The solution to the regulatory burdens facing building surveyors
27 July 2026
Building surveyors occupy a space that is easy to underestimate and difficult to overstate. We sit at the junction between intention and reality, legislation and construction, policy and practice. And while our mandate sounds straightforward – to ensure buildings are safe, accessible, durable, sustainable and compliant – what ‘compliance’ means in practice is neither simple nor clear, and that gap is growing.
At the AIBS South Australia Conference on 2 March 2026, AIBS President Wayne Liddy addressed that gap directly. Here is what he had to say:
Regulation matters, but it must be workable.
Good regulation saves lives, protects consumers and ensures structural integrity, fire safety, accessibility and environmental performance. Tragedies like the Grenfell Tower fire demonstrate what happens when systemic failure takes hold across design, construction and oversight. Nobody in the profession disputes the need for rules.
The dispute is about what those rules demand of the people who must apply them.
Across Australian jurisdictions, building regulations have become increasingly layered. Amendments sit on top of amendments. Performance solutions overlay prescriptive pathways. State instruments intersect with national codes. Advisory notes attempt to clarify what explanatory memoranda failed to explain.
In theory, this creates flexibility. In practice, it creates ambiguity.
Policy makers frequently operate at a distance from construction sites, documentation packages and real-time decision-making pressures. They draft provisions in response to headlines, inquiries, political urgency or stakeholder lobbying. They intend to close loopholes, tighten oversight, and prevent recurrence. But ultimately, every new clause has to be interpreted by someone, just as every ambiguity has to be resolved by someone.
That someone is usually the building surveyor.
A structural imbalance of risk
At AIBS, we believe there are three overlapping problems at play.
First, reactive lawmaking means major regulatory change tends to follow disaster or scandal. This, in turn, means it arrives compressed, politically charged and driven by the need to demonstrate action. Consultation with industry occurs, but implementation timelines are tight, guidance materials lag and industry training struggles to keep pace. The result is regulation that looks robust on paper but lacks operational clarity.
The second issue is fragmentation. The National Construction Code aims for national harmonisation, yet each state and territory retains its own building acts, regulations and administrative frameworks. Local planning, fire authorities, and energy standards all add different sets of requirements into the mix. The cumulative effect is regulatory density, and density does not equal clarity.
The third problem is the shift toward performance-based regulation, which is compounded by the rise of modular, prefabricated and off-site construction. These methods are being positioned as solutions to housing affordability and availability challenges, but the regulatory complexities they introduce for building surveyors are rarely part of that conversation.
Performance-based systems allow innovation and encourage engineering judgment, but they transfer interpretive responsibility directly to the building surveyor. When a standard says a building must achieve a particular level of safety "to the degree necessary," the building surveyor determines what that degree is.
This ambiguity is a risk for the surveyor because, if something goes wrong, it is rarely the policy writer who stands in court.
While industry is frequently consulted on draft regulations, it’s important to note that consultation and co-design are not the same thing. When a practitioner warns of issues during a consultation process, this information is noted but not always incorporated.
The result is often that a building surveyor becomes a policy translator. They translate legislative intent into site instructions, broad objectives into measurable outcomes, and political language into practical judgment, all while balancing commercial pressures, client expectations, statutory deadlines and personal liability. The consequences of this arrangement are predictable: professional stress increases, insurance premiums rise, defensive practice becomes the norm, and innovation is quietly discouraged.
What better looks like
It goes without saying that practitioners should be embedded in the drafting process, not consulted once drafts are circulated. Regulations should also be subject to mandatory implementation testing, with real building applications simulated before commencement.
Guidance materials should be published concurrently with legislative change, not months later. And if regulation intentionally relies on professional judgment, that judgment must be supported rather than retrospectively penalised in isolation.
Underlying all of this is a cultural shift. Building surveyors are public safety professionals. They stand between non-compliance and occupation in an increasingly complex construction landscape, and their input into regulatory matters is not just best-practice, but best for entire communities.
The message to policymakers is not ‘regulate less,’ but to regulate smarter. AIBS welcomes the opportunity to engage earlier, and encourages regulators to draft clearly, test practically and share risk fairly. Because no regulation, however well-written, exists in the abstract. It lives or dies in its application, and its application rests with the people in the profession.
Those people are the building surveyors, and they deserve clarity, coherence and a regulatory environment that reflects the weight of what they carry.