Ant Bagshaw and Julie Hare take on Job-Ready Graduates, the policy no one defends. Julie blames the sector for letting it pass in 2020 without a fight. Ant defends one part of it: shifting more of the cost onto students to expand the system. They agree the price signals don't change what students choose to study.

Julie thinks Labor is holding back the fix as a sweetener for the next election. If so, students will have been on JRG fees for a decade. Ant points out that any fix risks bad headlines unless an offer can be found for nurses and teachers.

The real argument comes later: the sector worries too much about student debt and too little about students' living costs. Youth Allowance numbers have fallen as enrolments have grown. Ant calls paid prac the government's most significant move in this space; he thinks universities should stop lobbying on JRG and push for better student financial support, which also helps them keep students.

Ed Nauseam is recorded in the Innovation Aus studio in Australian Parliament House.

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Consulting firms are on the nose. Four inquiries into university governance have landed on them, the sector spends an estimated $1.8 billion a year, and a former consultant taking a senior university job is now enough to provoke an FoI request or a media inquiry.

In the first episode of Ed Nauseam, recorded at Parliament House in the Innovation Aus studio, Julie Hare and Ant Bagshaw disagree productively about why. Julie's case is about work that doesn't understand universities, consultation decided in advance, and governing bodies that won't open the books. Ant's is that blame has been over-allocated to the firms and under-allocated to the institutions which hire them, and that a system where only metro universities with high international enrolments can comfortably balance a budget was always going to produce this. But does all that mean consultants should be considered evil?

Read more in The Hare Report:

• A brief history of dirty deeds and university bosses
• John Dewar's very public humiliation
• What's cooking in the Kitchen?

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