Page 976 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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implementing a whole-of-life cost analysis into their value for money calculations. That being the case, what is needed are strong ministerial directions and executive encouragement of public servants to adopt triple bottom line reasoning in performing the value for money calculations. If this encouragement is not forthcoming, the temptation will remain for a manager to ignore environmental and social so-called externalities and gain kudos by achieving short-term monetary savings for his or her work unit by buying the cheapest product or service available.
Perhaps the recent reorganisation of the public service presents an opportunity to break through the atomistic thinking that develops within most bureaucracies, meaning that each individual agency attempts to externalise costs and internalise savings even when this means that the cost to the overall public service or society at large is increased.
Proposed new section 22A (3) (e) gives the government power to prescribe any other considerations which must be considered in pursuing value for money. It should use this power to ramp up the requirement to factor in the full social and environmental costs of doing business. This would incorporate such things as the impact on biodiversity, say from sourcing unsustainably logged paper and wood products, as well as the embedded greenhouse gas emission content of various products, which attract no immediate financial cost but which are accruing a terrible environmental, social and health debt.
I am giving all agency heads a heads up that in the next estimates hearings I will be asking them to catalogue the changes in their procurement practices that these amendments I am focusing on have produced. Without wasting too much time and effort, I will be asking them to give me an estimate of the projected environmental benefits that their whole-of-life calculations are based on.
The amendments we are debating today have the potential to generate clear market signals that businesses will be rewarded for incorporating environmental and social benefits into their goods and services. This will no doubt generate a massive amount of greenwash and other hogwash for the procurement managers to wade through, as some companies will try to prove their environmental virtue with glossy recycled platitudes rather than change their practices to provide real benefits and real savings in reducing greenhouse emissions, reducing embedded energy, improving interoperability and taking social responsibility for the impacts of their particular commodity.
I wonder whether the requirement in the bill to have regard to probity and ethical behaviour would preclude public sector managers from contracting with firms with track records such as Exxon Mobil or Clayton Utz. Mobil has been consistently funding leading international climate change sceptics, including the Competitive Enterprise and the George C Marshall Institute. On the same day that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announced a more than 90 per cent scientific certainty that climate change is human induced, the British Guardian newspaper revealed that an Exxon Mobil funded lobby group, the American Enterprise Institute, offered scientists and economists $10,000 each to spread doubt about the IPCC report. Of course, $10,000 does not seem very much, but to scientists and economists, especially looking for work, it can be quite large. This is the kind of
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