There are two ways to fix a broken budget: cut costs or earn more money.

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The ANU is focusing on the former, but it's not clear it's doing much on the latter.

This isn't about getting more students or increasing student fees.

Both would help, but both are largely at the mercy of the federal government.

Rather, this is about the ANU tapping into Australia's $45.5 billion market for consulting services, of which the federal government (conveniently located on the other side of Lake Burley Griffin) is a big part of.

The ANU is full of extremely capable people, many of whom already do some consulting work which brings money into the university.

The problem is simple: they could be doing much more, and they're not.

What's stopping them? The short answer is that they have barely any incentive to bring in consultancy money.

As someone who left academia to start a consulting firm with friends (rather than do consulting work within the university), there are clear reasons why this is the case.

It goes like this. Any money that an academic brings into the university gets taxed by the university.

There are various complicated formulas, but the current tax rate is about 36 per cent, with the remaining going into what's called a "research account".

This means that the academic, in terms of their own personal bank account, gets none of this money. Consider this: if an academic brought in enough money to single-handedly close the ANU's budget deficit, they would personally get exactly nothing in return for doing so.

Immediately, you can see........

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