The Sovereign Australian Prime Alliance (SAPA) has welcomed reforms to the Commonwealth Procurement Rules to define an Australian business for use within the context of Commonwealth procurement framework.
The changes now define an Australian business as: ‘a business, including any parent business, that has 50% or more Australian ownership or is principally traded on an Australian equities market; and is an Australian resident for tax purposes; and is a business that has its principal place of business in Australia’.
In a page on its website, the Department of Finance said that the new definition will help to provide a more comprehensive picture on the number of Australian businesses that interact with the Commonwealth procurement framework.
“The data captured will also enable and inform targeted engagement with businesses and industry sectors, to help lift their capability to compete for Australian government contracts,” the government said.
SAPA - an informal grouping of large Australian prime contractors to the federal government made up of NIOA, DroneShield, Macquarie Technology Group, AUSTAL and Gilmour Space - has also welcomed the additional reform to Commonwealth Procurement Rules.
These reforms, introducing the Broader Economic Benefits in Procurement metric when making value judgements in government tendering, will require future government procurement to consider a broader range of weightings, priority outcomes and contracting considerations when assessing submissions for government contracts.
“We look forward to working with Commonwealth government departments as this new reform gets embedded in future procurement and tendering processes, and we encourage state/ territory governments to adopt this commonsense solution which has been led at the Federal level,” SAPA said.
TechnologyOne CEO Ed Chung said these reforms are a vote of confidence in Australia’s technology industry and an investment in Australia’s future as an innovation-led nation.
“The Government is recognising the value of local innovation and technology built, owned and run by Australians, which is an important step to levelling the playing field for local Australian companies in competing against multinationals when it comes to government contracts,” he said.
“We applaud the Federal Government for listening and acting on industry concerns that Australia had fallen out of step with international practice when it came to properly valuing the economic benefit of buying from Australians.”
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