State Government Procurement

Ms BEDFORD (Florey) (15:24): Supplementary, Mr Speaker: what is being done to close potential loopholes in the procurement tests that may allow interstate companies or competitors to establish short-term operations here in South Australia that temporarily fulfil the government's requirements without a long-term commitment to the state?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (15:24): I thank the member for Florey for her question. It's a good question. I will go and find out whether there are any elements within the contract that require people to actually set up their offices in South Australia permanently. I am not sure whether that would be contractually possible and I don't know to the extent to which this is a concern where people might set up for short periods of time.

But, as I said, we are looking for ways to get South Australian companies to sell in to the South Australian government. One of the areas that we are particularly interested in is on the tech side, so we have established I think it's called Go2Gov, which is a program administered by the Minister for Innovation and Skills in South Australia where we are providing opportunities for businesses to pitch in to government where they might be able to have a product or a service which would address something important to the people of South Australia or could improve the overall productivity of the Public Service in South Australia.

We are looking for all and every way to try to advantage the companies here in South Australia, but we also have a responsibility to the taxpayers to make sure that we’ve got good value for money. So we are balancing those two issues. That was essentially the theme that came out of the Productivity Commission's report and, as I said, we are now working through the implementation of that report.