Australia’s decade‑old Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP) has delivered a major injection of federal spending to Indigenous‑owned businesses… but new research shows much of that money has flowed to a surprisingly small group of companies.
A peer‑reviewed study by The Australian National University researcher Dr Christian Eva, based on freedom‑of‑information data from the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) examined all IPP contracts worth $10,000 or more awarded between 2015-16 and 2022-23, which represents more than 99 per cent of the total value of IPP spending.
In the first eight years of the policy, from 2015 to mid‑2023, 12,800 such contracts worth $7 billion went to just over 900 Indigenous firms. Of that $7 billion, $3.5 billion (exactly half) went to only 18 companies. Half of all contracts by number, 6,415 in total, went to just 11 businesses…
The study also highlights how ownership structures shape who benefits. It finds 47 per cent of total contract value went to businesses that were between 50 and 51 per cent Indigenous‑owned, with another 27 per cent going to firms whose Indigenous ownership status was not recorded in the data.
That leaves less than a third of spending going to entities that are clearly majority‑Indigenous owned beyond the bare minimum.
Geography is another fault‑line with more than 5,200 contracts (over 40 per cent of the total) and 30 per cent of their value ($2.1 billion) went to firms based in Canberra, even though the ACT is home to roughly 1 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and there were close to 14,000 Indigenous businesses nationally by 2022.
Advocates say the pattern doesn’t look like broad‑based economic development and is just benefiting a few “elites”…
And with so many contracts concentrated among a small cluster of firms close to federal departments, they argue the system rewards “nepotism by familiarity” – officials repeatedly returning to suppliers they already know, while newer and regional businesses struggle to get a first contract. That concern has been echoed in parliamentary debates where senators have questioned whether access to the IPP is genuinely open to Indigenous businesses across the country.
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