Fifty one per cent is where the question starts

On a share register, 51 per cent looks decisive. It is a majority, and majorities decide things. For a certification process, though, the percentage is where the assessment begins rather than where it ends, and the most instructive development in Australian supplier diversity this year is the one that shows why.

From 1 July 2026, a business seeking to access the Commonwealth’s Indigenous Procurement Policy must be at least 51 per cent First Nations owned and controlled, or registered with the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations, with transition arrangements running through the current financial year. The previous threshold was 50 per cent. One percentage point reads like an administrative tidy up. It is not. At 50 per cent, ownership is shared and so is control. At 51, one party decides. The change closes a structure in which a non Indigenous partner holds an equal stake and an equal say while the business trades on a category built for Indigenous economic participation, an arrangement the sector has long called black cladding and has long asked to be addressed.

Control is not something a share register can show

Consider a business with two shareholders. One holds a majority interest, but the governance documents require agreement on any significant decision. The shareholding says one thing and the practice says another, and it would be unsafe to infer the whole decision making arrangement from the number. That is why supplier standards separate the tests. Supply Nation’s certification considers ownership, management and control as distinct elements, and its process examines governance information and conducts an interview or site visit precisely because a register cannot answer the control question on its own.

The same distinction appears in overseas LGBTIQA+ certification. The Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce’s document guide for incorporated businesses asks for governance and ownership records, including information that would reveal restrictions on the qualifying owners’ control. The purpose is to establish what role those owners actually play, not to find their names in a register. Behind the documents sit practical questions: who has voting rights, how directors are appointed, who authorises transactions, and what can change without the qualifying owner’s agreement. None of those is answered by a percentage.

Verification has to continue, and it has to tighten

A certificate describes a business at the moment of assessment. Businesses take on investors, change directors and restructure, and the original certificate cannot establish that nothing has moved. Supply Nation describes ongoing ownership monitoring and audits, and from 2026 requires every Certified Supplier to complete an annual face to face interview with an Indigenous Business Officer. Its own framing was that its processes had been independently audited as world leading and that this did not mean it could not do more.

The sequence points to a general rule. Certification systems do not get gamed because they were designed badly. They get gamed because they start working. Nobody misrepresents their way into a category that leads nowhere, and once a category is attached to serious money the incentive to qualify by whatever means is created by the category’s own success. Which means the correct order for any new scheme is the opposite of the intuitive one. Starting permissive and tightening later means removing businesses that are already trading on the credential, which is expensive, public and bitter. Starting at the standard the system will eventually need is cheaper in every way that matters.

Rigour without needless intrusion

For LGBTIQA+ owners, verification carries an additional weight, because evidence about the business sits alongside evidence about a person’s identity. That makes proportionality a design requirement rather than an afterthought. The questions are not only how much evidence would satisfy a buyer, but whether the request is proportionate to what is being accessed, whether an applicant has an alternative way to establish eligibility, what happens when an assessment is wrong, and whether a small supplier without an adviser can get through the process at all.

A common percentage provides a starting definition and nothing more. The rest of the design is an explanation of control, a process people can afford and survive, and safeguards for personal information. Those are separate parts of the scheme, and each of them decides whether an owner trusts it enough to use it. A threshold tells an owner whether an application is possible. What the process asks of them, and what it does with the answers, tells them whether to proceed.

Sources

1. Supply Nation. Frequently asked questions for Indigenous businesses.
2. National Indigenous Australians Agency. The Indigenous Procurement Policy is changing: current transition arrangements.
3. Canadian Queer Chamber of Commerce. Document submission guidelines for incorporated businesses.
4. Supply Nation. How we verify Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander businesses.

Source pages last checked 19 September 2026.