Page 5706 - Week 13 - Thursday, 18 November 2010
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on the part of some people about it, so we recommended that the Auditor-General conduct a wide-ranging investigation of the allegations raised with regard to Aussie Junk’s employment practices and the management of contractual processes for the letting of the leases for the Mugga Lane and Mitchell facilities.
I will now move on to sustainability issues with regard to procurement. This is something that the committee spent some time on. The government’s submission on this was quite positive. It said that sustainability can be achieved. It agreed that it could be achieved and that it needed to be incorporated at the beginning of procurement.
However, the procurement principles set out in the Government Procurement Act do not specifically include sustainability as a factor to be considered in making a procurement decision. Subparagraph (d) of section 22A, which requires consideration to be given to “optimising whole of life costs”, certainly makes it possible to include sustainability in the process. It does not stop it but it does not actually start it, as it were.
Subparagraph (a), which requires “probity and ethical behaviour”, also points in the direction of sustainability, but again it does not actually require this. We had advice from ACT Procurement Solutions that they had put out a couple of circulars. One was about optimising whole-of-life costs, and that was mainly focused on the commercial costs—things like acquisition, maintenance, operating costs, disposal costs and training costs, which are, of course, important. But they did not deal very much with the environmental and social outcomes.
There was a further circular on sustainable procurement which listed a number of things that decision makers needed to take into account, such as the importance of a healthy environment, the need to value and protect ecological integrity and biodiversity, prudent use of resources, applying the precautionary principle and adopting a whole-of-life approach to projects.
There was not much evidence to suggest that sustainability considerations have been incorporated. In fact, the Property Council of Australia in its evidence suggested that evaluation still focused on financial considerations. It said:
The current approach of aiming to measure sustainability by adopting a whole of life costing exercise, is not appropriate in many instances and again leads towards a financial cost justification argument, avoiding evaluation of broader environmental and community benefits that could also be sought.
The Property Council in fact recommended that the Government Procurement Act and regulations be amended to make specific mention of sustainability and triple-bottom-line accounting, and also that ACT public servants get more relevant training.
This led to a number of recommendations. Recommendations 16, 17 and 18 all basically deal with incorporating sustainability into procurement. We have suggested that guidelines should be adopted and that the Auditor-General should conduct a
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