Australia's Building and Plumbing Regulatory Framework

About this course.

Building and plumbing in Australia are regulated across three tiers of government — the Commonwealth, the states and territories, and local government — and understanding who does what is the foundation of the whole framework. In brief: the Commonwealth's role is largely enabling and coordinating, supporting a nationally consistent technical code but not generally regulating everyday building and plumbing work directly. The states and territories are the primary regulators — they make the laws, give the national code legal force, and run the licensing, approval, inspection and certification systems. Local government (councils) administers many day-to-day approvals and enforcement on the ground, under powers given to it by state law. Each tier has a distinct role, and they interlock.

To understand why the system is shared this way, it helps to remember that Australia is a federation. When the Commonwealth was formed, the national Constitution gave the Commonwealth Parliament power over certain specific matters, but building and construction were not among them. As a result, responsibility for regulating building and plumbing rests principally with the states and territories, each of which has developed its own laws over time. This is the single most important fact about the framework and the reason so much of it "varies by jurisdiction": there is no single national building or plumbing law, but rather a set of state and territory systems that have been brought closer together, particularly on the technical side, through cooperation.