Victoria’s infrastructure spending is set to fall from $21.4 billion this financial year to an average of $16.5 billion across the forward estimates, settling at $15.3 billion by 2029-30, according to the state’s budget papers. The Metro Tunnel and the West Gate Tunnel are both open. Fewer megaprojects means fewer new construction contracts getting signed, and that pipeline has quietly become the biggest market in the country for certified social enterprises.
That’s the argument in a Spinifex opinion column published by The Fifth Estate, written by Steven Weir of Amplifier Collective, who works on social procurement and how it lands for the businesses on the receiving end.
His point isn’t that the Big Build was a mistake. It’s that a policy engine got bolted onto a construction boom, and nobody has said much publicly about what happens when the boom winds down.
Construction is 29 per cent of the buyer base
Weir points to Social Traders’ latest impact report and, in particular, the breakdown of who’s actually spending the money. Construction and infrastructure make up 29 per cent of buyers, the largest single category. Six of the eight organisations spending more than $5 million with certified social enterprises are construction and infrastructure contractors. CPB Contractors is the biggest spender in the report at $34.2 million in FY25.
That concentration isn’t an accident. Victoria’s social procurement framework has run since 2018, and the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority mandates social procurement on every construction contract it oversees. When the state is pushing tens of billions a year through transport and health projects, head contractors carry those obligations down into subcontract packages, and a certified supplier gets a leg-up it wouldn’t get on a private job.
The framework was never written to lean this hard on one industry. Its objectives cover employment, inclusion, First Nations participation and environmental outcomes as well. Construction just became the engine, Weir writes, because that’s where the money was.
He’s blunt about the risk. It isn’t that a handful of businesses miss out on a few packages. It’s that “an unusually favourable few years of procurement got mistaken for proof of a diversified, resilient market”, when it may have just been a good cycle.
Complicating it further: Victoria’s social enterprise strategy, the document the 2018 procurement framework grew out of, has expired, and Weir says it isn’t clear when or if it gets replaced. The framework is now doing the heavy lifting without the strategy that spawned it.
An inquiry has put social procurement under scrutiny
The second problem is messier. A report commissioned as part of an inquiry into misconduct on major Victorian construction sites listed alleged “misuse and abuse of social procurement schemes” among the practices under scrutiny, alongside alleged misuse of Aboriginal business enterprise arrangements. Weir notes the allegations are untested and matters have gone to police.
He draws the comparison to black cladding in Indigenous procurement, where non-Indigenous businesses exploit Indigenous business status to win work meant for genuine Indigenous enterprises. He says he hasn’t seen anything proven to be directly equivalent in the social enterprise space, and that certification is a real safeguard against the obvious forms of misrepresentation.
The worry is spillover. Once values-based procurement starts sounding rort-able in one corner of an industry, the scepticism doesn’t stay in that corner, and legitimate operators cop the blowback.
As for what the intermediaries and peak bodies in the “social enterprise eco-system” are saying about a shrinking buyer base, Weir’s read is that the conversation still sounds like business as usual: “More certification. More capability building. More procurement readiness. More celebration of a growth story.” Useful things, he writes, but not a strategy for a market that’s about to look very different.
What a shrinking pipeline looks like on the tools
Here’s the part that matters if you’re running a crew rather than writing procurement policy.
A tunnel opening is not the end of the work, it’s the end of a labour cycle. Civil and tunnelling crews demobilise first, the fitout and finishing trades stay on until handover, and everyone rolls off looking for the next contract. Where that next contract comes from is a question of what got signed twelve to eighteen months earlier, not what’s being announced at a ribbon cutting today.
So the gap doesn’t show up in your hours straight away. It shows up later, and by then the decision to hire an apprentice, buy a second ute, or take on a bigger package has already been made on the assumption the pipeline holds.
For subbies who’ve built a share of their turnover on government-funded packages, the practical question is what proportion of the order book depends on a contract with social procurement clauses in it, and what the plan is when those clauses stop appearing because the contracts stop being let. Weir cites Social Traders’ own research on the answer: diversifying customers and offerings is what cushions a business against market shocks.
NSW and Queensland are further back on the same curve
This isn’t only Victoria’s headache. Weir points to Infrastructure Australia’s market capacity data, which has the NSW and Victorian major infrastructure pipelines already contracting while Queensland’s and the Northern Territory’s grow.
NSW introduced an “if not, why not” local-supplier requirement in early 2025, modelled on the Victorian and Queensland approaches, just as the construction spend it leans on starts to soften. Queensland’s the mirror image: a record capital program driven by Brisbane 2032 is underwriting a newly strengthened social procurement policy, but 2032 is a fixed date, and there’s a cliff edge on the far side of it.
“Victoria just happens to be further along the same curve than everyone else,” Weir writes. “A good headline year is great when a market’s expanding. Strategy matters more once the ground underneath that growth starts shifting.”
His closing line is the one worth keeping: the Big Build may have been “a program that built a market and might have built a trap for it too”.
“a program that built a market and might have built a trap for it too”
Watch the contract awards, not the openings. If you want an early read on Victorian work in 2028, look at what the state is signing in 2026, and whether a replacement social enterprise strategy turns up before the procurement framework is the only thing left standing.
Frequently asked questions
Why is Victoria’s infrastructure spending expected to fall?
State budget papers show it sliding from $21.4 billion this financial year to an average of $16.5 billion across the forward estimates, hitting $15.3 billion by 2029-30, as major projects like the Metro Tunnel and West Gate Tunnel move from construction to completion.
Why does social procurement depend so heavily on construction?
Construction and infrastructure make up 29 per cent of buyers in Social Traders’ impact report, the largest single category, because Victoria’s social procurement framework, running since 2018, is mandated on every project overseen by the Victorian Infrastructure Delivery Authority.
What should subcontractors reliant on government contracts do as the pipeline shrinks?
Steven Weir cites Social Traders’ own research showing that diversifying customers and offerings is what cushions a business against the kind of market shock that follows a construction boom winding down.
Has anyone been charged over misuse of social procurement schemes in Victoria?
No. A report commissioned for an inquiry into misconduct on Victorian construction sites listed alleged misuse of social procurement schemes among practices under scrutiny, but the allegations are untested, matters have gone to police, and no person or company has been named.
Sourced from The Fifth Estate, Social Traders, Infrastructure Australia. Original article.
