Video interview available later today at woroni.com.au/tv
This interview was conducted on Monday 24 August 2026. References to any dates should be judged accordingly.
KM: Perhaps for those of our readers who aren't very familiar with you, could you just introduce yourself briefly?
JH: Hi, my name's Julie Hare, I'm a journalist of many years. I have specialised in education for the last 25 years or more, and I guess in this context, I broke and continue to break a whole lot of stories about ANU over the last couple of years and I can say I'm continuing to break stories.
KM: How did you start being a reporter and building contacts in the tertiary sector?
JH: A complete accident really. I'm old enough to come from a generation where a lot of careers are accidental careers. I studied English literature and drama at university because I liked reading books. I had an arts degree just as we went into the Great Recession, the Paul Keating recession “we had to have”. There were no jobs, there was nothing. I got a job, this is very old school, for Auto Supermarket, which was basically classified ads with pictures. It was a Kerry Packer publication, and that was my very inglorious entry into the world of journalism. Just one job led to another, and eventually I discovered I was a specialist education writer.
It wasn't meant to be, I tell you.
KM: The Education Minister, Jason Clare, last week announced that the Government was going to amend the ANU Act. Do you think the problem was the legislation or the culture that led to Renew ANU?
JH: If the Act had been rewritten, it wouldn't have prevented anything. Like I'm pretty sure that you can have policies and you can have legislation, you can have all these frameworks of behavior and culpability, but nothing was going to stop what happened during [20]24, 25, and into 26. It was deeply cultural and deeply top down. It was a very very strange confluence of very big personalities and power and ambition that just kind of got completely derailed. It just lost its sense of reality, and quite early in the piece I think.
KM: We've had quite a few questions from staff and community members about the Nixon review, and one of them described it as a “publicity stunt”, and says that the way ANU handles bullying and harassment is still appalling. Do you think that review brought about real change?
JH: No, I don't. I don't think the review itself was a publicity stunt. Weirdly, I came across this quote that I wrote at the time, where Genevieve Bell came out and said that she commissioned the review in January 2024 when she started, and she was obviously trying to flag to the community that bad behavior and bullying and cultural issues weren't acceptable, which is kind of ironic given that everything that went on subsequently in the Chancellery and in the in the Council meeting room. Christine Nixon’s report was very thorough and it was very down to earth. I've read every single word of it. It's kind of horrifying that workplaces can become that toxic, not just [in] that faculty, but it had happened over time and stayed like that over time because there weren't the mechanisms or the people in place to change things. But one thing that Nixon was very clear to do was to say it wasn't just isolated in that faculty; it was across the institution, and she was clear about that on many occasions. So, how much change did it affect? Probably very little, but now we've got the change in leadership that maybe it can be a reference point for the new Chancellor and the new Vice-Chancellor, whoever that might be, and the new leadership team.
KM: Do you think freedom of information (FOI) requests are actually helpful for the community to learn what's going on?
JH: From a journalism point of view, they're absolutely essential. If you know what you're looking for, or sometimes you don't need to know what you're looking for, they're absolutely critical to how journalists do their job. That said, I think FOI processes get abused and there's a lot of very toxic and malignant FOIs going on at the moment, including about me, which I find interesting. But it's not the me thing that matters. It's just there's a string of FOIs that seem to be malicious and are being driven by a separate agenda.
I think FOI is an important part of freedom of speech. Well, freedom of speech, not exactly that, but of getting information that that can be really important to actually shedding light on the truth. That said, I had an FOI with the University of Canberra from the beginning of January 2024. But two years later, it had been to the Ombudsman, and they finally released what they said were acceptable documents. It was just a series of emails between the media team and the interim Vice-Chancellor discussing the media plan for why the Vice-Chancellor, who I was asking questions about, had disappeared so suddenly.
I think before all of this [governance issues, Renew ANU] started, they were pretty lax in terms of meeting their obligations under FOI, and then I think they realised that they needed to respond, and I certainly got timely responses from ANU most of the time, pretty well all the time. But I think then they were just getting slammed. I know a lot of people had FOIs and still do, they wonder whether they're ever going to get answered. I mean everyone was getting sacked at the time, so there was no one to answer the FOIs.
