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Consulting Matters
What’s happening at Consult Australia
SME Highlights First SME Summit a Success! On 21 October 2020, Consult Australia held our first inaugural SME Summit – created by small business members for small businesses. We were thrilled with the response, with 90 registrations to the online event. Attendees met many of the Consult Australia team, including Board President Gerry Doyle, Board Director and SME member Holly Carson, CEO Nicola Grayson, and many of our state and territory managers. In plenary sessions there were presentations on the new normal of remote working by Rob McDonald of MI Engineers and PI insurance tips & tricks by Cos Cirocco of Planned Cover and Patrick Beaumont of BRIC Insurance Consultants. The break-out sessions were also popular, covering a broad suit of topics under our 4 P’s of; people, pipeline, practice and procurement. Many thanks to Jamie Shelton of Northrop, Julie Gratton of Aurecon, Kiri Parr of Kiri Parr Pty Ltd, Mandy Holloway of Courageous Leaders and Mark Fairweather of HDR for their valuable assistance. We look forward with anticipation to the 2021 SME Summit.
Call to action on PI Insurance In November Consult Australia put out a call to its SME members to use their collective voices to raise awareness of the state of the PI market with their local members of parliament. This initial phase is just to alert MPs to the issue and we propose a follow-up campaign to seek action. Thank you to those members that positively engaged with this initiative. Consult Australia see this as only one aspect of our continuing campaign to advocate for changes to de-risk the Australian market. Another aspect was our briefing to the Commonwealth AttorneyGeneral setting out government actions to alleviate the situation. For example, for government contracts to be subject to unfair contract term protections noting that the rest of the market takes its lead from government actions.
Small business wins with enhancements to unfair contract term protections At the start of the year Consult Australia made a submission supporting the proposal to enhance protections for small business from onerous and unfair contract terms. Recently, all Ministers for consumer affairs around Australia agreed to strengthen the Australian Consumer Law: • More businesses will be protected from unfair contract terms. Businesses with less than 100 employees or an annual turnover threshold of less than $10 million will be eligible for protection. • More contracts will be subject to the unfair contract term protections. There will no longer be a threshold for the upfront price payable under a contract for it to be covered. • More certainty will be provided on what is a ‘standard-form contract’. Factors such as repeat usage of a contract template, and whether the small business had an effective opportunity to negotiate the contract will be included. • More reliance will be able be placed on a court declaration of an unfair contract term. Unless proven otherwise, a contract term used in similar circumstances as a term found to be unfair by the court will also be unfair.
It is hoped that these changes will lead to fairer standard form contracts and give small business confidence. We will keep you updated on the timeline for the implementation of these changes.
SME Open Forum Continues in 2021 Consult Australia launched our SME Open Forum in August 2020 as a bit of an experiment. We wanted to give our small and medium members direct access to Consult Australia's Board President, CEO and Policy Team. With no set agenda, SME members can raise in the forum any and all concerns and questions. With three successful SME Open Forums held in 2020 we are looking forward to more engagement with our smaller business members next year – keep an eye out for your email invite to the first one of 2021.
Policy Team Shines a Spotlight on Active SME members Our Policy Leads James Robertson and Kristy Eulenstein rely on member input to drive the national advocacy campaigns. We know there is very little time when running a small business to answer our calls for information, but when you do it is invaluable and ensures that Consult Australia truly is the voice of the consulting industry. Looking back on 2020, the Policy Team would like to take the opportunity to thank the following SMEs as being amongst our most active contributors to Consult Australia policy development:
