What is Australian government procurement, for a supplier?
It is a published process for spending public money. The buyer is an agency, a council, a government-owned entity, or a body required to follow the same rules. The pack tells you how offers will be received, how they will be evaluated, and what happens if you miss a mandatory. That is the whole of it, from the supplier’s side of the table.
It is not a relationship dressed up as a competition. Private invitations can be that. Public processes are not allowed to be. Probity exists to keep the evaluation on the published criteria. If you are bidding because someone in the agency likes you, you are bidding on a fact the evaluators cannot use.
It is also not a duty to respond. Open listing does not create an obligation. A firm that treats every AusTender ATM as inbound work has outsourced its strategy to a portal. The bid/no-bid decision guide still holds. Public rules add mandatories and a no-contact period. They do not add a reason to say yes.
This page is a supplier’s map, not legal advice and not an agency manual. The instruments change by jurisdiction and by year. Read the pack in front of you. The procurement glossary is the short definitions underneath; this guide is the decision logic that sits on top of them.
RFT vs RFP vs RFQ vs EOI vs ITT: which is which?
The letters on the cover tell you what the buyer is asking you to decide. An RFT asks for a conforming offer against a specification. An RFP asks for a proposed solution, often with room to negotiate. An RFQ asks for a price against a scope that is already known. An EOI asks whether you are capable and interested, not for a priced offer. An ITT is a Commonwealth or state flavour of an RFT. An RFI is information, not a commitment.
Firms lose hours by treating every acronym as a full bid. An EOI is cheaper than an RFT. It is not free. An RFQ with onerous conditions of contract is still a risk decision. The comparison is in RFT vs RFP vs RFQ vs EOI vs ITT. Use it before anyone opens a response template.
If the cover says one thing and the conditions say another, believe the conditions. Buyers reuse templates. The evaluation clause is the one that decides how you will be scored, not the marketing title on page one.
How do panels, standing offers and frameworks actually work?
A panel is a bid for the right to bid later. You spend pursuit cost to win a seat. Then you spend it again, often at short notice, on call-offs. Standing offers and frameworks behave the same way. The label changes by jurisdiction. The arithmetic does not.
Membership is not a standing yes. Call-offs still need a gate. Rate files lock you to numbers you may not be able to deliver at. Refresh invitations are process artefacts, not evidence you can win. The decision logic for that gate lives with the bid/no-bid for panels. The definitional version is panels, standing offers and frameworks. Score the seat as access, then score the work you would actually chase.
Being on a panel can be the no-bid. If the only work it will send you fails strategy or risk, the seat is a trophy. Trophies cost hours: insurance, reporting, refresh responses, the expected call-offs you will feel obliged to write. A firm that collects panels as proof of seriousness is running a museum, not a pipeline.
What does probity forbid?
Contact that the process has closed. Undisclosed conflicts. Submissions that do not conform to the published format. Attempts to introduce material the evaluation plan cannot score. The no-contact period is the one firms trip on most often: a helpful email to the officer you already know, sent after the ATM opened, is not helpful. It is a probity event.
Probity is not a vibe. It is a set of rules written so that a later audit can reconstruct the evaluation. That is why late lodgement is fatal, why extra pages get ignored, and why an evaluator cannot reward a relationship the criteria do not name. If your only path to a win is a conversation the process forbids, the call is already no-bid.
Conflicts belong on the page before you price. A former employee on the evaluation committee, a subcontractor who is also advising the buyer, a board member with a related interest: these are not footnotes for legal after the draft exists. They are capacity and risk, today.
Where are tenders published?
Commonwealth opportunities sit on AusTender as approaches to market. States and territories run their own portals. Some entities still email a list. Discovery tools scrape those sources and sell you the same listing with a nicer filter. Seeing a tender is the start of a gate, not the end of one.
A firm that equates “we found it” with “we should bid” will bid the portal, not the strategy. Mandatories, locality, panel membership, and the evaluation weights are still sitting in the pack. The listing is a pointer. It is not a brief.
Watch the close date and the lodgement method as hard facts. A portal that requires a file named a certain way will exclude you for a filename. That is not pedantry. That is the process working as designed. If you cannot lodge conforming today, you are not bidding. You are hoping.
What do the Commonwealth Procurement Rules mean if you are not the agency?
The CPRs tell agencies how to buy. They do not tell you how to write a bid. What they give a supplier is a map of the process you have been dropped into: when open tender is required, when limited tender is allowed, what value for money is supposed to mean, and how SME and other policies are meant to be considered.