KM: On the note of malicious FOIs, the new Chancellor supported legislation that would have tried to filter those out, how do you think that will affect his leadership?
JH: I saw your stuff on that, and I had an interview with him [new ANU Chancellor Gordon de Brouwer] last week, and I spoke, I raised it with him, and he said that his support of FOI and limiting it was only very specific to that specific circumstance, and that he is a full supporter of FOI and the use of FOI more broadly. So, I have no reason to disbelieve him. Someone described him to me as a man that wears integrity as a badge of honor, and I think he is, and I think that's why he's been chosen because he's got to be different, and he knows that, and he is different. So I agree with you, I was really worried when I read that, but he explained it [his position on FOIs] to me in quite convoluted terms, but I have no reason to disbelieve him.
KM: You mentioned these FOIs directed at you and we have received one or two responses in the form which were a bit critical. Why do you think these people are trying to attack your integrity?
JH: There's a group of people who actually think that I've been at least partially responsible for the destruction of ANU's reputation. They see my journalism as basically contributing to the downfall of that leadership team and they hate me for it. Another point of view is that what I did was throw light on a very, very bad set of circumstances. So, they don't like me and that's fine, I don't need to be liked by everyone. I'm quite comfortable with it.
KM: When you started reporting on ANU, did you find that once you poked the hole, a cascade started flowing?
JH: Yeah, it was. I've just never worked on a story like this in my entire life. So, it started with a senior professor here and a certain faculty contacting a colleague of mine at the Australian Financial Review (AFR/the Fin) and wanted to have coffee with him, and my colleague said “I don't understand, you go and have coffee with him”. So I went and had coffee with him, and that's what unleashed it. At the time it was more about Genevieve, ANU, Renew ANU and just how bizarre it was. It was about Genevieve's rather eccentric leadership characteristics, her behavior at meetings, her behavior towards individuals, the fact that she shut people out if they even slightly disagreed with her, the fact that entire hour-long meetings would be like a TED Talk monologue, that people didn't have access to her. She did no media. I mean, from coming in as the new Vice-Chancellor, she didn't do an interview with Canberra Times I think throughout the entire 2024, even until maybe halfway through 2025.
So that's kind of how it started, and I published the first story I think it was in early December 2024, and then it just started. It just was a tsunami, really, because I found out within the next 10 days that Genevieve Bell had continued to be paid by Intel. Which interestingly, I didn't FOI. I just asked the media. Someone had contacted me, a former senior academic here, and he said, "Have you noticed that Genevieve Bell has always got Senior Fellow and Vice President of Intel? And he said, "What does that mean? It's everywhere. And he goes, "Is she being paid? And I went, "I don't know, so I'll ask. So I did, and they said, yes, that she had been paid until November that year, when Intel had sacked like 10,000 people across the world and she was off the payroll.
Then that triggered denials, Bishop and all these senior executive came out and condemned media reports, i.e. me, and then they like they said that the Council had been fully abreast of it, and then media people who kept multiple people on Council then contacted me and said it never was raised, and then so then we have this position of me versus them, and then Bishop repeating these claims in Senate estimates and various other places, like the kind of the small lies and the semi-truths just kept kind of rolling into bigger pieces of misinformation, all the while accusing me of misinformation and fake news.
KM: Have you found that being now a freelance journalist has given you more agency about what you're reporting?
JH: So when I started writing about ANU, I thought Genevieve Bell was the problem, and then three or four months in, I realised the bigger problem was Julie Bishop and the governance, and how the Council was being run. And every time I thought that the story had come to a natural conclusion, something else would then blow up. Like someone sent me Julie Bishop's expenses from the Perth office, which revealed the $150,000, and then I tracked that with her Instagram, and I could place her on using ANU flights and accommodation in London and New York and Japan doing things that were not ANU work. So anyway, so ANU just kept rolling along.
