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The head of South Australia's Independent Commissioner against Corruption launched an investigation into allegations of misconduct and malpractice on the part of the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Adelaide after he resigned for health reasons. The university had previously projected revenues of more than A$1 billion (US$705 million) for this year, but these have been replaced by projected losses of A$100 million.

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”.