Blame the consultants? The higher education sector and the consulting industry in Australia

Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:00:00 +1000

Consulting firms are on the nose. Four inquiries into university governance have landed on them, the sector spends an estimated $1.8 billion a year, and a former consultant taking a senior university job is now enough to provoke an FoI request or a media inquiry.

In the first episode of Ed Nauseam, recorded at Parliament House in the Innovation Aus studio, Julie Hare and Ant Bagshaw disagree productively about why. Julie's case is about work that doesn't understand universities, consultation decided in advance, and governing bodies that won't open the books. Ant's is that blame has been over-allocated to the firms and under-allocated to the institutions which hire them, and that a system where only metro universities with high international enrolments can comfortably balance a budget was always going to produce this. But does all that mean consultants should be considered evil?