Page 5704 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
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Motion, as amended, agreed to.
Public Accounts—Standing Committee
Report 13
MS LE COUTEUR (Molonglo) (3.43): I present the following report:
Public Accounts—Standing Committee—Report 13—Inquiry into ACT Government Procurement, dated 9 November 2010, together with a copy of the extracts of the relevant minutes of proceedings.
I move:
That the report be noted.
The first thing I need to do in noting this report is to thank the secretariat. We were fortunate to have two secretaries during the period of this report. Andrea Cullen finalised it but a lot of the work was done by Derek Abbott, who was here until June this year.
The inquiry actually began for the public accounts committee way back on 30 April 2009. During that period we had both Ms Joy Burch and Mr John Hargreaves as members of the committee, as well, of course, as me and Mr Smyth. I want to note here, in case I forget to note it later, that Mr Hargreaves did not participate in any of the deliberations regarding the waste management section because he had ministerial responsibility for some of these actions at the time.
As I said, this started in April last year, so this report has been a long time coming. I think there are a number of very useful recommendations in it. I think all members of the committee felt it was an area that was of considerable importance. I am speaking personally here when I say I was slightly disappointed by the number of submissions we had, because there were a lot of people that talked about it but who did not put submissions in. I hope this was not due to concern that putting a submission in might not be advantageous for them in terms of getting more government procurement in the future.
By way of context and background, the ACT government spends about $1.2 billion a year on goods, services and works—that is, things that are covered by the term “procurement”. $1.2 billion is a sizeable amount of money, so it is really worth while getting it right.
You will be pleased to know that I do not intend to go through all 25 recommendations, but I will go through some of them. I will start with recommendation 8, which states:
… ACT Procurement Solutions engage specifically with representatives of micro, small and medium sized businesses to refine procurement processes …
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