“Procurement writing for people who actually buy things.”
Short critiques of a specific claim, statistic, or recommendation. Named source, named failure mode, stated conclusion.
The Commonwealth Procurement Rules allow unlimited contract variations without requiring re-competition. The ANAO found one OPC contract varied twenty times and labelled it non-compliance, not rule design.
Nine years of Australia's Mandatory Minimum Requirements for Indigenous procurement produced $69.3 billion in exemptions, a third of them classified as 'other'. The policy's administrator never evaluated whether it changed anything.
Infrastructure Australia's 2026 Infrastructure Priority List claims to align the pipeline with market capacity, but the mechanism for alignment is market-forced delay: the workforce shortage fell only because the market pushed projects back, not because the planning function imposed a constraint, and a new 300,000-worker shortage peak arrives in mid-2027.
The NAO's March 2026 report found the government's Shared Services Strategy unlikely to reach its £1 billion savings target because departments aren't joining. The diagnosis is governance failure. The actual problem is that the mechanism for enforcing compulsory participation hands the decision back to individual departments — which is not enforcement at all.
The PAC correctly diagnosed a £900 million data gap in UK consultancy spending — then recommended better reporting requirements on the same bundled contracts that make reclassification the path of least resistance.
Airservices signed a cost-incentive contract at twice the supplier's own fixed-price bid, then expressed surprise seven years later that the incentive model hadn't contained costs.
DfT has a well-designed lessons-learned framework. The Government Internal Audit Agency confirmed in January 2026 that programme teams don't apply it. The NAO's March 2026 prescription for Northern Powerhouse Rail is to monitor whether the lessons are being applied.
Adoption statistics measure the newest tool, not the deepest capability. The functions being graded 'low uptake' have been running AI since before the people writing the reports knew what it was.
The ANAO audit of Australia's $7 billion infantry vehicle procurement found that 'mature, proven technology' appeared in the RFT without definition, threshold, or evaluation criteria. The selected platform is developmental. The lesson is not to write better requirements. It is to stop treating a stated requirement as a substitute for a measurable one.