Australia’s university sector is in tatters. Why?

But I think probably the best way in is for us to start by talking about the investigation into the University of Wollongong that is currently being conducted by the New South Wales anti-corruption body, ICAC.

So earlier this month, we had the conclusion to the public hearings.

But Julie, maybe for those who are not totally across the details of this particular saga, can you give us a bit of a snapshot of the story and what's going on here?

Okay, so I think this is where local media are really important and the demise of local media outlets in a lot of country and regional areas in Australia is, you know, really diabolical for getting to know what's going on in towns because it was the work of the Illawarra Mercury, a guy called Ben Langford, who has just been on top of this.

So a new chancellor arrived in...

In December 2013, and his name was Michael Steele, he had no real experience of universities and he just seemed like an odd pick, like no one really knew why he was there.

Within four months, the vice-chancellor had been sacked and within the next 12 months, every senior member of the executive had gone.

So there were three key areas to the ICAC inquiry.

One is that there is... a chief governance officer at the University of Wollongong who forged a very close relationship with Steele.

She'd been hired from the University of Sydney and was seen like a very good appointment.

But over the course of the next year, year and a half or two years, she ended up using her position to employ 11 of her friends and former associates.

That was a bit of a shock when I cut Cam out.

It was something that really hadn't been covered in the media or any... reporting beforehand.

So that was the surprise.

She worked with Steele.

He sat on, it's very unusual for a Chancellor to sit on recruitment panels, but he actually chaired recruitment panels for the recruitment of some of her friends, and together they cooked up a $400,000 new job for her in the Vice-Chancellor's office while the university was going through massive cuts and redundancies.

The second part of it was that Steele Mr Still had created a $2 million fund, essentially, for the Chancellor to use for wherever he wanted to.

That was unheard of at the university.

And he used that to pay for some of the positions that he and Alyssa White had created and also to... employee as a contractor, an old friend of his who he'd met when working back for a property firm back in 2011 or something like that.

So that was odd.

And then I think the third thing that is the one I'm most interested in is that after he sacked Patricia Davidson, they obviously didn't have a vice-chancellor.

So He started talking to people and the name of John Dewar came up.

Now, John Dewar had been a vice-chancellor at La Trobe University for 10 years.

He'd been a deputy vice-chancellor at Melbourne.

He's a really nice guy.