Turning infrastructure into opportunities
Supporting major projects, government agencies and regional economic development organisations to achieve credible local content outcomes, build regional capability, unlock value and generate real economic and social benefits for communities.
Our Clients Include
12
Project Owners
20+
Tender Teams
8
Tier One Contractors
8
Economic Organisations
2
Community Ecosystems
What We Do
Hughes et al (HEA) partners with project owners and contractors, government agencies and regional stakeholders to plan, activate and support local and First Nations business participation, employment, and training and skills development.
Early engagement strengthens approvals confidence, reduces delivery risk and ensures projects deliver measurable local economic outcomes.
Why Local Content Matters
Major projects face increasing scrutiny to deliver genuine local jobs, procurement outcomes and community benefits - all while operating within fixed timelines, budgets and approvals pathways.
When local content is addressed late or treated as a compliance exercise, projects face material risks: approval delays, delivery disruption, reputational damage and loss of social licence.
How HEA Changes The Outcome
We help projects get local content right early. By working upstream of delivery, we design strategies that are realistic, defensible and deliverable at scale - reducing downstream risk and improving approvals confidence across complex project environments.
Our Approach
Strategy - Early planning aligned to project needs, regional capability and regulatory requirements.
Intelligence - Market, workforce and supply chain insights that ensure commitments are credible and achievable.
Activation - Practical implementation through systems, reporting, Jobs Hubs and ongoing assurance.
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Our Services
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Building local content strategy practices during design, approvals, early works, and construction phases, across the supply chain, and establish platforms for economic impact and legacy.
We bolster procurement, employment, and engagement teams with resources, systems and practices that define, enable and support the delivery of collaborative local content.
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Writing Local Australian Industry Participation Plans, that cover procurement, employment, and Indigenous participation, and align to stakeholder engagement objectives.
Developing collaborative frameworks that link plans and initiatives, together with functions and resources, and align with stakeholders from project and community alike.
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Item descriptionIdentify government, industry, and community policy requirements and targets, and ensure implementation, process management and reporting are in place.
Developing key performance indicators and undertaking target analysis, along with benchmarking against our local content database of hundreds of projects.
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Managing market testing campaigns for procurement processes, that involve the use or software, EOI development, and question and data frameworks.
Processing market testing data and providing analysis and insight into local market capability and capacity, and the subsequent opportunities for engagement and market development.
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Working alongside procurement specialists to provide assurance and support in the procurement of significant and/or sensitive procurement packages.
Undertake detailed package research including market testing, data analysis, capability and capacity assessment, and stakeholder engagement and analysis.
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Helping clients understand the roles of systems such as ICN Gateway, BenchOn, Felix, Social Pro, VendorPanel, and the enterprise systems they connect with.
Supporting clients to design system approaches to local content including the development of inhouse tools, systems interfaces, and an engagement and participation strategy.
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Developing client systems to engage, evaluate, and report on local supply chains, workforces, to ensure compliance, performance and stakeholder reporting is undertaken.
Consolidating multiple data sources to identify risks, opportunities, needs, and trends, and developing and implementing tools for governance reporting and public statements.
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Helping projects and economic advocates to implement and manage their own strategies through our supportive frameworks, systems, and networks.
Mentoring project teams and people on how to deliver local content strategies and/or undertake specific elements of their role to deliver tailored local content outcomes.
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Crafting tender documentation and evaluation frameworks for project proponents to help drive competitive and pragmatic tender submissions, and assessable local value.
Undertaking tender evaluations, writing feedback on submissions, and providing reports on which tenderer will likely create the best local content outcomes.
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Working within tender teams to facilitate local content discussion, clarification, and practices, to develop win theme responses.
Writing submission responses and plans, preparing questions for clarification, modelling commitment targets, and supporting workshops and interactives.
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Enabling communities with the knowledge and the systems to build their own capability and capacity to leverage community benefits from major project local content.
Establishing or supporting frameworks of collaboration between major projects operating across one region to identify and progress cumulative strategies.
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Working with both projects and communities to establish uWorkin Talent Communities, that increase local workforce and subcontractor participation and development.
Embedding technology and practices that support key stakeholders facilitate collaboration across their community on the basis of insight provided by reliable systems and data.
Your Local Content Experts
HEA supports major infrastructure and resource projects across Australia to design and deliver local content strategies that create real impact and long‑term regional benefits.
We work across industry participation, workforce development and stakeholder engagement to ensure local communities share in the opportunities created by major investment.
Our dual experience - partnering with both owner’s teams and main works contractors - enables us to design collaborative, compliant and achievable local content models. We build frameworks that set clear expectations, guide delivery, and demonstrate measurable outcomes.
We are not just advisors - we are hands‑on practitioners. We’ve planned, tendered, calculated, evaluated, advised, implemented and delivered across some of Australia’s most significant regional projects.
Our mission is simple: to strengthen regional economies by creating local jobs, building capability and enabling sustainable community benefits.
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Meet the Team
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Ben Hughes
Managing Director and Principal
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Jason Manttan
Principal Consultant – Local Content, Social Outcomes & Regional Economic Development
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Jacqueline Lawton
Local Industry Participation Officer
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Camila Hynes
Fractional CMO I Marketing Lead
Case Studies
Local Content Best Practice Guide
Download our Local Content Guidance Note, referenced in the Commonwealth Government Procurement report (2022) as an important resource in helping understand Local Content.
Written in 2020 during COVID, the guide was aimed principally at the Project Directors of main works contractors who were normally contracted to build a project……and suddenly expected to develop an economy. What started out as a lock down project to help a client ended up being a resource that we amended and published for free.
Much has moved on since 2020; however, a lot of the underlying principles still prevail, even if much of it is now accepted. Enter your details below to access the guide.
For all of our latest thinking, please visit our Articles page: https://www.hughesetal.com.au/articles
