Date: 7th of December 2021
Time: 10:35am to 12:00pm
Venue: Storey Hall, RMIT
Session Type: Panel
Participants: Sue Boyce (AbilityWorks), Dr Warren Staples (University of Melbourne), Paul Ashby (Aurecon, waiting for his confirmation), Dr Joanne Meehan (University of Liverpool, UK) and Sebastian Conley (Transurban)
The panel will be moderated by Dr Kevin Argus (RMIT) and Dr. Natalya Turkina.
Paul Ashby
Land & Water Leader VIC/SA
Aurecon
Paul is Aurecon’s Land & Water Leader for VIC/SA. He has recently joined the Infrastructure Unit after leading the operations for Aurecon’s Global Asset Management Group and as Advisory Leader for Victoria and South Australia, incorporating 150 staff across the sub-units of Telecommunications Infrastructure, Planning and Urban Design, Project and Programme Management, Asset Management and Infrastructure Advisory. Paul has also been involved in the tendering, planning and organisation of many recent key infrastructure projects across the Victoria Transport portfolio. Paul brings his strong leadership skills to help develop, execute and deliver for our clients plans and projects.
Aurecon
Aurecon brings ideas to life to design a better future. Imagining what is possible, we turn problems into solutions. We provide advisory, design, delivery and asset management services on projects across a range of markets, in locations worldwide.
Topic: “Beyond ‘Box-Ticking’: Institutional Challenges and Opportunities for Australian Social Procurement”.
Synopsis: The COVID-19 crisis has significantly hit Australia, bringing in the first economic recession since the 1990s along high un- and under-employment rates, especially amongst the vulnerable, disadvantaged, or marginalised groups of people (e.g., women and youth at risk, refugees and migrants, people with disabilities, indigenous people). To recover from this crisis, the Victorian Government has prioritised social procurement as a promising strategy for creating meaningful long-term employment. Social procurement is a framework for organisations to use their buying power to generate social value for local communities above and beyond the economic value of goods or services being purchased. This can be achieved via direct procurement from social enterprises or by including social impact or employment assessment in the tender requirements. However, Australian firms tend to take a short-term ‘box-ticking’ approach to social procurement by merely complying to minimum contractual requirements instead of creating meaningful long-term business and employment opportunities in the local communities. During this Panel discussion, we will discuss what institutional (i.e., political, cultural, financial) challenges inform such a ‘box-ticking’ approach and what institutional opportunities lie ahead of Australian social procurement.
