While the Queensland Government is committed to an open and transparent process for public private partnership projects, this objective must be balanced against the need to protect the competitive position of individual proponents and the commercial interests of government. In this regard, it is important to ensure that confidential information is protected.
As a condition of employment, all public servants are under a general obligation of confidentiality to their employer. Accordingly, it is not necessary for members of the government project team who are public servants to execute a confidentiality undertaking in relation to the project. All government advisors, members of each bidding consortium and any other third party that is privy to commercially sensitive bid information must provide a formal undertaking to the government that they will keep this information confidential.
It is important to establish clear security procedures for handling bid related documents (that is, submissions prepared by proponents and the evaluation report which may include discussion of commercially sensitive bid information). A lack of proponent confidence in relation to security arrangements could deter proponents from bidding in the future or reduce the detail and volume of information provided in support of bids. Government project teams should consider a regime for internal security of documents that may include the following:
• Documents which contain commercially sensitive information should be stored in secure conditions at all times, with only persons authorised by the Project Director able to access such documents;
• Appropriate protection of computer generated documents should be maintained through the use of passwords or other means ;
• Commercially sensitive information will only be made available on a "need to know" basis; and
• Limited numbers of copies of bid related documents should be produced, and each copy should be numbered and logged.
The highest level of confidentiality should be accorded to bids and bid evaluation documents.
The issue of intellectual property is dealt with in section 4.1 of this document.