Joshua Black

University leaders are keeping their institutions in the news for all the wrong reasons. Yesterday, it was University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) turn for a round of bad press. Five of its executives – including the Vice-Chancellor – zipped to the US for two alumni events in May, at a total cost of $140,000.

This is the same university that hired KPMG (at a cost of $4.8 million) to provide advice on how to cut $100 million from annual expenditure by the end of next year. While university leaders are jetting around the world, consultants are cooking up twin crises of finance and integrity at home.

Even for a large institution, $4.8 million is a huge amount of money. A brief glance at UTS’s 2024 annual report shows that this sum equates to:

· Half of UTS’s 2024 expenditure on laboratory supplies ($9.5 million).

· 87% of its insurance bill ($5.5 million).

· More than the entirety of UTS’s telecommunications expenses (nearly $3.4 million in 2024).

The KPMG contract itself costs the equivalent of 5% of UTS’s new savings target. (Face-palm.)

This kind of university largesse gives consultants not just millions of dollars at universities’ expense, but also a seat at the table where decisions about the future of these same universities are made.

UTS has been open about its KPMG contract. Others are not so transparent.

· The embattled Australian National University has been nothing but secretive about its reliance on Nous Consulting Group, who helped the current leadership cook up a $250 million cost-cutting adventure. Only through FOI documents did the public learn how integral Nous was to the whole process.

· When the University of South Australia’s council voted to merge with the University of Adelaide back in 2023, consultants from Accenture were in the room. They had prepared the feasibility study that led to the decision, and their presence was confidential until FOI documents brought it to light.

How do we address consultants’ influence on campus? First, the individual Acts governing Australia’s universities could be changed so that staff and students are meaningfully, democratically represented on university councils. (Corporate types are currently overrepresented on these bodies.)

State governments could introduce laws that require universities to report itemised consultancy spending for all contracts above $10,000. Such rules exist already in Victoria, ensuring greater transparency of their universities’ expenditure.

A national whistleblower protection authority, covering the public sector more broadly as well as universities specifically, would help to mitigate secrecy and unaccountability in university governance and spending.

Until we see big, meaningful reforms like these, university leaders can expect more criticism of the kind they’ve been experiencing lately.

Last November, the Albanese Government announced a promise to cut all existing student HELP loans by 20%. It was a key Labor federal election promise, one that the Coalition opposed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese repeatedly pledged that it would be the first bill put before the new parliament.

The bill – formally the Universities Accord (Cutting Student Debt by 20 Per Cent) Bill 2025 – promises to benefit three million Australians with a student loan and forgive $16 billion worth of existing debt. As the education minister’s media release today points out, the whole thing is conceived as “cost of living relief for the Australian people”.

But the title of the bill is kind of a red herring. The “Universities Accord” was, in a nutshell, a massive review of the structural flaws in Australia’s university system. There’s little in its Final Report about student debt forgiveness, certainly not “one-off” relief packages. There are a few lines about waiving some “life-long debts”, but even these are followed by the conclusion that waiving debt does nothing to address the integrity of the fee system as a whole.

To be fair to Clare, there is a little bit of Accord-inspired structural reform in the bill. Specifically, the bill offers a new “fairer repayment system” that raises the income threshold at which people start paying back their HELP debt (from $54,435 up to $67,000). It also ensures that debt repayments are based on income above that threshold, rather than total income.

The explanatory memorandum is at pains to show that this change “addresses recommendation 16(b) in the Accord’s Final Report”. But what were the Accord’s other recommendations for student debt reform?

First, a major change to the way HELP debt is indexed over time. Instead of debts rising with inflation every year (which led to a 7 per cent spike in debts back in 2023), the report said debts should rise with whatever is lower – inflation or the wage price index (WPI). The government did, in fact, implement this reform in 2024.

Second, the report also recommended that the Morrison Government’s Job-ready Graduates (JRG) package, with its massive fee hikes for humanities, society and culture, and communications students, be scrapped. JRG means people studying these courses end up with higher debts than they used to (sometimes as high as $50,000), and take even longer to pay them off. As the report says, a fairer HECS-HELP system would charge students based on their projected lifetime earnings.

So far, JRG has been kept firmly in the too-hard-basket. But scrapping JRG and reforming student fees is a much-needed reform, one wholly deserving of the “Universities Accord” title. The new Australian Tertiary Education Commission, established on 1 July, has been asked to start work on this straight away, but the federal government will ultimately be asked to take the decisions that matter.

Cutting student debt is nice for some, but bigger reform would be better for everyone.

Over in the senate the crossbench have also been trying to get the bills they had left over from the last parliament which were not addressed, re-introduced into this parliament.

The first day of business of a new parliament is a lot of this work – dealing with the things that were left to wither on the vine during the last parliament.

For David Pocock, that looks like these bills:

1. Copyright Legislation Amendment (Fair Pay for Radio Play) Bill 2023;
2. Electoral Legislation Amendment (Fair Territory Representation) Bill 2024;
3. Lobbying (Improving Government Honesty and Trust) Bill 2025; and
4. National Housing and Homelessness Plan Bill 2024.

