that within seventeen days of the Vice Chancellor starting the job, she had authorized the pursuit of these consulting firms for enormous
restructure at the A ANDU. When it was subsequently urge that David Pocock had been misled, he was furious, and he put out a statement in April this year essentially saying that it was appalling and that he takes this incredibly seriously. And the conclusion he reached was that he had been misled by these officials because they didn't want
to answer the question. And of course after that there were also a bunch of questions on notice, which through the Parliamentary Estimate system, you can take a question on notice, you can take it away, you can use all your resources at your institution, your department, whatever it is, and answer the question properly and come back and tell the Senate the truth. And it is an offense to mislead
the Senate. There were several questions on notice that printed outright mistruths about the use of now Consulting and about the value of those contracts. They had to be recalled and corrected. The question that remains is how did that happen? Who's signed off on those questions? I noticed responses. The fact that there has been a pattern of behavior here now has led people to ask even more questions that
they might have otherwise been happy to accept. The answers to which is what are your motives behind this restructure? Why are you paying now and what are you doing with the advice that you're refusing to tell us about.
So a lot of secrecy and uncertainty around us all this, But what we do know is that universities are spending a lot on consultants, which begs the question shouldn't university management people like the vice chancellor and the people on the university council have a sense of how to make savings or where to spend money, or how to structure their business. I mean, isn't that their job?
Yeah, that is their job and they should do it. We have a fundamental structural problem with universities and to some extent they won't be financially sustainable, while the government that funds and regulates them doesn't seem to care about
their role in society. But vcs are paid somebody around a million dollars on average in Australia to do these jobs because we're told they demand an incredibly astute and sensitive skill set, which is to manage the academic output and the rankings and the quality of the institution with the business of running such a large organization. But university councils have even fewer oversight mechanisms than a corporate board.
There are no shareholders to whom they're accountable. There is no publicly used ASX meeting for these council members the VC, particularly at university, the Australian National University, the VC can only lose their job if they resign or if the council recinds it.
So, Rick, what impact do you think all this will have on the university sector, The reliance on consultancy firms, the lack of funding from federal government to universities. What does the future of the university sector look like at the moment.
It's pretty grim and you know, staff were already overworked and overburdened, particularly academic and professional staff are trying to just keep the wheels turning on these places that have been gutted, and you know, they tend to get gutted every other four years. You know, there's always a restructure happening at a university at any given point in time. And of course university vcs didn't want to make these decisions on their own because they're so much political blowback
within the organization, so they'd get these consultants in. But of course, now ever, I'm very cranky that they're using these consultants. So you've got Griffith University now just hiring the consultants as full time employees. You know, someone told me to look at the vice Chancellor's office at Griffith and there's two employees there who were hired directly from NAUS who are principal consultants who are now directing transformation
within the vice Chancellor's office. So it's pretty grim. I mean, what does it look like in the future. We just keep cutting And now some themselves a quite seplicity in their report where they interviewed the chief operating officers. They literally said that the academy's up for grats. That's how they phrased it's up for grats, which tells you everything you need to know I think about the way they see this.
Rick, thank you so much for your time.
Thanks, I appreciate it.
Seven am. We'll be back tomorrow with an episode on the Around Wall and how it's created not just a humanitarian and economic crisis, but an environmental catastrophe as well.
What happened was that Israel struck for fuel depots and refineries and Tehran, resulting in massive fires, sending plumes of toxic smoke over the city, which led to these horrifying scenes of black rain, effectively acid rain on steroids, you know as the oil mixed with a lot of the FOD that comes from burning oil, especially sulfur and nitrous oxide, but all these other really nasty heavy metals, other combustion products. An alphabet soup of toxins.
I'm Daniel Giants, Thanks for listening.