Rick Morton

And it also wasn't correct as a standalone answer on if he had been asked how much he'd been paid because the invoices at that point were about $450,000 to Nouse.

Now, we now know, when he asked this question on November 7 last year, that a contract for Naus had been signed and set in motion a month before and that that contract was worth $837,000.

Genevieve Bell was also asked, have you used Naus to advise on the restructure?

And the answer she gave was, I would argue, deliberately obtuse.

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 17 days of the vice-chancellor starting the job, she had authorised the pursuit of these consulting firms for an enormous restructure at the ANU.

When it was subsequently emerged 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 offence to mislead the Senate.

There were several questions on notice that printed outright

about the use of NASC 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 signed off...

on those questions unnoticed responses, the fact that there has been a pattern of behaviour 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?