Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to 7am.
Chapter 2: What investigations are currently facing Australia's prestigious universities?
One of Australia's most prestigious universities is now at the centre of three investigations and could be about to face a fourth. Last year, ANU 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 changes meant to save $250 million were ever justified.
A separate investigation is looking into bullying allegations against former Chancellor Julie Bishop. And Bella herself has been suspended from her ongoing role as a distinguished professor accused of serious misconduct.
Chapter 3: How did Genevieve Bell's resignation impact ANU's restructuring?
It comes as powerful firms are reshaping higher education. A recent Four Corners investigation found Australian unis are spending roughly $1.8 billion a year on consultants and contractors.
Chapter 4: What role do consultants play in shaping university policies?
Today, we're bringing you an episode from 2025, where 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 19.
Chapter 5: How much are Australian universities spending on consultants?
This episode first aired in June of 2025. Rick, universities as a sector have been sounding the alarm for a long time that government policy, including funding cuts 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?
Chapter 6: What examples illustrate the influence of consultants in higher education?
So consultants appear to be coming in, and a great example of that is one I covered recently at 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.
Chapter 7: How is the Nows Group involved in university restructuring?
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 rationalise and centralise services. But the actual structure of a university is incredibly special for a reason. It's meant to be a kind of a...
a distributed network of knowledge centres, faculties, you know, 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 NOWS group, which is one that we'll come to in quite a bit of detail,
The advice is centralise 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 Nowse Group, 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?
Nowse is fascinating, and I particularly zeroed in on them because I think they've had the most astounding growth off the back of their participation in higher education advisory services.
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Chapter 8: What are the implications of universities relying on consultancy firms?
And, of course, this story was first being told through the Australian Financial Review. A former colleague of mine, Julie Herr, 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 announced this kind of $250 million restructure. at the ANU because they said that they were running out of money structurally and there were going to be 600-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 $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.
Coming up after the break, David Pocock takes on Unibosses. Rick, late last year, the ANU were brought in front of Senate estimates to ask about the restructures you mentioned earlier. And David Pocock was trying to get to the bottom of how much the uni had paid Nowscroup for the restructure. Thank you. Thank you, Chair.
And just finally, is it correct that you've engaged Nowscroup? And what... What work are they doing?
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.
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