I signed a non-disparagement clause with the Fin, but it eventually got to the point where I just had to leave, and so freelancing has been great because I've had a lot of support and and I've been validated. It sounds so pathetic, but I was working on the Four Corners program earlier this year on universities and the producer and the presenter just kept going “Oh Julie, you're really great” a lot, and I'm like, Oh, really? Thank you. So yeah, I've enjoyed freelancing and the outlets. The outlets that I'm working for have been absolutely fantastic, and because I'm not just working for one publication behind a very high paywall, a lot more people are seeing my work. I'm really surprised. At least once a week, someone comes up and goes, "Oh my God, you're everywhere! And I'm going, "Well, I'm writing a lot less, but a lot more people are seeing it.
KM: What do you think about the IVC should she stay, or do you have any strong opinions? Would it be a good signal, kind of, just to say, "Oh, we're leaving this all behind"?
JH: I don't have any real thoughts on this. I think Rebecca was an important replacement when Genevieve left and I think that she said all the right things. The first thing she said at the first town hall was that it is my job to regain your trust and that is what the ANU community needed and I think she certainly got a lot of support. I think while Bishop was still here there was a meeting of students and unions and academics all in support of her while there was a whole lot of very malicious leaks going on about her, but I don't know what happens next. I don't know if she wants the job. I've got no idea, but I think she was a really important stepping stone in that transition, which has gone on a lot longer than anyone really expected. But she was a really important stepping stone, and I think she flagged the right things and separated herself from the previous leadership and from the council and its decision-making processes, which needed to be done.
KM: Talking more broadly about tertiary education, as you mentioned, you've been a reporter for the past 25 years. Has there been a decline in the standards of universities over that time? Has it fluctuated? Do you think there was a particular starting point? Was it the Dawkins reforms, voluntary student unionism, or was it COVID that finally broke the sector?
JH: I've been thinking about this a lot because if you say that there is a crisis in universities in terms of trust and in terms of governance, and I say there is actually a crisis, the question you've got to ask is how did we get here, and I've been doing a lot of thinking. I think you've got to go back to the Dawkins reforms where we get massification, and then I think you've got Julie Bishop's reforms when she was Education Minister, which changed the structure of councils to make them more corporate-like, and then you've got the Global Financial Crisis, and then you've got the demand-driven system, and I think that fundamentally changed universities in terms of they became so much bigger. There was so much money flowing into them through increased domestic student demand, and the international student sector was really taking off. In the meantime, universities kept complaining about lack of funding, but there was probably never as much money in the system as there was then.
I used to think the whole corporatisation and managerialism line was a bit meh and a bit union, but I actually subscribe to it now. I think that is what has happened, and I think the separation between the Executive and the rest of the University, this kind of, the executive is all about money and it's not about academic integrity. I think some Vice-Chancellors don't even know there are students out there, like they view students just as an annoyance who stop them doing their big real estate deals. So I think COVID also really kind of pushed something, but they didn't have the financial annihilation that they said they had, and they all overdid their sacking of staff, and then they had to get staff back in. I think unis are really bad at forecasting, or a lot of unis are really bad at forecasting, and it's really strange, but ANU’s had its own particular issues. While the financial crisis that was sold by Bell and Bishop was not true, that was said to me in that very first meeting in that coffee shop in Manuka, that sure it could be better but it's nowhere near a crisis it's not on the precipice and I think ANU has been probably badly financially managed for some years and but it was never what they said it was.
KM: The TEQSA report is long awaited, I believe completed but not released. What can we expect?
JH: I understand it's completed and that people have seen it. I email or ring TEQSA every couple of weeks and go, hey, what's happening? I think this is actually going to be the nail in the coffin for the previous leadership. I know TEQSA started looking at ANU from basically the beginning of my reporting and they were watching it and other universities with a fine tooth comb. While there's this narrative that they overstepped their mark in terms of the voluntary undertaking, I think, given their lack of powers, I think TEQSA has been actually quite magnificent in the way they've dealt with it because it was a crisis. It was an absolute crisis in which they didn't have the legislative powers to intervene, but they knew they needed to do something because they couldn't let it keep going like it was. So there were some pretty terse letters between Mary Russell, the [TEQSA] CEO, and Genevieve and Julie last year, and TEQSA weren't holding back. TEQSA is an organisation that tends to couch things in very bureaucratic language, and I can tell you as a journalist, I understood exactly what they were saying.
