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Perth’s Murdoch University and other universities have become heavily reliant on foreign student fees to bolster their incomes. 50 professors from the Australian Research Council’s Laureate Fellowship condemned the decision to take legal action against an associate professor from the university. Deeply concerned about the integrity of academic teaching, the professor complained on television that the university was not only enrolling international students whose English was inadequate but also allow them to graduate.

Many institutions in Australia provide training programmes for their Ph.D. students but these programmes vary in quality, content and reach. The temptation to judge a researcher’s performance for grant funding by the number of published research papers and the focus on the quantity over quality is very strong. They are not just driving bad behaviour for researchers but are also creating a market for criminals to enter scholarly publishing.

A major police investigation has been underway since August 2018 after serious concerns about the school’s finances and allegations of nepotism were referred by the Department of Education. According to the Financial and Cyber Crime Group, they misused $4.6 million from a private school south of Brisbane to buy expensive art and finance luxury trips to Europe and Asia.

116 cases of fraud and theft were revealed in the Department of Education staff in Queensland in 2018, including inappropriate use of public resources and misuse of corporate cards. The Crime and Corruption Commission charged a 46-year-old Education Department staff member with two counts of fraud totaling $110,000.

A secret report by Ernst & Young into credit card use at Murdoch University has revealed its four most senior academics racked up almost AU$1 million (US$753,000) in expenses in two years. Murdoch refused to release the document until The Australian won an appeal to the West Australian Information Commissioner, arguing that the report was in the public interest as it involved the use of taxpayers’ funds. The revelations come after Western Australia’s Corruption and Crime Commission last year described Murdoch’s financial controls over corporate credit cards as “lax” and found that the parameters of card usage were “extremely broad”.

The Chinese government is buying influence over Australian universities by donating libraries and funds for institutes as part of a broader push to strengthen its soft power in the country, two Australian journalists have argued. The debate in Australia echoes concerns in the US, where the Chinese government has been accused of seeking to exert control over the academy by funding Confucius Institutes on university campuses.

The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission is investigating past and present senior education department bureaucrats involved with the Ultranet computer project that was scrapped in 2013.Public hearings as part of IBAC's investigation began on Monday hearing allegations that senior department officials bought shares in the company awarded the project tender. The hearings were also told a senior official diverted funds from other projects to cover up a $60 million Ultranet cost blowout.