Speaker 1: Okay, So, Rick, a spreadsheet might not usually be the
Speaker 1: most exciting place to start a story necessarily, but this
Speaker 1: spreadsheet is different.
Speaker 2: It was so red.
Speaker 1: Hot that there were many people who.
Speaker 2: Denied that it even existed for months.
Speaker 1: So tell me about the spreadsheet, what is in it
Speaker 1: and when did you first hear about it?
Speaker 3: First of all, Ruby, how dare you?
Speaker 4: Spreadsheets are very exciting in my line of work, but
Speaker 4: particularly this one.
Speaker 1: Rick Morton was writing about the crisis at Australian universities
Speaker 1: earlier this year when some documents from the University of
Speaker 1: Technology Sydney caught his eye. Uts said, hired the big
Speaker 1: consulting firm KPMG to help them save one hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars through a restructure, and.
Speaker 4: It's a restructure we've now just seen start. They announced
Speaker 4: eleven hundred subjects will be axed, the entire School of
Speaker 4: Education is gone, and one hundred and sixty full time
Speaker 4: equivalent jobs in academic workforce are gone, and there's about
Speaker 4: to be two hundred and forty more across professional staff.
Speaker 4: So this is a significant kind of swinging cut across
Speaker 4: the university to save one hundred million dollars a year.
Speaker 1: As he read through the documents, he noticed there was
Speaker 1: a request from UTS asking KPMG to create a master
Speaker 1: Excel spreadsheet, one that ranked researchers by how much money
Speaker 1: they were bringing in.
Speaker 4: Now that's interesting to me because you can't make someone
Speaker 4: redundant purely based on performance. If they've got a performance
Speaker 4: issue such as not researching enough for bringing in enough money,
Speaker 4: that has to be dealt with under a separate part
Speaker 4: of the EBA. So why would UTS be asking for
Speaker 4: this breakdown from KPMG in a redundancy drive.
Speaker 1: That question sent Rick on a hunt to find out
Speaker 1: was this list real, and what he found reveals a
Speaker 1: lot about the way Australian universities are grappling with the
Speaker 1: pressure to be profitable at a time when research and
Speaker 1: learning is under threat. I'm Ruby Jones, and you listening
Speaker 1: to seven AM Today journalist Rick Morton on UTS, KPMG and.
Speaker 2: The secret Spreadsheet.
Speaker 1: It's Thursday October two. Okay, so you hear about this spreadsheet.
Speaker 1: Clearly there are questions about what it is, how it's
Speaker 1: being used, and whether it's allowed to be used in
Speaker 1: that way. So tell me a bit more about how
Speaker 1: you go about finding out more about it.
Speaker 2: And how the university responds.
Speaker 4: It's a great question because you know, they could have
Speaker 4: explained this away. I wouldn't have believed the explanation potentially,
Speaker 4: but they could have said, look, we asked for it
Speaker 4: as an input, but we weren't using it to make
Speaker 4: any decisions.
Speaker 3: We've got all this other work going on.
Speaker 4: But what they ended up doing was it scenes from
Speaker 4: the outside trying to hide the fact that this spreadsheet
Speaker 4: was even handed over to the university. And that's when
Speaker 4: my spider sense as a journalist starts to go off.
Speaker 4: People were trying to get access to this thing. There
Speaker 4: was mentioned in all of these work orders. There were
Speaker 4: under Fredmin Information laws in New South Wales called Keeper
Speaker 4: people were putting in requests for access to the contracts,
Speaker 4: the work orders, the status reports, and in every one
Speaker 4: of these there is reference to this master Excel spreadsheet.
Speaker 3: Which UTS has asked for.
Speaker 4: And in the March contract signed by the Vice Chancellor
Speaker 4: this year, Andrew Parfitt not only said they'd asked for it,
Speaker 4: but that they'd completed it and so where is this
Speaker 4: thing right? And so fys get put in. There's one
Speaker 4: from the National Tertiary Education Union branch officials as another
Speaker 4: anonymous person who submits a keeper request and the FYS
Speaker 4: come back and there is no documentation. They say that
Speaker 4: we can't find this spreadsheet. Yes, it was asked for
Speaker 4: early on, but it never eventuated because the work was discontinued.
