Rick Morton

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 $8.5 million for business advisory, which is consulting at University of Melbourne.

Deloitte was another $1.5 million.

Griffith University has paid now, I think it was almost $2.5 million over the last 16 months.

And then lots of kind of boutique ones that are even like a tier below now.

So they're absolutely everywhere.

And the irony is that universities themselves often have their own consulting output, but they won't use them because they're worried about pushback 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 sloshing 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.

Is it related to funding 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, Senator.

We have paid now circa $50,000 so far this year.

With Nouse.

That's the question.

Very easy to understand.

How much was his contract worth?

And what he said was, we have paid to date $50,000 to Nouse.

That wasn't the question.