LNP senator Matt Canavan is making moves in the senate – he just put this on the senate papers:

That the following matter be referred to the Economics References Committee for inquiry and report by the last sitting day
in 2025:
The current health and future of the Australian metals manufacturing industry including the alumina, aluminium, lead, zinc, copper and nickel industries, with reference to:
(a) the impact of increasing energy costs, technological change, industrial relation regimes, workforce challenges and the
broader regulatory environment;
(b) distortions in global supply chains that impact the viability of Australian metals manufacturing;
(c) the cost of metals manufacturing businesses meeting climate change targets;
(d) the viability of government interventions to sustain Australian metals manufacturing;
(e) the potential for energy investments to help reduce costs for Australian metals manufacturing;
(f) the viability of further public-private partnerships;
(g) the impact on regions, our national security and economy if metals manufacturing declines in Australia; and
(h) any other related matter.

Mike Bowers has spent some time capturing some first speeches moment in the chamber:

Jason Clare also introduced Labor’s bill to tackle some of the issues with childcare workers and children safety, given some of the cases we have seen lately. The bill’s main point is that it will strip government funding from ‘unsafe’ centres.

Georgie Dent from advocacy group The Parenthood says the government should be looking at creating an “independent national body to oversee early childhood education and care” as the “most effective way for the government to ensure children are safe”.  

Dent:

Right now, there is no national body to ensure that every single early learning centre across Australia is providing safe and high-quality education and care. Nor is there a single source of truth for parents to turn to in such distressing times. 

We need national coordination on everything from processes for hiring new staff, educator training and background checks, to body safety protocol and government funding arrangements. All levels of government need to work together and provide adequate resourcing to the regulatory bodies in the system. 

That’s what an Independent National Early Childhood Commission – as was recommended by the Productivity Commission last year – could have the power to achieve. 

Parents shouldn’t have to worry about the quality and safety of centres. At the absolute baseline, parents deserve to know that their child is safe in care. But without a national leader to oversee, monitor and regulate quality and safety, the onus is still on parents, many of whom have little choice around their reliance on childcare. 

Ahead of this year’s Federal Election, the Prime Minister said that he wanted universal early childhood education and care to be his legacy. 

The Federal Government has already taken steps towards a universal system with their accessibility and affordability measures, but safety and quality must be at the heart of systemic reform. A National Commission would address all of these issues, and ensure that every child in Australia has access to safe, high-quality, inclusive and affordable care.

We urge the Federal Government to prioritise the establishment of a National Early Childhood Commission,” said Ms Dent.

So why does Michael McCormack hate net zero? Because of the farmers, apparently.

They’re all facing these shysters who come in, these spiffs who come in and ride roughshod over over farmers.

They’re signing up one neighbor and then not the other and often they’re brother and sister. They’re dividing families.

They’re ruining friendships that have been going not for years, but for generations.

I mean, between Binalong and Browning, a great little area, peaceful, idyllic area, putting up 90 260m wind turbines, wind towers.

I mean, nobody should have to live with that right on their doorstep when there’s absolutely no benefit to them. It’s destroying lives. It’s destroying livelihoods. …I’m very much against that. I’m very much worried about the cost of power when we’re getting left behind, and we’ve got the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, wanting to do a productivity forum, and we’re not talking about how we’re going to have cheap energy. I mean, this is a crock. It is an absolute crock..

You know what actually is terrible? Coal-fired power stations.

But the Coalition opposition to wind turbines is not new, or particularly original. In 2014, then-Liberal treasurer Joe Hockey said his eyes were offended by the sight of wind turbines driving into Australia.

We have some beautiful landscapes in Australia, and frankly, putting up those towers is just to me, quite appalling in those places.

I drive from Sydney to Canberra … to go to parliament, and I just look at those wind turbines around Lake George and I am just appalled.

The LNP in Queensland are cancelling renewables projects, even where the community wants them.

So this is not new. It doesn’t matter what the Nationals do here – they will blow up the Coalition and also consign their own party and relevance to the dustbin of history – but they will continue the culture wars to the bitter end.

Michael McCormack is the latest former Nationals leader to appear on Sky today.

Barnaby Joyce was there earlier today (apparently net zero is the ‘head of the serpent’) and the current Nationals leader David Littleproud (if you don’t have a clock on his leadership going, you are late) also made an appearance to pretend everything was fine.

So now TipTop (our name for him because he is as white bread as you can get) is now against net zero because the party room is and Joyce is behind McCormack as leader because there is no chance Joyce will ever get the numbers again, but McCormack could. And the enemy of my enemy…..

Anyways, it is ON:

David Littleproud is the leader. All of our seats in the Lower House were returned to the last the last Parliament, and and David, as he said this morning, will will do what the party wants as the leader, and that is his obligation and duty. And look, I support David. I do. I’ve never said that I don’t.

The address-in-reply to the Governor-general’s speech (where they read a speech prepared by the government to the senate, about the government’s agenda. It is all very weird) was happening in the chamber.

Now it has moved back to first speeches. Ben Small, the new Liberal MP for Forrest (who took over from the retired Nola Marino) is giving his first speech.

Independent Senator Fatima Payman is also looking for some documents: