Defence Australian Industry Capability Plans to be made public

Min­is­ter for Defence Materiel Jason Clare today announced that the details of the Aus­tralian Indus­try Capa­bil­i­ty Plans (AICPs) for all future major Defence acqui­si­tion projects will be made pub­lic.

AICPs set out the plan by Defence com­pa­nies to max­imise oppor­tu­ni­ties for the involve­ment of Aus­tralian indus­try in major Defence capa­bil­i­ty projects. 

“This is an impor­tant reform for Australia’s Defence Indus­try,” Mr Clare said. 

“It will ensure the com­mit­ments made by major Defence com­pa­nies to Aus­tralian indus­try are pub­lic and they are held account­able for them.” 

Ear­li­er this year Mr Clare made a num­ber of reforms to strength­en Aus­tralian Indus­try Capa­bil­i­ty Plans. This included: 

• The reduc­tion of the thresh­old for manda­to­ry AICPs from $50 mil­lion to $20 mil­lion for all eli­gi­ble Defence acqui­si­tion contracts;
• The removal of the abil­i­ty of a com­pa­ny to arbi­trar­i­ly reduce the lev­el and type of work includ­ed in an AICP; 
• The inclu­sion of a new clause in the Con­di­tions of Ten­der allow­ing a com­pa­ny to be exclud­ed from a ten­der if they have pre­vi­ous­ly failed to meet their AICP obligations; 
• The addi­tion of AICP per­for­mance in the Com­pa­ny Score­card used by Defence to assess a company’s per­for­mance; and 
• Putting AICP per­for­mance in the DMO Project Manager’s Char­ter to make project teams accountable.

“This is the next step. It is a com­mon-sense idea,” Mr Clare said. 

“The Aus­tralian Defence Indus­try Net­work and a lot of Aus­tralian small and medi­um enter­pris­es I have met with have asked for this and the Gov­ern­ment has delivered.” 

AICPs are also required for major sus­tain­ment con­tracts. The details of AICPs for major sus­tain­ment con­tracts signed after 1 Jan­u­ary, 2012 will also be pub­licly released. 

The detail pub­lished on each acqui­si­tion or sus­tain­ment AICP will depend on a range of fac­tors includ­ing secu­ri­ty clas­si­fi­ca­tions and com­mer­cials restrictions. 

These reforms fol­low the Prime Minister’s announce­ment on 6 Octo­ber of mea­sures to strength­en oppor­tu­ni­ties for Aus­tralian indus­try to com­pete for work across Government. 

Press release
Min­is­te­r­i­al Sup­port and Pub­lic Affairs,
Depart­ment of Defence,
Can­ber­ra, Australia 

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