How We Think

Earlier this month, The Joint Committee of Public Accounts Audit (JCPAA) released a report addressing aspects of Commonwealth procurement. Report 498, titled "Commitment issues' - An inquiry into Commonwealth Procurement" provided strong recommendations following a recent Parliamentary Joint Committee inquiry into five reports released by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) that focused on Commonwealth Procurement over the last year.

At some point in our lives, we have most likely come across the phrase 'knowledge is power'. Whether knowledge is power or whether it is the sharing of knowledge that translates it into power is debatable within numerous different contexts, including workplace and organisational culture.

The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) published a report on 14 June 2023 on an audit of the procurement of office furniture, between 2017-2022, for the Department of Home Affairs (HA) and Services Australia (SA). This intention of the audit was to increase transparency of procurement frameworks and ensure that HA and SA were effective in undertaking their respective procurement activities as per the Commonwealth Procurement Rules (CPRs).

12 October 1997. A 9-year-old girl with a mop of brown curls, and an insatiably curious mind was taken to Parliament House to witness the Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTAR) Sea of Hands – a powerful, physical representation of the Citizen’s Statement on Native Title. The Citizen’s Statement was a petition circulated by ANTAR to mobilise non-Indigenous support for native title and reconciliation.  

Organisational transformation is hard. It's complex, multi-faceted, and takes time. Amongst this complexity lies risk - what if these aren't the right changes for the right reasons? What if all this change doesn't achieve the outcomes we seek? What if our people don't buy in to this?

If there's anything the last few years have reinforced, it's that change is constant and inevitable. As a community, we've learned it is our shared ability to respond effectively to change that determines our success.