Speaker 4: People say, this doesn't make any sense, so they're write
Speaker 4: back clarifying emails to the head of Corporate Information at
Speaker 4: the University of Technology, Sydney, who writes back, I can advise, however,
Speaker 4: that this master spreadsheetem quoting did not eventuate and was
Speaker 4: no longer required as an output of the OSI what
Speaker 4: they call the Operational Sustainability Initiative, that's.
Speaker 2: The restructure, And I mean, what do we know about that.
Speaker 2: Does the spreadsheet exist?
Speaker 3: It does?
Speaker 4: It does, but only we only know this because people
Speaker 4: much smarter than me kept going back to the university saying,
Speaker 4: hang on a second, this doesn't make any sense because
Speaker 4: in the workhorder, not only do they say that this
Speaker 4: thing is requested, but there are clear status updates from
Speaker 4: KPMG that explain that the work has been discussed with
Speaker 4: the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research, Professor Katherine McGrath, and
Speaker 4: that the analysis will be prepared.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 4: In the contract signed by Parthad it says activity one
Speaker 4: point one validate diagnostic analysis was shown as completed before
Speaker 4: Christmas twenty twenty four, So what's going on here? And
Speaker 4: so people kept submitting more keeper requests. There was an
Speaker 4: internal review of the one that was put in by
Speaker 4: the Tertiary union and the barrister hired by a UTS
Speaker 4: to conduct that internal review was himself misled about the
Speaker 4: existence of this spreadsheet.
Speaker 1: Right, tell me more about that. So the university hired
Speaker 1: this someone to look into their own response to these
Speaker 1: essentially freedom of information requests and tell me about what
Speaker 1: they told the barrister.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So the barrister can only report and they're from
Speaker 4: Wentworth Chambers, so they're an independent legal expert. They can
Speaker 4: only report and find what they're told by the university
Speaker 4: and the university. This barrister sets out a bunch of questions,
Speaker 4: essentially saying this is what has been asked for. These
Speaker 4: are the contentions an issue for this internal review? Can
Speaker 4: you give me the detail of them? And one of
Speaker 4: those questions is was there a spreadsheet? And they say no,
Speaker 4: there was no spreadsheet. And the barrister in the internal
Speaker 4: review found that there was no excess spreadsheet, and again
Speaker 4: people came back and said, we don't believe this, and
Speaker 4: it's only because of this kind of you know, months
Speaker 4: of pushing that suddenly low and behold the university finds.
Speaker 3: The spreadsheet.
Speaker 2: Coming up.
Speaker 1: What this saga says about the state of Australia's universities. Okay,
Speaker 1: so they did not reveal the existence of the spreadsheet
Speaker 1: to Freedom of Information requests. They didn't tell the barrister
Speaker 1: they hired about the spreadsheet. So the university, I mean,
Speaker 1: for starters, are they breaking the law here by not
Speaker 1: revealing information they potentially should to an FOI request?
Speaker 4: By their own admission, they told the barrister conducting the
Speaker 4: internal review that if this document existed then absolutely it
Speaker 4: should have been handed over under the Geeper law, the
Speaker 4: access to information public access law in New South Wales.
Speaker 4: And also accidentally not supplying it is not an excuse.
Speaker 4: You have to do a proper thorough search for these
Speaker 4: docums and it's when they're requested. Now, how hard could
Speaker 4: it have been to find this spreadsheet? Well, as it
Speaker 4: turns out, not very hard at all, because there is
Speaker 4: an email with it to the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research
Speaker 4: Professor Catherine McGrath at her request discussing the breakdown or
Speaker 4: the research output by staff name, staff id, staff, position,
Speaker 4: category of research, category of employment. It's all there and
Speaker 4: we know that the DVCR, the Deputy Vice Chancellor of Research,
Speaker 4: was the senior person responsible for the Research Priority and
Speaker 4: Investment section of the KPMG restructure, So that would have
Speaker 4: been the first person you go to and go, hey,
Speaker 4: you know that whole section of work that we paid for,
Speaker 4: that was listed in the work order, that was listed
Speaker 4: in the status updates that said there was an ex salesprea.
