Not on the Panel
Unpacking what works when building in ███ ██████, GovTech, and the █████████ market.
👋 Welcome
Welcome to issue #8 of Not on the Panel, your unofficial guide to building and scaling in government.
Not on the Panel tracks the weekly activity in Australia's $80 billion business-to-government market. We explain how the system really works, show businesses how to navigate it, who is winning, where the money is moving, and how startups and investors can break into the market.
In this week's edition, we look at:
The Government’s response to the ANAO audit of Defence's use of the Australian Industry Participation
Another significant fundraising in the US GovTech market from General Medicine
And in our major features, you’re getting not one but two stories:
📑 We take a deep look at the ANAO Audit into Defence procurement; &
🗺️ We (think) have built the first Australian startup map
(👇see below👇)
🤝 If you find value in our unique perspective, help us grow by sharing this with your network. Every new subscriber brings us closer to delivering more in-depth coverage of the overlooked and undervalued B2G market.
📰 This Week in Global Gov
🇦🇺 Defence Fast-Tracks Funding in Response to Audit
Following a damning ANAO audit, the Albanese government awarded $16.5M to 58 local defence suppliers. Grants focus on skilling, security, and sovereign capability (e.g. drone parts, rocket fuel, ship components).
Source: The Mandarin
🏥 Tasmania launches digital health overhaul
The state has kicked off the ‘Bluegum’ program, part of a $476M digital health strategy. It aims to deliver a unified health record system that connects hospitals, GPs, aged care, and community care statewide.
Source: Department of Health
🏥 General Medicine Raises $32M Series A
General Medicine, a virtual care marketplace, secured $32 million in Series A funding led by Matrix Partners, with participation from JSL Health Capital, BoxGroup, Founder Collective, and VXI Capital. The platform offers direct-to-consumer access to primary and specialty care services, including dermatology, urology, and cardiology, through telehealth consultations. The funds will be used to expand service offerings and increase platform capacity.
💼 This Week in Australian B2G
Week 22 (ending 23 May)
📄 $530.92m in total reported contract spend
🖥️ $10.89m in software + digital services
Breakdown by Service:
💾 Software: $3.30m
☁️ SaaS (Cloud): $1.78m
🛠️ Software maintenance & support: $2.56m
🧱 Platform SaaS: $78k
⚙️ Software/hardware engineering: $3.14m
Breakdown by Procurement Method
📢 Open Tender: $1.17m
🗃️ Prequalified Tender: $0
📩 Limited Tender: $8.15m
GovTech Flex
Converlens: An Adelaide-based consultation, engagement and survey platform secured a $46k contract with the Net Zero Economy Authority. Since 2018, Converlens has quietly picked up more than $1.6 million in federal government work, averaging around $416k per annum over the last three financial years.
🧱Builder Better
When the System Fails, Execution Matters More
The Auditor-General’s Report No 31 (2024–25) offers a measured but unequivocal account of how Defence procurement has drifted from its policy foundation. Despite clear directives designed to embed Australian industry into major contracts, the Department of Defence has failed to implement the required mechanisms to ensure that intent becomes outcome.
While not accusing the Department of Defence of bad faith, the audit delivered a far more damning indictment: it reveals a system structurally incapable of fulfilling its own stated objectives for Australian industry participation. The failures are not isolated oversights but the direct consequence of institutional arrangements that have critically failed to keep pace with the policies they are meant to champion.
The Auditor-General's report meticulously catalogues a series of profound failings that paint a picture of systemic breakdown:
Blind Procurement: Defence cannot reliably identify which of its myriad contracts incorporate Australian industry obligations. The absence of a central register or even a basic tagging mechanism within its procurement systems forces contract managers into a world of manual, inconsistent, and opaque processes across vital projects. (See pages 27–28 and 59–60 of the ANAO report)
Missing Mandates: Industry participation plans and schedules—the very blueprints for local involvement—are frequently absent, critically incomplete, or approved so late in the procurement cycle as to render them ineffective. Shockingly, of eight contracts scrutinised, only three had approved plans by August 2024. Others proceeded with mere drafts, while some offered no evidence of exemption or justification for the omission. (See pages 57–59)
Superficial Monitoring: The oversight of contracted commitments to Australian industry is exposed as limited and fundamentally unreliable. Across five contracts with active obligations, a mere 12 out of 59 commitments were actually reported. In four instances of clear delivery failure, Defence's follow-up was cursory, occurring just once. (See pages 64–65)
Outdated Arsenal for Implementation: Procurement guidance and templates, the essential tools for enforcing policy, are themselves outdated or incomplete. Key documents, including the Defence Procurement Manual and Australian Industry Capability (AIC) related templates, were either obsolete or languishing in draft form during the audit. The comprehensive AIC guidance suite, exposed in draft form in 2021, had still not been fully implemented. (See pages 41–42)
Ghost Governance: Crucial governance structures mandated by policy to oversee and drive the Defence Policy for Industry Participation (DPIP) were simply never established. The mandated working group, intended to ensure enterprise-wide implementation and review, was not created, leaving a vacuum in strategic oversight. (See pages 69–70)
A number of defence-focused media outlets picked up on the report. Defence Connect highlighted the gap between policy intent and actual execution, calling for stronger compliance and accountability in Defence procurement. Australian Defence Magazine summarised the report’s findings but avoided engaging with its broader implications. Their coverage tends to focus on expenditure figures and procedural adjustments, rather than the concrete and often debilitating consequences for businesses trying to work within a system that routinely fails to function as designed.
