Page 519 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 21 February 2018
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Looking at Indigenous employment, currently ACT government directorates and agencies are encouraged to include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander owned businesses from the Canberra Region Joint Organisation in their procurement opportunities. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses can be identified from Supply Nation’s Indigenous business direct register. However, the commonwealth Indigenous procurement policy goes even further, with a mandatory framework to leverage the commonwealth’s annual multibillion procurement spend.
In the ACT in 2016-17 the University of Canberra public hospital head contractor set a target of 10,000 worker hours on the site to be provided by Indigenous staff. Disappointingly, only 7,568 worker hours were provided by Indigenous staff, and the vast majority of that was by trainees. Targets like those under the commonwealth Indigenous procurement policy provide a level of accountability, and the Greens would like to see the ACT government do more, including setting targets.
The Greens have regularly raised the issue of sustainability in procurement over the years. Despite the ACT’s net zero targets and being carbon neutral by 2020 government target, the ACT government continues to build infrastructure that is not going to meet the needs of our future, or our climate targets. The obvious example of this is the continuing car-dependent culture, especially in our new greenfield suburbs.
You might be interested to hear, though, in terms of basic things that government uses, that overall the world use of paper has gone down over the past two decades, despite population growth. The flipside of that is that, as we are now working in largely paperless offices, instead all our data is being stored in huge data warehouses, which require large amounts of electricity to keep cool. Of course, there are many more devices around, such as the iPads which members like me received over the holiday period. Again, that is a potential waste and certainly impacts on resource consumption.
In the ACT we are working hard, and we will be successful in switching our electricity to be 100 per cent renewable, but as soon as we procure interstate data storage we are creating large levels of greenhouse gas emissions, and these are not taken into account in our ACT greenhouse gas inventory.
That is just one example of the types of downstream effects of our procurement, but they are fundamental. These are the sorts of things that the ACT government needs to address in looking at the whole supply chain in the procurement process. You cannot just look at one little bit of it; you need to look at the entire chain, as Mr Rattenbury noted with regard to modern slavery. It is equally so with environmental impacts, just as it is with the impacts on workers and on the human beings involved.
In conclusion, the Greens wholeheartedly agree that workers in Canberra should be paid properly and work under safe and appropriate conditions. The ACT Greens also believe that our tender and procurement processes should take into account the employment standards of companies up and down the supply chain. We do not think it is okay only to look after the workers of Canberra and then purchase items made by slave labour or by companies that engage in human trafficking.
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