Information last reviewed at:
04 September 2008
History of the Building Code of Australia
INTRODUCTION
In the building regulatory area, that is the regulation of public safety, health and amenity in buildings, Australia has historically had strongly individual and substantially different systems in each of the 6 states and 2 territories.
AUSTRALIA'S CONSTITUTION AND BUILDING REGULATIONS
The foundation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901 was the culmination of over 10 years of discussions and compromises between a number of British colonies which had little in common except for their substantially British ethnic origins and that they happened to occupy the same continent. The basis of this new nation was its Constitution, which is still in force over 100 years later. The Constitution sets out the roles, responsibilities and powers of the Commonwealth Government. By standard convention, those matters, which are not mentioned in the Australian Constitution, remain the responsibility of the states.
As the Constitution does not mention matters regarding the safety, health and amenity of people in buildings, responsibility for them rests with the state and territory governments. This has led to 8 separate Acts of Parliament, one for each of the states and territories.
Because of a range of differences between the Building Acts, this led to 8 quite distinct building regulatory systems. Indeed, at various times it has been even more complex. Some states passed on many of their building regulatory powers to their municipal councils, which effectively enacted their own building regulatory systems by way of council by-laws - and there have been times when Australia has had over 900 local councils.
AUSTRALIAN MODEL UNIFORM BUILDING CODE
The complexity of Australia's building regulatory system provided a legislative maze for building practitioners to work through. However, after World War II several of the states started to establish more uniform technical building requirements, and those states which delegated their primary responsibilities to municipal councils started to reclaim control. This led a number of people to start thinking about the benefits of having a National-wide set of building regulations. These people first met in the early 1960's, and in 1965 they negotiated the establishment of the Interstate Standing Committee on Uniform Building Regulations (ISCUBR). ISCUBR was basically an agreement between the state administrations responsible for building regulatory matters to pool their resources for the benefit of all states.
ISCUBR's first work was to draft a model technical code for building regulatory purposes. The document was referred to as the "Australian Model Uniform Building Code" (AMUBC), and was firstly released in the early 1970's.
The AMUBC contained proposals for both technical matters and some administrative matters which were based on the then Local Government Act of one of the states (New South Wales). The intention was that states could use the AMUBC as a model for their own building regulations. However, variation from the model was considerable, with many states choosing to follow their own administrative requirements, some states still leaving the matter to their municipal councils. The most significant variation was that states changed the provisions in accordance with their perceptions of local needs.
Over the years the AMUBC underwent a number of amendments. Most of those were of a technical nature and did not address the fundamental problems referred to above. Nor did these amendments address the structure of the code that many believed was not set out in a logical sequence; eg it was necessary to use Parts 17 and 18 before being able to apply Part 16. Further many of the Parts were blank to allow the state or territory to include their own, usually administrative provisions.