These responses share an assumption that the policy framework is being applied in practice. The audit makes clear that it is not. In our view, the problem is not a lack of policy clarity but a profound absence of execution.
What these commentaries often overlook is the corrosive, cumulative effect of such administrative decay. It is not merely Defence that bears the cost; the entire market and the nation's sovereign capability ambitions suffer. When a policy as foundational as Australian Industry Participation is so erratically applied, investors and industry partners begin to question the credibility of stated government priorities at the crucial point of delivery. Early-stage companies, many established in direct response to public pronouncements about building sovereign capability, are confronted by a procurement landscape where requirements shift not by strategic design, but by systemic disarray. Without dependable systems, these firms are unjustly forced to absorb uncertainty that rightly belongs to the buyer, not the supplier.
Successfully navigating this treacherous environment now demands more than mere strategic alignment; it requires a deep fluency in how and where policy consistently breaks down. Procurement, it appears, often operates on improvised workarounds rather than robust workflows. The ability to discern formal process from deeply entrenched informal realities has become an essential, if unwelcome, prerequisite for engagement.
The pivotal lesson from the Auditor-General’s report is not that government policy is inherently untrustworthy, but that the systems underpinning its execution cannot be taken for granted. Until the administrative machinery is overhauled to match policy intent, genuine progress will hinge on acute insight, astute pattern recognition, and the tenacious ability to navigate systemic friction with unwavering purpose.
The Business-to-Government (B2G) opportunity within Defence has not evaporated. The strategic imperative for a robust Australian industrial base remains a visible thread in government pronouncements, policy statements, and ministerial briefings. Procurement volumes are still significant. What has fundamentally eroded, however, is the reliability of that intent translating into tangible outcomes at the point of execution. This is the challenging, yet still addressable, terrain of the contemporary B2G market: strategically vital, economically significant, but profoundly shaped by the practical realities of how systems truly behave. Enduring success will belong to those who can accurately read both the policy ambition and the on-the-ground execution.
🧱Builder Better Extra
🗺️ No One Else Mapped This — So We Did
We’ve released what we believe is the first market map of Australian startups and scaleups selling to government.
Up until now, it did not exist, not from government, not from industry, not from anyone paying serious attention to the early-stage market. So we built it.
Like many early-stage efforts, we bootstrapped this with a lot of data mining from AusTender records, some open-source digging, and our average Canva skills.
But we applied clear inclusion criteria. Companies must be Australian-based, privately held, and either venture-backed, angel-backed, or bootstrapped. Each must have secured at least one reportable government contract. Not a grant. A contract.
We focused on the Federal Government, though our open-source research also turned up a number of startups working with New South Wales and Queensland. We plan to expand this scope in the next version.
This is not a marketing piece. It is a tool. Too much of the commentary around public procurement relies on vague sentiment. We wanted to show that a market does exist, even if it is still far too small. These companies have earned just over $2.8 billion in reported government revenue. That is the foundation I plan to build from.
It is not complete, but it is qualified. If we missed someone who meets the criteria, send them through. We think this market deserves sharper focus, and we are here for it.
Click the thumbnail below and answer a few quick questions to get your copy.
📣 Are you a Startup Selling to the Government, or want to?
Each week, more than 1,500 federal contracts are published on AusTender. We track what we can, but we cannot review every supplier to identify which companies are startups.
If you’re:
Tendering for government work
Already delivering to a government customer
Recently awarded a contract
We want to hear from you.
You don't need a press release; leave a comment below or get in touch with us.
We are always looking for stories that help explain what is actually happening in the B2G and GovTech markets.
📄 Method and Scope
Each week, we track reported contract data from AusTender, the Commonwealth government’s procurement reporting system. Our focus is on contracts classified under software, SaaS, and digital services, as these categories are most relevant to technology founders building with or for government.
AusTender publishes thousands of contract notices each week across a wide range of categories. While we rely on this data as our primary source, we cannot guarantee the accuracy or timeliness of individual listings.
We do not attempt to cover every sector or supplier. However, if a startup is awarded a contract and we can verify it, we will include it, regardless of classification. These stories help surface where momentum exists and where future opportunity may lie.
✍️Meet the Editor
Hi, I'm Mat, a Startup advisor, former bureaucrat, investor, and lifelong procurement tragic.
Throughout my career, I’ve worked on four of the Commonwealth's most significant non-defence contracts. I remain frustrated that early-stage companies are often excluded from the government market.
This Substack is part of how I’m building in public. I work with founders and investors who see the $80 billion business-to-government opportunity in Australia.
We also support founders in essential but often overlooked areas, such as governance, risk, and strategy.
If you’re a founder looking to break into government or seeking opportunities to back generational companies in this space, please don't hesitate to reach out. I’m always up for a coffee.