The federal government’s Indigenous Procurement Policy (IPP) is regularly touted as ‘supercharging’ the Indigenous business sector. But the flawed way in which its success is measured could mean the only thing that gets supercharged is the bureaucracy’s feel-good factor.

Since July 2015, the IPP has committed federal government departments to awarding three per cent of all new procurement to Indigenous-owned small businesses by 2020; and the touted ‘success’ of the policy has seen that target date brought forward to the end of 2016–17.