00:01Victorian universities have been accused of abusing freedom of information laws.
00:06One of the people involved in this called them freedom from information laws.
00:10All eight universities there were hit with coordinated requests on executive salaries
00:15and external partnerships.
00:17It took on average about seven months for them to respond,
00:21despite a requirement under law to release material within 30 days.
00:25A number of these cases were actually overturned on appeal.
00:30I've seen some of the documents that the universities did release.
00:33We're talking about pages where there's just blacked out information
00:36after blacked out sheet of information.
00:38One university did decide of their own accord to release the information
00:42without a finding from the watchdog,
00:44but another, Deakin University, is digging in
00:46and hiring a legal consultancy firm called FOI Solutions to fight this.
00:51They said they're going to appeal that decision
00:53and critics say that starts to look like public institutions
00:56spending public money to avoid public scrutiny.
01:00Of course the universities though, they say that they're following FOI laws,
01:04that they're committed to transparency
01:05and that they have an obligation in some cases to protect sensitive information.
01:10It really matters because universities receive significant public funding
01:13from everyone, from Australian taxpayers to function
01:16and they're places that we invest in in the expectation that decisions
01:20that are taken about what courses are offered to students,
01:23how they conducted themselves, all those kind of things,
01:26will be subject to scrutiny.
01:28And this latest news comes after Four Corners revealed this week
01:31that universities had spent $1.8 billion on external contractors
01:36and consultants without really giving proper detailed explanations
01:40of exactly where the money's going on.
01:42It comes after wage theft scandals at universities
01:45and a number of other major issues.
01:48So we're seeing scrutiny on universities really increase.
01:51There was a damning Federal Senate inquiry
01:53that handed down its recommendations last year.
01:56There's two more state inquiries underway
01:58and I think there's a sense that universities need to do much more
02:02to explain what's going on in order to maintain their social licence.
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