If MSP 2.0 does not build in ethical conduct and past performance from day one, it will have to bolt them on later, under worse conditions

The Commonwealth Procurement Rules changed on 17 November 2025. Ethical conduct is now an explicit value for money criterion under CPR 4.5(c). Reasonable enquiries into a supplier's compliance apply to every procurement under CPR 6.6, not just those above a threshold. CPR 6.7 requires officials to actively prevent conflicts of interest, not just record them. Historic performance is now part of the value for money calculus, not a footnote to it.

MSP 2.0 is being designed after those rules took effect. That is an advantage, if Defence uses it. It is also a test.

The old model was not built for this

The prior MSP arrangements were designed, awarded and largely governed under a framework where ethical conduct and past performance sat outside the value for money assessment, checked at the margins through probity plans and conflict declarations, rather than built into the commercial architecture itself.

That gap shows up in a specific way with a standing panel model. An MSP is not a single transaction. It is a multi-year embedded relationship, renewed, extended and layered with work packages long after the original award. A supplier's compliance posture, and any adverse findings against it or its parent, can change substantially over that life. A model that only tests ethical conduct and past performance at initial award, and treats the standing offer as settled after that, is applying a 2018 lens to a 2026 rule set.

What building it in actually looks like

Ongoing, not point in time, compliance review. Reasonable enquiries under CPR 6.6 should be a scheduled feature of panel governance, not a one off gate at tender. A supplier's adverse findings, regulatory proceedings or settlements arising after award should trigger a documented reassessment against CPR 4.5(c), not sit unexamined until the next re-tender cycle years later.

Conflict of interest management that is specified, not assumed. CPR 6.7 requires officials to seek to prevent conflicts, which is a higher bar than disclosing them after the fact. For a workforce and delivery model where the same entities can hold embedded advisory access and compete for adjacent work, MSP 2.0 needs a published position on what is permitted, what requires a firewall, and how firewall integrity is actually audited, rather than leaving the question to be worked out case by case once the panel is running.

Transparent linkage between past performance and panel standing. If historic performance is genuinely a value for money factor, it should have a visible mechanism, in scoring, renewal or work allocation, connected to it. A framework where poor past performance and adverse compliance findings sit on file but never visibly affect standing or workflow is not implementing CPR 4.5(c). It is documenting it.

Why this belongs in the design phase, not the review phase

Retrofitting ethical conduct and past performance scrutiny into a panel that is already running is harder than designing for it from the outset, and it usually only happens after an ANAO report or a Senate Estimates question forces the issue. Defence has form here. Independent reviews of past MSP transitions have already found governance and behavioural gaps that were not caught until well after the fact.

MSP 2.0 is the chance to build the mechanism in from the start, while the rules are new and the panel has not yet accumulated years of embedded relationships that make change harder to make.

Ethical conduct and past performance are not compliance overhead to the workforce model. Under the current rules, they are part of what value for money means. A model that treats them as an afterthought will be measured against a standard it did not design for.