Page 1104 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 2012
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were recommended by the public accounts committee. The public accounts committee spent a lot of time and effort on procurement at the beginning of this Assembly’s term. As everyone is aware, the committees are tripartisan committees, and this recommendation expressed the considered views of all three parties. It is very disappointing that the government has chosen not to take it up.
There are other points. Recommendation 20 also recommends an amendment to the procurement act on the basis of social procurement. It is disappointing that the government, while making these quite reasonable minor improvements to the procurement act, has not gone further, looked at the broader implications of government procurement, and followed up some of the recommendations from the public accounts committee’s quite extensive inquiry into government procurement.
MR BARR (Molonglo—Deputy Chief Minister, Treasurer, Minister for Economic Development and Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation) (10.41), in reply: The amendments to the Government Procurement Act 2001 that are proposed by this amendment bill will improve efficiency by streamlining ACT government procurement activities, and contribute to open government. They represent a reduction in red tape for ACT businesses in dealing with the territory government.
The amendments in the bill will clarify the mechanism for setting the notifiable contracts threshold; amend the reporting requirements to the PAC on reportable contracts to once a year, from every six months; and fix an inconsistency in the act in relation to how long a notifiable contract must be publicly accessible.
The government foreshadowed that it would raise the threshold for notifying contracts in its response to PAC report 13, Inquiry into ACT government procurement. To make future changes to the threshold quicker and easier, the bill will amend the procurement act so that the threshold will be set by regulation. Removing the current default threshold stated in the act will prevent any opportunity for confusion that could arise from having different thresholds in the act and in the regulations. This simple change will make the process of notifying ACT government contracts more efficient.
An amendment to Government Procurement Regulation 2007 will be notified within a week and will commence when this amendment to the procurement act comes into effect.
The second amendment in this bill will streamline the reporting of “reportable contracts”, which under the procurement act are notifiable contracts that have had confidential text removed. Currently the act requires the government to provide the public accounts committee with a report on reportable contracts every six months. This bill amends the reporting period to every 12 months. This will reduce administrative processes whilst maintaining transparency of government contracting. It will continue to offer the committee the opportunity to scrutinise contracts. And as members would know, the public text of these contracts is available for perusal at any time from the contracts register on the Shared Services procurement website.
The third amendment in this bill corrects an inconsistency in the procurement act. The act currently has one section stating that public text needs to be publicly available for
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