KM: On the note of regulators, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission (ATEC) now exists and the government in next sitting fortnight presumably is going to try and get their Opening the Doors Opportunity Bill through, which notably does not reform the Job Ready Graduates (JRG) package. What do you think that the Opening the Doors of Opportunity Bill is actually going to do, and why the inaction on the JRG?
JH: I've got theories about both of these things, so from the minute that the Universities Accord review was landed with those targets of doubling the number of students to 2050, I just call bullshit on it. There's just no way the universities can increase by that amount, knowing that those numbers have got to be picked up within low SES and disadvantaged students. We saw what happened to a lot of those students during the demand-driven system, they got taken in as cash cows and then a lot of them dropped out without completing, which means they had debt or got degrees that were close to useless. They would have been better off with a VET qualification. I just don't get it. There's a real tension too between vocational education and universities. I wrote a story last year that looked at the schools list for New South Wales. There were 420 jobs on the critical schools list, of which more than 90% required a VET qualification, not a higher education qualification. So I think there's a real tension in this massification thing. I think it's Labor going, oh, we're a good Labor government and we do education and health, this is our education thing. They're never going to get to those numbers and they're farcical, and there's no way in the world they're ever going to have the money to finance them, and I just think this idea that students will just keep going down their preference list until they get to, you know, Charles Sturt or Charles Darwin or whatever is kind of farcical.
Now the second part of this question was about Job Ready Graduates. I did a Substack on this, and something like, if my memory is correct, all but three of the Albanese cabinet senior cabinet members have Arts and Law degrees and would be in that sort of $70-80,000 mark, and I find that hypocrisy. I asked Barney Glover this last week, and he didn't answer it properly, I do think Barney's great by the way, but I asked him how you can change, do this opening doors of opportunity without addressing job-ready graduates, because funding and where the funding comes from is absolutely fundamental to everything, and everything flows from the funding. I mean, ATEC isn't even taking its report on the pricing of degrees and cost of teaching and all that sort of stuff until the second half of 2027. Now they've been working on it already for 18 months. Does it really take that long? No, it really does not take that long. So my theory is that they're holding it [JRG reform] for the next election, and they can stand up and just go “Well, aren't we a great government who looks after young people, and we're doing something about student debt and intergenerational wealth gap, and we're going to change job ready graduates” when they could have done it probably cost neutrally five years ago. It'll be 10 years of students who've copped that by the time any changes get through, and I think that is unacceptable and diabolical.
KM: I find it very interesting that they chose to wipe 20% off student debt instead of doing JRG.
Look, it played really well electorally with young people but it was kind of insincere. If you really want to do something about student debt, the thing that you do is sort out job-ready graduates because it is so unfair. It is so unfair, and it's 42% of students, I think, are enrolled in those cluster one [higher fee] degrees, and the vast majority of low SES [socio economic status] students are in those cluster one degrees, and the number of low SES students is in decline. Where Jason Clare says this [increasing low SES] is his highest priority. Like there are real tensions in this and they're not reconcilable at the moment.
KM: The new ANU 2030 strategy, is that just more managerialism?
JH: I don't know what the point of it is. I guess it flags that we're moving forward, but it doesn't have anything specific. I think they were asked for specifics, and the ANU governance project has been very specific about what it wants, and it's been superb. I think it's maybe just a holding document until you actually get a new leadership team. You can then actually do a real strategy, because it's not real.
KM: And then we had a community question saying, "Are you writing a book about Renew ANU?”
I'm supposed to be, and in fact, I've started my first chapter and I have a publisher, but I keep getting distracted by my Substack and by work that pays. I've never written anything as long in my life. I've got all the work and it's all done, I've just got to dump it into chapters and then put in a lot of segues and add a bit here and there in a few interviews, but then I just keep staring at the first sentence again going like, what am I doing? I know what I'm supposed to be doing, so I am going to try a lot harder to get it done because even when I started thinking about the book, which was while I was still working at the Fin [Australian Financial Review], there was a genuine story. But it just keeps getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and there's another big breaking story tomorrow [25 August, Liz Allen apology], which I can't tell you about. But it just keeps exploding and hopefully now, for ANU's sake, this is the turning point. I hope Gordon de Brower is the turning point.