Procurement Begins With a Conversation: Reflections from Supply Nation Connect 2026
Walking through Supply Nation Connect 2026 in Perth, I found myself watching not only the Indigenous businesses exhibiting on the floor, but also the people walking past them.
Some buyers moved confidently from stand to stand, asking questions, exchanging details and showing genuine curiosity about the businesses they were meeting. Others seemed more hesitant. They would glance at a booth, slow slightly, then continue walking. Some would engage briefly before moving on. Others appeared to be searching for familiar names, familiar suppliers or familiar conversations.
After years of attending events like this, I have come to realise that perhaps the greatest challenge facing Indigenous procurement is not policy, targets or supplier capability. It is curiosity.
For more than a decade, governments and corporations have invested heavily in Indigenous procurement frameworks. The intent has been clear. Create pathways for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses to participate in the economy and share in the opportunities generated by public and private sector spending. The results have been significant, with Indigenous businesses now operating across almost every sector imaginable, from professional services and technology through to construction, infrastructure, logistics, creative industries and environmental management.
Yet despite this progress, it is difficult to ignore the reality that many procurement professionals still approach Indigenous procurement differently from mainstream procurement.
Traditional procurement practice encourages buyers to understand markets, explore alternatives, build supplier relationships and continually seek innovation. Good procurement professionals do not wait for opportunity to arrive in their inbox. They actively search for it. They attend industry events, build networks, meet emerging suppliers and challenge existing assumptions about who can deliver value.
The question, then, is why Indigenous procurement is sometimes treated differently.
As I walked through Connect, I couldn’t help but notice a familiar pattern. Some of the most experienced procurement professionals appeared reluctant to engage beyond the businesses they already knew. Whether driven by time pressures, perceived risk, uncertainty or unconscious bias, there was often a tendency to gravitate towards the familiar while avoiding conversations that sat outside established networks.
The irony is that those avoided conversations are often where the greatest opportunities exist.
Every Aboriginal business owner exhibiting at Connect has invested time, energy and resources to be there. They are making themselves available. They are opening the door to conversation, collaboration and partnership. The least a buyer can do is walk through it.
Because procurement does not begin with a contract.
It begins with a conversation.
In recent days, a Reuters photograph from Washington, D.C. has travelled across the world. It shows a Black woman sitting on a train, surrounded by members of the Patriot Front, described in reporting as a white nationalist group, during America’s 250th anniversary celebrations. The image is hard to look at because it holds so much in one frame: fear, disappointment, disbelief, exhaustion and the heavy weight of history repeating itself in a new form.
A woman simply sitting in public space, surrounded by masked men carrying an ideology of racial dominance, is not just an American image. It is a warning image. It reminds us that history does not disappear just because nations celebrate anniversaries. It reminds us that racism does not always arrive quietly. Sometimes it arrives overt, loud, organised, proud of itself and convinced it has the right to intimidate.
America, at 250 years, is still dealing with the cultural and racial fractures that have shaped much of its national story. Those fractures have changed form over time, but they have not disappeared. The language may be different. The platforms may be different. The uniforms may be different. But the fear, the hostility, the dominance and the attempt to decide who belongs and who does not, that is old.
Australia should not look at that image with distance or superiority. We should look at it with honesty.
Because we have our own unfinished work.
Here, too, we are still dealing with cultural and racial divides that go back to invasion, dispossession, frontier violence, stolen children, exclusion, assimilation policies and generations of public denial. Here, too, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are often asked to carry the burden of educating others, absorbing disrespect, explaining history, defending identity and proving the value of culture in systems that should already know better.
And today, we are seeing something deeply concerning. Social media has changed the way people behave. It has made cruelty feel casual. It has made racism feel amplified. It has rewarded outrage, humiliation, conspiracy and division. It has given people permission, or at least the illusion of permission, to say things publicly that are hostile, racialised and dehumanising. It has normalised the loudest and most extreme voices while making respectful dialogue feel harder and harder to hold. This also shows up in politics, where these topics become political point scoring, such as the rise of the Orange Wave, with it’s fear and division tactics.
But we need to be clear: this is not normal.
It is not normal to intimidate people because of race. It is not normal to attack culture because it makes others uncomfortable. It is not normal to reduce First Nations people to political talking points. It is not normal to use fear to divide communities. It is not normal to dress hate up as patriotism, free speech or cultural pride. When behaviour promotes fear, dominance, exclusion and hostility, we should name it for what it is.
Perhaps one of the greatest challenges facing all of us today is the willingness to sit with discomfort. Real learning rarely happens when our existing views are simply reinforced. It happens when we ask difficult questions, examine our assumptions, and challenge the cognitive biases that shapes how we see the world. It requires us to step outside the safety of our own experiences and attempt to understand life through someone else’s eyes.
Growth is often found in disequilibrium, that uncomfortable space where old beliefs no longer explain what we are seeing and a new way of understanding has not yet fully formed. It is in this space that we learn our new schema, a new framework for making sense of the world and our perception of belonging. The challenge is not to retreat from that discomfort, but to remain curious within it.
For reconciliation, this is essential. We cannot build stronger relationships, challenge racism, or bridge cultural divides if we are unwilling to reflect on our own perspectives. Progress begins when we move from certainty to inquiry, from defensiveness to understanding, and from simply hearing different experiences to genuinely considering what they might mean. Sometimes the most courageous thing we can do is admit that we do not yet know enough and be willing to learn.
It begins with a willingness to ask questions, challenge assumptions and learn something new. It requires procurement professionals to step outside their comfort zones and engage with businesses they may not fully understand. The same curiosity that drives innovation and competition in mainstream procurement should apply equally to Indigenous procurement.
For organisations genuinely committed to supplier diversity, this matters. Policies and spend targets can only achieve so much. Meaningful outcomes depend on the behaviour of individual buyers and procurement teams. If Indigenous businesses are continually required to prove themselves before a conversation even begins, while established suppliers benefit from existing relationships and familiarity, the playing field remains uneven.
What stood out at Connect this year was not a lack of capability among Indigenous businesses. Quite the opposite. Across the exhibition floor were sophisticated organisations delivering complex services and solutions to major clients across Australia. The capability was visible. The expertise was visible. The ambition was visible.
The challenge was ensuring people were willing to stop long enough to see it.
Perhaps this is the next stage in the evolution of Indigenous procurement. We have spent years building Indigenous supplier capability, certification pathways and procurement policies. Now the focus must also turn to buyer capability.
How do we encourage procurement professionals to become more culturally confident? How do we challenge risk-based assumptions that can unknowingly exclude Indigenous businesses? How do we create procurement cultures where curiosity is valued as highly as compliance?
These are important questions because Indigenous procurement was never intended to be about meeting a target. It was intended to create economic opportunity, strengthen communities and foster relationships that benefit everyone involved.
Events like Supply Nation Connect remind us that these outcomes are not achieved through policy alone. They are achieved through people. Through conversations. Through relationships. Through choosing to walk towards a stand rather than past it.
As I left Perth, I found myself reflecting on a simple truth. The future of Indigenous procurement may depend less on how many Indigenous businesses are willing to show up and more on how willing procurement professionals are to meet them halfway.