Speaker 3: Sheeet did you get it? And we now know that
Speaker 3: she did because she asked for it.
Speaker 2: How do we know that?
Speaker 4: So in October last year there was an all day
Speaker 4: leadership retreat, but it was held at uts On campus,
Speaker 4: so I don't know how much of a retreat it was,
Speaker 4: but all the senior leaders were there, the vice Chancellor,
Speaker 4: the Deeputy Vice Chancellor Research, the vice Chancellor's chief of staff.
Speaker 4: They were all doing a hands on. There was a
Speaker 4: huge presentation from KPMG. Part of that presentation was about
Speaker 4: the Research Priority and Investment part of their work, which
Speaker 4: is Katherine McGrath's business and during that day she emails
Speaker 4: a KPMG partner.
Speaker 3: We don't know the name because all the KPMG names are.
Speaker 4: Redacted and says hi, I assume you have a list
Speaker 4: of all the individuals from level A through level E
Speaker 4: that are in the bottom twenty five percent or have
Speaker 4: no research er. It's kind of like research income or
Speaker 4: research outputs McGrath wrote, And that was on seventeenth of October.
Speaker 4: Would you be able to send that to me so
Speaker 4: I can get a sense of this now. The KPMG
Speaker 4: people were doing the retreat that day, but they respond
Speaker 4: the following week on the Monday. We hope that you
Speaker 4: were well and that you had a lovely weekend.
Speaker 3: How nice. Twenty first of October.
Speaker 4: For the initial diagnostic analysis work, we focused on identifying
Speaker 4: level D and E reason searches only who are in
Speaker 4: the bottom twenty fifth quartol for research income and publications,
Speaker 4: and the list of level DN E researches with zero
Speaker 4: income and or zero publication across the same three year period.
Speaker 4: Just for explanation, DNA are kind of like the most
Speaker 4: highly paid people at a university. So we're talking I
Speaker 4: think assistant or associate professors and professors DN and so
Speaker 4: if you're going to cut these people in a redundancy program,
Speaker 4: you would save the most amount of money. So it's
Speaker 4: quite significant in that sense. And so that's how they
Speaker 4: set it out in the email. And then they attached
Speaker 4: to that email the spreadsheet which was password protected and
Speaker 4: it contained I counted them myself, eighteen pages of individual
Speaker 4: staff names for the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research.
Speaker 1: Okay, so now that we know that it does exist
Speaker 1: and that's what's in it, what has the university said
Speaker 1: about why they have it and why they didn't reveal
Speaker 1: it for so long.
Speaker 3: It's a question we still don't have a proper answer to.
Speaker 4: But suddenly, when they are forced to hand it over,
Speaker 4: after you know, multiple requests from people, they insert a
Speaker 4: little context paragraph that says, oh, okay, yeah, look here
Speaker 4: is the spreadsheet. What happened was that it was part
Speaker 4: of a portion of work that was discontinued. It was
Speaker 4: discontinued in May this year and it was never finalized,
Speaker 4: but there was this spreadsheet that went to early on
Speaker 4: the Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and she decided to intervene.
Speaker 4: Now I asked them what intervene means? In this context.
Speaker 3: It's weird. It's weird.
Speaker 4: They kind of give you three options and say pick one.
Speaker 4: So they said, UTS has previously responded tokeeeper and information
Speaker 4: requests relating to KPMG documents.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we know.
Speaker 4: However, those responses did not include the list that has
Speaker 4: now been provided via this more recent keeper request. Yep,
Speaker 4: this may have been this is fun this part. This
Speaker 4: may have been due to search parameters being too broad,
Speaker 4: inaccurate assessment of the documents, or genuine human error. Do
Speaker 4: they tell us which one they think it is? No,
Speaker 4: so take your pick. They say, UTS takes its keep
Speaker 4: oblications very seriously. We can absolutely rule out any perceived
Speaker 4: or actual conflicts of interest.
Speaker 3: Well, what happened?
Speaker 4: Was it in an accurate assessment of documents? And if so,
Speaker 4: who did the inaccurate assessment? Because we all know what
Speaker 4: a spreadsheet looks like, we all know what was being
Speaker 4: asked for.
