On Monday, Labor and the Coalition voted down David Pocock’s motions calling for ANU to produce documents related to its “Renew ANU” cuts, staff surveys, and ANU Chancellor Julie Bishop’s emails to council members alleging breaches of confidentiality. 

Yesterday embattled ANU Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell welcomed the move with a sentence structure known to every struggling university administrator in 2025: a noun, a verb, and Donald Trump. 

Bell spoke about the motions in no uncertain terms, calling them “new territory for us and the sector more broadly”, adding: 

I want to be very clear that we have all watched the overreach of politicians into daily operations of American universities and the consequences have been far reaching. 

American universities are being blackmailed with losing billions of dollars in government funding over supposedly not doing enough to discipline pro-Palestine protestors, a clear case of political interference in higher education. ANU on the other hand is being subject to requests for basic transparency after testimony in Senate Estimates alleged that Chancellor Julie Bishop bullied and threatened members of ANU Council. The contrast seems clear. 

Perhaps the ANU, whose “broad range of activities around security” – again, allegedly – included tracking student movements and social media accounts to identify pro-Palestine protestors, might consider using a different analogy to claim victimhood in future. 

Considering that the ANU may have previously misled the Senate by potentially misrepresenting the amount of money it had spent engaging the consulting group Nous, concerns about transparency are not new.  

Bell further defended her university’s conduct, saying “Materials which we can release are already published on the website including staff surveys”. But ANU had previously attempted to block the release of those surveys due to their potential to “have a substantial adverse effect on the proper and efficient conduct” on the university. In fact, their release only came after a Canberra Times article criticised ANU for keeping the survey results secret. 

ANU is in a severe governance crisis. And if their university administration accused of bullying, protest crackdowns, and misleading Australia’s democratically elected Parliament wants to find something to compare to Trump, perhaps it should look in the mirror.