Senate Order 13 for Entity Contracts

Senate Order 13 (February 2024)

Senate Order 13 (SO13), known as Murray Motion, requires that, twice a year, Commonwealth entities publish details of individual contracts with a total value of $100,000 (GST inclusive) or more, which meets specific date requirements (during the reporting period). 

For the 2023 calendar year (this reporting period), 1 January 2023 to 31 December 2023, the National Disability Insurance Agency (Agency) identified 864 individual contracts that met the requirements of SO13. 

In this reporting period the number of participants across the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) increased by 35,947 since June 2023. This brings the total participants in the NDIS to 646,449 as at 31 December 2023.

The NDIA and Services Australia Procurement and Contract Management Review 
(the Review ) conducted by Dr Ian Watt in March 2023 put forward recommendations that:

  • “the NDIA and SA should publicly report on the number of suppliers invited to respond for each procurement through their websites”, and
  • “the NDIA and SA CEOs support the introduction of an AusTender change to provide advice to agencies when a contract has been varied a number of times. As the NDIA does not report on AusTender, it should develop its own system. If the change is not introduced as a priority, then SA should develop its own system as well.”

NDIA supports these recommendations. However, as the NDIA does not report on AusTender additional information including procurement methodology, number of suppliers approached, number of contract variations and original contract value will be published as part of this SO13 reporting.

Confidentiality 

Confidentiality clauses of a general nature are included in all NDIA standard form contracts (i.e., they all contain clauses requiring the contractor to maintain confidentiality of NDIA confidential information and to protect personal information). 

The reasons for including such clauses include: 

  • ordinary commercial prudence that requires protection of trade secrets, proprietary information and the like; and/or 
  • protection of other Commonwealth material and personal information. 

The Accountable Authority of the Agency has assured that the listed contracts do not contain any inappropriate confidentiality provisions. 

For details on the current SO13 listing, please visit:

Cost of Compliance

The estimated cost of complying with SO13 in relation to the current list for the Agency is approximately $6,770.

An estimate of the total hours committed by each staff member involved in the preparation of the SO13 response was costed to calculate the above figure.

Previous reporting

This page current as of
29 February 2024