Speaker 3: Was a genuine human error? Who made the error?
Speaker 4: I asked them if they're going to retract the internal
Speaker 4: review the findings of the internal review, and they did
Speaker 4: not answer that question. So, you know, I don't know
Speaker 4: what happened. We're not any closer to the truth. On
Speaker 4: this front, but I think it does. It's a problem,
Speaker 4: right because it then speaks to this border issue of well,
Speaker 4: how transparent are the decisions being made? Not just in
Speaker 4: this restructure, but as we know from the governance inquiries
Speaker 4: in the universities across the country, there is a transparency
Speaker 4: problem across the entire sector. And this is a great
Speaker 4: case study in how easily those two insparency issues can arise.
Speaker 1: So the university has now admitted that the spreadsheet exists,
Speaker 1: but they have said they didn't rely on it in
Speaker 1: making decisions. And this is one story. This is one university,
Speaker 1: it's one spreadsheet, but it does speak to these broader issues,
Speaker 1: as you say, of governance in the sector. So what
Speaker 1: does it tell you about how universities are grappling with
Speaker 1: the pressure to be profitable versus their role, their public
Speaker 1: role as you say, as places of research and learning.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's not good.
Speaker 4: I mean the parliamentary the Senate inquiry into governance Quality
Speaker 4: of governance at Australian Higher Education Institutions was the interim
Speaker 4: report was released just you know, a week and a
Speaker 4: half two weeks ago now, and in that there are
Speaker 4: so many examples, you know, there's an example from I
Speaker 4: think the NTEU branch at Monash University, where apparently the
Speaker 4: university commissioned this entire governance review of the council never
Speaker 4: told staff or students that it was happening. The governance
Speaker 4: review was apparently finished handed to the council, has never
Speaker 4: been made public.
Speaker 3: What did it find? What say do people have in
Speaker 3: how these institutions are run.
Speaker 4: We know more than we should now about what happened
Speaker 4: at Australian National University. The vice Chancellor's resigned, the chancellor's
Speaker 4: really bishop is still there. But there is a story
Speaker 4: at every university for this issue. And partly that is
Speaker 4: the fault of government regulation but also government funding.
Speaker 3: And so universities have been brought to this.
Speaker 4: Position of weakness by our own oversight and then they've
Speaker 4: panicked in the face of these terrible policies. Rightly so, well,
Speaker 4: the policy is bad, but they shouldn't panic. And the
Speaker 4: panic is now going to harm these institutions by gutting them.
Speaker 3: Some would say you're reparably for years to come.
Speaker 2: Well, Rick, thank you for your time.
Speaker 3: I'm always happy to help Ruby, thank you.
Speaker 1: And Rick Morton's recent book Meanstreak about the Coalition's deadly
Speaker 1: Robodette scheme was one of six winners of this year's
Speaker 1: Prime Minister's Literary Award, taking the award for nonfiction. So
Speaker 1: we just wanted to say congratulations from all of us
Speaker 1: at seven am. Also in the news today, a former
Speaker 1: Human Rights commissioner and one of Australia's most experienced international
Speaker 1: legal experts is urging Australia to cut military ties with Israel,
Speaker 1: warning the government risks being complicit in genocide if it
Speaker 1: fails to act. Chris Sadoti, one of three commissioners selected
Speaker 1: by the Human Rights Council which found that Israel's war
Speaker 1: crimes in Gaza constituted genocide, has addressed the National Press Club.
Speaker 1: He says Camber needs to apply more comprehensive sanctions on
Speaker 1: Israel and ensure no Australian made parts were going into
Speaker 1: Israeli warplanes. And Prime Minister Anthony Abernezi has welcomed the
Speaker 1: Trump Administration's proposed.
Speaker 2: Peace plan for Gaza.
Speaker 1: The US President announced the plan alongside the Israeli Prime
Speaker 1: Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday, which involves Gaza being governed
Speaker 1: by a transitional committee headed by Donald Trump and includes
Speaker 1: a former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The plan has
Speaker 1: received criticism, including from the Australian Greens, who say it
Speaker 1: removes the right of Palestinians to determine their own future.
Speaker 2: I'm Ruby Jones. This is seven am. Thanks for listening.