We support the review of the Government Rules of Procurement and the Government’s intent to make it easier for New Zealand business to win government contracts.

However, the draft rules for the fifth edition are lacking in some areas and require further improvements as we have detailed in our submission (see link below).

Some of our key concerns include:

  • Accountability – the draft rules do not detail how agencies will held accountable for their performance against the procurement rules. We suggest agencies be required to complete a post-project evaluation to be published annually as an opportunity to learn and demonstrate accountability.
  • Transparency – critical to build public trust and confidence, yet the draft rules for this fifth edition do not include definitions of the ‘must’ and ‘should’ as previous editions have. These definitions need to be restored.
  • Economic benefit to New Zealand – Agencies are ‘expected’ to demonstrate their procurement choices are delivering economic benefit to new Zealand – but there’s no requirement to do so. We want to see the rules changed so that they ‘must’ demonstrate this benefit. And we suggest that Treasury and agencies do further work to ensure agencies have the knowledge capability and resourcing to be able to quantify this benefit.
  • Local suppliers – More work is needed to understand the broad economic benefit of buying from local suppliers, including accounting for the fact that the cost of imported content may be significantly reduced through subsidies.
  • Circular economy – The draft rules ignore New Zealand’s transition to a circular low emission economy and the challenges of climate change with no requirement, undermining the value that local manufacturing businesses deliver to New Zealand’s future. NZ based manufacturing generally produces goods of a lower carbon footprint than those imported manufactured goods sourced from Asia which have high embodied carbon owing to fossil fuel energy and carbon component of freight.

These are some of our concerns and recommendations.

You can view our full submission here ALENZ submission – Government Procurement Rules 5th edition – April 2025