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\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\nThe report found the ANU Council approved the $250 million Renew ANU program (with its savings target of 16.5% of total expenditure) \u201cwithout clear evidence it was needed, achievable, urgently required, or likely to have the intended impact\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It found that the ANU had possessed strong overall financial health in recent years, on measures like audited net operating results, credit ratings and net assets, while acknowledging a trend of declining average five-year surpluses.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Concern about financial sustainability is common across our universities, due to constraints on public funding and a reliance on international and other full-fee paying students. These pressures are undeniably affecting the educational experience of students and the satisfaction of staff. Nevertheless, our largest universities, now run like large corporations, are fundamentally wealthy organisations with billions each in assets. The ANU is no exception. Like any large institution, its long-term sustainability requires active management, but according to the ANAO, it did not face any immediate financial crisis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The ANU Council, responsible for the entire control and management of the university, \u201capproved Renew ANU without a clear understanding of the problem, the options available, implementation risks, or the expected impact of the program on the university\u2019s purpose, financial sustainability, and people\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The council\u2019s decision-making on Renew ANU, which largely rested on staff cuts, should have considered \u201cadditional information, options, and perspectives, including alternative ways to address identified financial problems\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n
What went wrong at ANU?<\/p>\n
The ANAO analysis revealed that in the years 2023, 2024 and 2025, ANU management diverged from standard auditing practices and, in doing so, altered the university\u2019s underlying operating results and forecasts. The financials presented to the council were much worse than the properly audited figures, and subsequently were used to justify a radical cost-cutting program. Then, instead of consulting with critical stakeholders such as staff and students, ANU employed a private consultancy to help design the cure to these self-generated and overstated financial woes.<\/p>\n
The ANAO found that in 2023, ANU made a series of variations to its reporting of investment returns, which influenced the reported financials significantly. Damningly, the report said, \u201cthere is no approved documented basis for one-off adjustments to ensure reporting validity or consistency\u201d. The motivation for the accounting trickery seemed intended only to justify the cost-cutting.<\/p>\n
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\t\t\t\tArticle ID: 1252389\n\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t There was no urgent problem with the university\u2019s finances. Government funding for ANU had fallen 24.4% (in real terms) between 2006 and 2024, and this had forced a greater reliance on student fees. But while these didn\u2019t cover the shortfall (of around 25% since 2020), the gap was filled by investment income, consultancy and contracts, and other income drawn from the ANU\u2019s $6 billion asset base.<\/p>\n The ANU has an AA+ credit rating. Its staffing bill was in line with other major universities. From the audited financial results of the past five years, the ANAO reported that the ANU had large average surpluses from 2020 to 2025, albeit with some COVID-related dips in 2020 and 2022.\u00a0<\/p>\n The ANU council itself was partly at fault for some underlying risks though: it lacked mechanisms to control spending when the financial shock of the pandemic occurred, and didn\u2019t do a great job of introducing financial management improvements in the aftermath either.\u00a0<\/p>\n One alarming fact buried in the ANAO report is that the biggest financial hit borne by the university during COVID was not from the reduction in student fees (which fell around $32 million in 2020) but from the fall in ANU\u2019s investment earnings (around $172 million in 2020).<\/p>\n Yet instead of acknowledging and addressing the real source of these unusually weak results, or accepting that the pandemic\u2019s effects were not structural and instead the result of an isolated event, the ANU council embarked on an organisational restructure aimed at cutting costs, especially from staff. From January to April 2024, the university executive sought external advice on ANU\u2019s business model, and consultant Nous was contracted. The measures proposed did not focus on changes to investment losses and financial risk management. They targeted employment expenses ($100 million), with a further $150 million to then be identified by an Expenditure Taskforce.<\/p>\n The staff union estimated Renew ANU would cost 650 jobs<\/a>.