Page 64 - Australian Defence Mag March 2020

64
FROM THE SOURCE
NAOMI ANSTESS
MARCH 2020 | WWW.AUSTRALIANDEFENCE.COM.AU
LEFT: “We are not ‘black clad’,” Anstess confirms.
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 63
At Intract, we co-locate with McMahon Services Austra- lia, nationally. McMahon Services are a minor shareholder of our company. But outside of the ownership component, we are also capability partners. Meaning we have a com- mercial contract with McMahon Services. It’s a smart com- mercial contract that we’ve had since we became incorpo- rated as a proprietary limited company and that partnership means that we can call on the capability, the higher level capability of an Australian company who is dedicated, abso- lutely, without a shadow of a doubt, to Aboriginal empower- ment and equity and has all the same values - family first, family at the core.
They enable us to access high level project management ability, we contract back our services so that we can focus on the development of our workforce and grow in development of our workforce to be able to deliver things in our own right. It also enables us in the quiet periods to be able to share a workforce when we don’t have enough work to sustain our 80 people, they can be placed on McMahon Services’ jobs.
This is really important for us, and this just shows the commitment of McMahon Services because I guess we bring a lot to them in terms of cultural diversity, we bring a lot to them in terms of innovative and different ways of thinking. They value that, they value the work and they ac- tively empower our people and actively engage in the Ab- original community - but that partnership is also commer- cial in nature and it’s smart.
I think it’s really interesting, the conversations in the Supply Nation space, in the Aboriginal procurement space nationally where Aboriginal companies that partner with non-Aboriginal companies can be labelled as ‘black clad’ or otherwise. What I will say to that is we’re not black clad
at all. If we were black clad we might have an owner some- where with absolutely no say in the business, no employees and actually have no Aboriginal participation; we’ll just be pulling a profit somewhere for an individual. But we’re not doing that, we are actively engaging, we are actively em- ploying people and what we’re doing is smart – it is main- stream smart – and it is empowering.
So for Aboriginal people, what we’re doing is standing up in this Aboriginal business through our management, our leadership in John Briggs (Intract’s owner and CEO) and we’re saying we have a right, like non-Aboriginal business, to engage in smart commercial decisions and that shouldn’t prevent us from partnering with people with the same val- ues as us, to help us to grow.
ADM: The other obvious question; do you consider Intract as part of the Defence industry community?
ANSTESS: Absolutely we do. I think without Defence In- tract wouldn’t be able to have made the commitment that we’ve made. We’ve obviously worked very hard internally and we’ve worked across state and territory governments, particularly the SA and NT governments and the private sector to engage with us also in the civil space, but we are most certainly part of the Defence community.
The Defence community has been integral to our steady growth and our maintenance. It’s helped us to continue to grow, to being at a stage where we employ 80 Aboriginal people full time every day across the na- tion. We’re inbuilt, we’re part of that Defence family and we’re not unlike NORFORCE and the Aboriginal busi- ness units within Defence who are at the forefront of protecting the country. We’re around protecting culture, cultural values, the values of the nation as part of that Defence community. Yeah, we think we’re a really impor- tant part of the family.
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