"The ANU council approved the $250 million Renew ANU savings target without clear evidence it was needed, achievable, urgently required, or likely to have the intended impact."
That is the finding of the Australian National Audit Office inquiry into financial management at the Australian National University.
It should end any pretence that Renew ANU was a regrettable but necessary exercise in financial discipline. It was a destructive job cuts program approved by the university's governing body, without the evidence required to justify the damage it would cause.
At ANU, staff were told there was no alternative. We were told the university faced an urgent crisis. We were told cuts had to be made - disciplines savaged, schools and colleges restructured, and colleagues had to lose their jobs.
Since the beginning, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) said that the numbers did not stack up. The Auditor-General has now agreed.
NTEU members stood up when management tried to close on-campus not-for-profit childcare centres. We stood up when management tried to cut pay by 2.5 per cent. We stood up when the chancellor and vice-chancellor pressed ahead with a program that would have gutted the university on the basis of unaudited and inconsistently applied financial measures.
We organised, argued, voted no confidence, demanded documents, challenged the narrative and refused to let management call destruction "reform".
Our union succeeded in stopping job cuts. We have seen off a chancellor and a vice-chancellor, and we put university governance on the national agenda.
The ANAO report vindicates that struggle. While council members "approved Renew ANU without a clear understanding of the problem" we kept turning up to try to give students something like the experience they were promised and paid for.
The report goes directly to the duties of care and diligence owed by council members.
Council members were responsible for testing management's claims, demanding evidence, considering alternatives and protecting the university's public purpose. But the ANAO found that council approved Renew ANU without a clear understanding of the problem, the options available or the implementation risks.
In plain terms, council failed to do the basic work of governing.
That failure has had consequences. Renew ANU damaged teaching and research. It has left the university with broken systems.
It has consumed staff time and energy that should have gone into students, scholarship and public service. It has resulted in the departure of valued colleagues through voluntary and involuntary redundancies. It treated workers as an expense to be cut, rather than the people who make the university function.
A university council should not be a cheer squad for management. Its job is scrutiny. Its job is oversight. Its job is to ask the hard questions before staff and students are made to pay the price.
ANU does face real long-term financial pressures. Staff never denied that. We live with the consequences of underfunding, policy volatility and managerial failure every day.
Financial sustainability requires careful management. But a $250 million target imposed without a proper evidence was not prudence. From where we sit, it looks like negligence.
New faces in high places are no guarantee of accountability. A new chancellor and a new vice-chancellor will inherit the same statutory architecture unless Parliament changes it.
The same council structure, the same weak internal accountability, the same management-filtered information flows and the same capacity to sideline staff and students would remain in place.
The ANU Act must be amended so this can never happen again.
Reform should begin with a statutory University Senate, with a staff and student majority. It would provide voice, guaranteed access to the information that council did not care to request, and the power to recall council members who lack the care and diligence to govern.
It would not be a revolution. Council would remain the accountable authority. Management would remain responsible for operations. But the missing piece is a durable democratic counterweight inside the institution, one that allows the people who do the work of the university to scrutinise those who govern it.
This is a conservative reform in the best sense. It strengthens self-government by reducing the need for crisis intervention by regulators, ministers and parliamentary committees.
It protects university autonomy. It recognises that universities are public institutions whose legitimacy depends on the people who teach, research, study and support them.
The ANAO report should be the end of business as usual at ANU. The federal government now has a choice. It can accept another round of apologies and platitudes, or it can change the law.
NTEU members fought Renew ANU because we knew what was at stake. We fought for jobs, for students, for research, for professional staff, for academic freedom, and for the future of the national university.
We were right. Now Parliament must act.
