The sector is plagued with scandals, from wage theft and conflicts of interest to excessive spending on marketing, travel, and consultants.

Alongside these scandals, Australia’s Vice-Chancellors are some of the highest paid in the world.

A recent Australia Institute submission provides an extensive list of recommendations that would improve university governance.

However, the Australian National University (ANU) has unwittingly shown that a good place to start would be greater use of a powerful existing tool: Senate Estimates.

Last month ANU’s Chancellor Julie Bishop was the subject of questions at Senate Estimates about external consultants and conflict-of-interest processes.

This questioning led the university to later acknowledge that the cost of external consultants for the Chancellor’s speechwriting services ran to $35,000 over four years, while a related leak alleged that the Chancellor’s travel costs for 2024 alone were in the order of $150,000.

Senate Estimates is a remarkable forum. It allows the Senate to summon senior public officials and question them about budgetary and other decisions.

This mechanism directly and indirectly bolsters the transparency and accountability of Australia’s public institutions.

Directly, Senators can legally require officials to attend, answer questions, and produce documents. The hearings are publicly livestreamed and major findings are reported by journalists and other public commentators.

Indirectly, Senate Estimates means that public officials are (or at least should be) mindful that they may later have to publicly justify their decisions.

In the memorable words of former Senator Rex Patrick “[f]or me, the value for Estimates was not the one week of questioning, it was all the other weeks when every public servant was saying, ‘Geez, if I make this decision, could I justify this at Estimates?’

As public institutions, public universities can be brought before Senate Estimates (in the case of the ANU) or state parliament equivalents (in the case of other universities).

Unfortunately, these powerful tools for transparency have rarely been used to hold universities to account. In the 55 years since Senate Estimates was formally established in 1970, the ANU has only ever appeared four times for a total of 4 hours and 45 minutes of questioning.

Despite its infrequency, Estimates questioning has proven effective at uncovering the dark corners of university finances. Notably, supplementary questions arising from the University of Sydney’s recent appearance at NSW budget estimates revealed that it “spent millions of dollars more on external contractors and consultants – including PwC – for calculating and administering liability for wage underpayments and a review of its systems than it has paid out to staff”.

That kind of information would be almost impossible to come by without parliamentary scrutiny. Parliaments should summon the leaders of our public universities to estimates at least once each year.

While greater use of these tools is the starting point, it is not the sole destination for better university governance.

The Senate is currently holding an inquiry into the quality of governance at Australian higher education providers, and the Australia Institute has recommended a range of reforms that would bring good governance to the sector.

University students and staff should be better represented on governing councils, and the meetings of those councils should be made public, allowing for limited exceptions.

More detailed reporting and disclosure requirements, which already exist in some states, should be implemented nationally to reveal how much university leaders spend on consultants and overseas travel each year.

All these measures would be even more effective if accompanied by an expectation that decisions and expenses will be scrutinised at estimates.

The ANU’s attendance at estimates shows that parliamentary scrutiny can make an immediate and material difference to transparency and accountability in the university sector.

Australia’s Vice-Chancellors enjoy some of the highest pay in the public sector, and they oversee millions (in the ANU’s case, more than $1 billion) of expenditure each year. Why should they be subject to anything less than the rigour of Senate Estimates? University managers should be asking themselves, “Geez, if I make this decision, could I justify this at Estimates?”