<\/p>\n Bizarrely, according to the auditor\u2019s report, the ANU\u2019s own analysis suggested that $250 million in savings \u201cwould not be achievable\u201d, yet \u201cno adjustment to the savings target or timeline was considered or made\u201d. Furthermore, Renew ANU \u201conly addressed one of the pressures and conditions faced by ANU between 2020 and 2024, namely overspending, and did not address lack of enrolment growth and poor financial management\u201d.<\/p>\n The fallout<\/p>\n In the face of executive attack and a lack of consultation, academic staff were confused, furious, and losing their jobs. Council members resigned amid the furore, criticism was discouraged, and matters were made worse by accusations involving vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe Australian National University keeps making headlines for all the wrong reasons,\u201d Julie Hare wrote in the AFR<\/a> in March 2025. \u201cVice-chancellor Genevieve Bell faced calls to resign, less than a year into her tenure, for having a second job at Intel; she came under pressure over her management of pro-Palestinian protests on campus; then it emerged that Bell\u2019s boss, chancellor Julie Bishop, racked up $150,000 on travel and has been hiring her business partner to write speeches for ANU events.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tRelated Article Block Placeholder<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tArticle ID: 1250477\n\t\t<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\t Amid the Renew ANU cuts, one school at ANU \u2014 according to Hare\u2019s reporting \u2014 appeared \u201cimmune from the maelstrom: the School of Cybernetics. It is the creation of Bell, the Australian-born anthropologist lured to the university in 2017 to establish a new branch of engineering.\u201d<\/p>\n The school founded by Bell reportedly had \u201ctwo academic staff members to every student, at a time when tutorials in other parts of the university, which have long been the smallest in the country, are blowing out to 30 or more.\u201d Six of the school\u2019s academic staff had no research outputs.<\/p>\n The ANAO report didn\u2019t delve into the various scandals involving persons behind Renew ANU, but in reaching its own harsh conclusions, it didn\u2019t need to. In the wash-up, the Renew ANU implementation cost $35.9 million in redundancies and general expenses before being retired in October 2025, and ANU reported that it achieved $74.8 million in annual salary savings<\/a>. It\u00a0cost hundreds of jobs and caused untold psychological harm to ANU staff and students. In evidence to Senate estimates recently, interim vice-chancellor Professor Rebekah Brown said that the cost of the reputational damage to the university from the episode was in the order of $100 million<\/a>.<\/p>\n ANU\u2019s response<\/p>\n The ANU council responded<\/a> by thanking the ANAO for its recommendations, \u201call of which have been accepted\u201d, and recognising the opportunity \u201cto strengthen governance, financial advice and reporting practices\u201d. However, the council did not accept \u201cthe characterisation that the Renew ANU savings target was approved without an understanding of the nature, scale or urgency of the financial challenge\u201d.<\/p>\n The ANAO\u2019s pithy reply suggested that this was hard to accept: the council couldn\u2019t possibly have offered an informed approval of Renew ANU, because it lacked \u201cevidence of key decisions, supporting analysis and the rationale for choices made\u201d, according to the ANAO. It also said materials provided to the council lacked \u201cfeedback from meaningful consultation with staff and students\u201d, and had never included any \u201canalysis to demonstrate that the $250 million savings target was both necessary, and achievable\u201d. Damning.<\/p>\n Vice-chancellor Bell walked away last year with a severance package of more than $400,000<\/a>. Chancellor Julie Bishop tendered her resignation in May, and the ANU council thanked her for her service<\/a>: \u201cIn her six years in the role and through her advocacy, the Hon. Julie Bishop has raised the university\u2019s profile domestically and internationally\u201d, and the council \u201cwishes her well for the future\u201d. The ANU faces years of hard work to rebuild its reputation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A reckless, corporatised council and a management that diverged from standard practices to enable the mass sacking of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28389,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[26191,5237,22,23211,983,21,2307,7743,2148,9071,10574],"class_list":["post-28388","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-australia","tag-anao","tag-anu","tag-au","tag-australian-national-audit-office","tag-australian-national-university","tag-austrlia","tag-education","tag-genevieve-bell","tag-job-cuts","tag-julie-bishop","tag-tertiary-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28388","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28388"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28388\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28389"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28388"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28388"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/australia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28388"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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