Read them as context, not as a lever. You cannot cite a CPR paragraph to waive a mandatory the RFT wrote down. You can use them to recognise which process you are in, and to notice when a pack is asking for something the rules did not contemplate. Commonwealth Procurement Rules summarises the supplier-facing parts. The instrument in the pack outranks any summary on this site.
State and territory regimes rhyme. They are not copies. A NSW eTendering listing does not run on the CPRs. Do not paste a Commonwealth assumption onto a council RFT. The glossary entry for each instrument is the safer first stop.
How do SME, Indigenous and local-content targets change a bid?
They change it when they are a mandatory, a weighted criterion, or a reporting obligation after award. Increasingly they are all three. A target that is only a policy statement in the buyer’s annual report is not a row on your scorecard. A target that is 15 percent of the evaluation, or a pass/fail on Indigenous participation, is a gate.
Do not invent a partnership on Thursday to clear a Friday mandatory. If you do not hold the status, the subcontractor, or the local presence today, question 6 on the scorecard is a no. That is a no-bid. “We can get it” is how firms write conforming fiction and then cannot deliver.
Where the criterion is weighted rather than mandatory, score it honestly against the evidence you can put on the page. A thin Indigenous participation schedule that exists only in the response will be read as that. Evaluators have seen it. So has every debrief that followed.
What are you entitled to after a loss?
On most public processes, a debrief. Not a rerun of the evaluation. Not the competitor’s price. A structured account of how you were scored against the published criteria, and where you were weak. Ask for it in writing. Send someone who can hear it without defending the last draft.
Use the debrief to test the next bid/no-bid, not to relitigate the last one. If the weights sat outside what you do, that is a strategy fail you should have seen in week one. If a mandatory was missed, that is a process fail. If the incumbent’s evidence library was always going to win, that is an incumbent-wired pack, and the next one from the same buyer deserves a colder read.
A firm that never asks for debriefs is flying without instruments. A firm that treats every debrief as proof the process was unfair is flying with the instruments covered. The useful output is a sentence you can put on the next gate: we will not bid this category until X is true.
What should a bid/no-bid look like on a public process?
The same three axes as any other tender: strategy, capacity, risk. Mandatories are a hard gate on capacity. Probity and liability sit on risk. Public evaluators will still score a conforming bid you should not have written. Fit and winnability are different questions. This guide is about the first, inside a rule set.
Week one still applies. Day one: log the ATM, pull mandatories, close date, lodgement method. If a mandatory is not held today, the letter can go that afternoon. Day two or three: liability, roster, evaluation weights. The weekly gate is twenty minutes. A pack still being read in week two is already a bid, whether you meant it or not.
selrob runs that read against your firm, not a generic public-sector benchmark, and returns bid, no-bid, or review with the clause named. How that test is built is on the public tenders page. This guide is the map underneath it, so a bid team can recognise the instrument they are in before the software, or without it.
What happens if you miss a mandatory?
The offer can be set aside before quality or price is read. That is the design. Evaluators who liked the rest of the response are not allowed to save it. A week of writing, voided by a licence you did not hold on day one, is the most expensive kind of no-bid: the one you made by not making it.
The fix is not a better draft. It is a read on day one that lists every mandatory and ticks held, not held, or not sure. Not sure is a review with a date. Not held is a letter that afternoon. Hoping the buyer will waive a rule they published is not a strategy.
Some mandatories hide. Locality in a schedule. A named standard in the conditions of contract. A prequalification that sits on a different portal. That is why the first read is for gates, not for the methodology chapter. The methodology chapter cannot resurrect a fail. If the pack is still being searched for mandatories in week two, you are already bidding.
State and territory portals rhyme with AusTender and are not copies. NSW eTendering, Buying for Victoria, QTenders, SA Tenders and Contracts, the WA and Tasmanian and territory systems; each has its own lodgement quirks. Where tenders are published is the list. The listing is a pointer. The pack is the brief. The mandatory you missed is usually in a schedule nobody opened because the evaluation table looked friendlier.
What is this not?
It is not a substitute for the pack. Definitions on this site will not save a lodgement that missed a mandatory in schedule 4. It is not a Commonwealth or state manual. Agencies have those. You have a close date.
It is not legal advice. Indemnity, probity, and the CPRs have lawyers attached to them for a reason. Where a clause would change the call, that is a named review with a date, not a paragraph on a marketing site.
It is not an argument that public work is better or worse than private work. Public processes are slower, more documented, and less forgiving of a missed mandatory. Private processes hide the same risks in a shorter PDF. The gate is the same. The letters on the cover change which facts you have to find first.