3 minute read
From the CEO
It has been a time of new constructs for Consult Australia, with the unveiling of our newly constructed website! The site has been designed around the value of Consult Australia to ‘your industry’, ‘your business’, and ‘your career’. Under ‘your industry’ you’ll find our advocacy and thought leadership campaigns organised by our four key focus areas, people, practice, pipeline, and procurement. Under ‘your business’ you can find all our member services including our practice notes and business guides, and ‘your career’ is where you’ll find our professional development and event listings. To find out what’s going on in your local area, navigate to the state/territory pages to see upcoming events and local advocacy. You can keep up to date with our activities and publications by going to the latest news page. Please also tune into James and Kristy’s monthly ‘Pulse Updates’ video for a 5-10 minute round-up of our advocacy work.
In another new construct we have set up a regular online Open Forum for our SME members to come and talk with each other and discuss issues with me, James, Kristy, and Gerry. There’s no set agenda, members can drop in as they want. Topics raised in our first Forum included concerns about the availability and affordability of Professional Indemnity Insurance, the burden of increasing red tape, and the need for project pipeline transparency. The Forum follows an SME discussion at our June Board meeting, where a group of our SME members shared their views on how we might improve our engagement and value to Consult Australia’s small and medium business members. In this edition you’ll see other updates for our SME members, including our upcoming SME Summit where we’ll be exploring in more depth the issues raised through the Open Forums. For the first time we’ll be delivering our Annual Awards for Excellence via an online live event, whilst it is sadly not possible to have our traditional face to face celebration, which was to be in Melbourne this year, we will still put on a great show to reveal the winners. So, you can still dress up and celebrate your successes with us on 29 October!
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We know that challenge/adversity leads to innovation and a reimaging of what once was, pushing us outside our ‘comfort-zones’ to create new ways forward. Contributions in this edition explore these opportunities. Anthony Richardson (Aurecon), invites us to imagine, ‘What if energy was free?’, and looks at how this might be possible in Australia. Sophie Olsen, Jonathon Chapman, and Dorte Ekelund (SMEC) explore potential policies to unlock private investment for property development to stimulate economic recovery. Professor Danny Samson (Melbourne Business School) makes the case for leaders to embrace ‘ESG’ for the growth and success of our organisations.
It has been shown that diversity and productivity are intrinsically linked, arguably because innovation comes through diversity of thought, by bringing together people with different backgrounds and experiences. Dr Juliana Mutum and Dr Frédéric Blin (Aecom), consider this in their article, ‘I want to be a leader but I’m not white and named Andrew’.
Thank you to over 200 of you who joined our Male Champions of Change online session on ‘why diversity still matters in times of crisis and beyond’ at the beginning of September, with Dr Fitzsimmons who took us through leading practices in creating and sustaining gender inclusive workplaces. Much work has been done, but much work remains to be done. If you want find out more about the Male Champions of Change
and our diversity and inclusion work, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
Please connect with us via our social media, or contact us direct, to share your new constructs and engage in our activities – by coming together through Consult Australia we create an avenue for diversity of thought that creates value for you, your business, your industry, and the Australian community we all seek to serve.
Nicola Grayson
CEO
