Access Requirements for Class 5, 7b and 8 Buildings

About this course.

Access matters because Australian law makes it unlawful to discriminate against a person with disability, and because buildings that are hard to enter, move through or use exclude workers, visitors and customers from ordinary participation in work and public life. Three instruments work together. The Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth) — the DDA — sets the overarching prohibition on disability discrimination, including in access to premises. The Disability (Access to Premises — Buildings) Standards 2010 — the Premises Standards — translate that broad duty into specified building requirements. The National Construction Code (NCC), developed by the ABCB, carries the technical access provisions that are checked at approval. Together they turn a general right into buildable, verifiable requirements.

It helps to understand the DDA first, because it is the foundation on which everything else rests. The DDA is Commonwealth anti-discrimination law, administered in relation to complaints by the Australian Human Rights Commission. It makes discrimination on the ground of disability unlawful across many areas of public life, including employment and the provision of goods, services, facilities and access to premises. Importantly, the DDA operates whether or not a building happens to comply with any particular technical requirement: a person who is denied dignified access to a workplace or a service can, in principle, bring a complaint under the DDA. This is why access is not merely a code-compliance exercise. A building can satisfy the minimum technical provisions and still generate a complaint if, in practice, a person with disability cannot use it on an equal footing. The DDA also recognises the concept of "unjustifiable hardship", which allows that some adjustments may impose costs or difficulties out of all proportion to the benefit — but this is a defence to be established on the facts, not a general excuse, and it is assessed case by case.