Building Compliance and Enforcement Orders

About this course.

Building compliance means building work meeting the legal requirements that apply to it — the technical requirements for how buildings are designed and constructed, and the procedural requirements for approvals, inspections and certification. Enforcement is what happens when work does not comply: the system by which regulators and building surveyors or certifiers identify non-compliance and use statutory tools to require it to be fixed. The powers to do this come almost entirely from state and territory legislation, because in Australia building regulation is administered at the state and territory level rather than by a single national regulator. That is why the specific instruments, their names and the processes for using them differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, and why this course keeps its explanation general. This module is general information and not legal advice.

The technical requirements for building work are set out nationally, in general terms, through the work of the Australian Building Codes Board (ABCB), which develops the National Construction Code as the nationally consistent set of minimum requirements for the design, construction and performance of buildings. However — and this is the key structural point — the Code does not itself have the force of law. It is given legal effect only when each state and territory adopts and applies it through its own building legislation. In other words, a nationally consistent technical document sits on top of eight separate legal systems, each with its own building Act, regulations, administrative arrangements, regulator and enforcement powers. Compliance is therefore measured against a largely common technical benchmark, but it is enforced through jurisdiction-specific law. Information about the ABCB and the Code is available at abcb.gov.au.