What are the exclusion grounds?
Schedules 6 and 7 of the Act organise them: mandatory grounds (convictions and findings of specified gravity, from corruption and fraud to labour-market and environmental offences among others) and discretionary grounds where the buyer assesses whether exclusion is warranted, including poor past performance and certain regulatory breaches. Map entity, associated person, ground, and evidence in four columns: which company, which individual connected to it, which ground is even arguably engaged, and what document proves the position either way. Self-cleaning evidence (remediation, compliance programmes, personnel changes) belongs in the map where the provisions allow it.
Confirm the current schedules and the exclusions and debarment guidance before relying on any summary here; grounds, thresholds, and look-back periods are exactly the detail that moves. No inference of automatic failure beyond what the provisions state: discretionary means the buyer decides, on the facts, with your evidence in front of them.
What is debarment, and how does it differ?
Debarment places a supplier on a published central list following ministerial decision, visible to all buyers, with defined scope and duration. Exclusion is per-procurement, decided by the buyer in that process. Participation capacity (whether you can perform) is a third thing again. Three tests, three evidence packs, three moments. Collapsing them produces either panic (treating a capacity question as exclusion) or complacency (treating a ground as paperwork).
What about other jurisdictions?
Australian probity and New Zealand probity are separate regimes with their own exclusion logic (AU probity and NZ probity), labelled here as other jurisdictions, not equivalents. A clean record in one regime proves nothing about another; a ground in one does not automatically travel. Cite each jurisdiction’s consequences separately, and where exclusion is genuinely in play, that is specialist advice, sought early, not after shortlisting.
What does this mean for the bid/no-bid call?
A mandatory ground squarely engaged is a no-bid, made once, with advice, not re-litigated per tender. A discretionary ground with strong self-cleaning evidence is a review with a dated evidence pack and an owner. After an award decision, the timeline that matters is assessment summaries and standstill.