Senate Order 13 (August 2024)
Senate Order 13 (SO13), known as Murray Motion, requires that, twice a year, Commonwealth entities publish details of individual contracts with a total value of $100,000 (GST inclusive) or more, which meets specific date requirements (during the reporting period).
For the 2023 -24 financial year (this reporting period), 01 July 2023 to 30 June 2024, the National Disability Insurance Agency (Agency) identified 866 individual contracts that met the requirements of SO13.
The NDIA and Services Australia Procurement and Contract Management Review (the Review ) conducted by Dr Ian Watt in March 2023 put forward recommendations that:
- “the NDIA and SA should publicly report on the number of suppliers invited to respond for each procurement through their websites”, and
- “the NDIA and SA CEOs support the introduction of an AusTender change to provide advice to agencies when a contract has been varied a number of times. As the NDIA does not report on AusTender, it should develop its own system. If the change is not introduced as a priority, then SA should develop its own system as well.”
NDIA supports these recommendations. However, as the NDIA does not report on AusTender additional information including procurement methodology, number of suppliers approached, number of contract variations and original contract value will be published as part of this SO13 reporting.
Confidentiality
Confidentiality clauses of a general nature are included in all NDIA standard form contracts (i.e., they all contain clauses requiring the contractor to maintain confidentiality of NDIA confidential information and to protect personal information).
The reasons for including such clauses include:
- ordinary commercial prudence that requires protection of trade secrets, proprietary information and the like; and/or
- protection of other Commonwealth material and personal information.
The Accountable Authority of the Agency has assured that the listed contracts do not contain any inappropriate confidentiality provisions.
For details on the current SO13 listing, please visit:
Cost of Compliance
The estimated cost of complying with SO13 in relation to the current list for the Agency is approximately $6,521.
An estimate of the total hours committed by each staff member involved in the preparation of the SO13 response was costed to calculate the above figure.