Facilities Services

The Hon. G.G. BROCK (Frome) (14:41): My question is to the Minister for Transport and Infrastructure. Can the minister advise the house if a Regional Impact Assessment Statement has been made regarding the proposed outsourcing of the facility maintenance services and what communication or consultation has been undertaken? If so, how was this carried out with regard to the proposal to outsource the facility services management across the Yorke and Mid North? With your leave, sir, and that of the house, I will explain further.

Leave granted.

The Hon. G.G. BROCK: Three weeks ago, the minister indicated on radio that these facility maintenance services currently in operation would be outsourced. These maintenance services currently service over 70 preferred DPTI contractors, who employ well in excess of 330 employees, who in turn not only provide local employment but also purchase materials that are utilised locally, which generates economic opportunities for these locations.

The Hon. S.K. KNOLL (Schubert—Minister for Transport, Infrastructure and Local Government, Minister for Planning) (14:42): I do thank the member for Frome for his question. I want to make something a little bit clear here because there is some confusion as to what outsourcing means in this regard. Apart from a very small number of government employees who provide pockets of actual service delivery across Adelaide, the vast, vast majority—I think it is about $300-odd million worth of work that is done under the facilities management contracts—is already outsourced and has been outsourced for a long period of time.

What we are talking about here is the outsourcing of the facilities management, i.e., the people who manage the contractors and make sure that everything is done in accordance with what is right and make sure that all the risk assessments and the appropriate occ health and safety requirements in relation to maintaining facilities are done properly. So we are not talking about people doing the work; they are already all outsourced and will continue to be. There is a small number of internal staff that did perform some work. That is also being outsourced, but that is a very, very small portion of the $300 million.

Of that facilities management layer, around 60 per cent of the work done is already outsourced under an AGFMA arrangement—when I say 'AGFMA', Across Government Facilities Management Agreement—that has been in place for about 20 years. All we are doing is essentially extending a structure that has been in place for two decades to make it consistent. So, instead of having some DPTI internal facilities management staff and then these AGFMA contract staff, we are going to just a single external contractor.

In terms of local contractors being able to undertake the work, that will continue. In the question that the member for Frome put, he was talking about contractors who employ local people. Those local people are already employed. They are already private outsourced contractors. Those arrangements will continue. The structure of the contract—this was again in response to a question from the member for Mount Gambier, I think, yesterday—is such that we are actually improving the contestability of these arrangements.

Some of the feedback we've received from agencies—and what I'm saying to agencies is that, essentially, DPTI here is actually just the agency that looks after these things; the other agencies are actually the clients. There are about 5½ thousand sites across South Australia that get managed under this AGFMA contract.

What we're doing is giving greater opportunity for small low-risk work, for that work not to necessarily come through the AGFMA contract. Let's say there's a school which wants to undertake some handyman work or undertake what we call planned small construction or soft facilities management. Instead of the school needing to go through the AGFMA contract to get that work, what is going to happen moving forward with the new procurement is for the school to be able to use their local preferred people.

Again, these arrangements are complex, but what I want to dispel is a myth that is being put around, that somehow—and this is where the confusion lies—we are going to be outsourcing contract work that is already outsourced. I just want to assure small to medium-sized businesses across South Australia that currently do work under the AGFMA contract, as well as ones that are contracted with DPTI, that those opportunities are still going to exist.

As part of these arrangements, there has been no change to the budgets of client agencies and the money that they have to manage their sites. All we're doing is, instead of having DPTI facilities management and AGFMA facilities management, we're going to have one arrangement instead of two.