Thursday, 19 June 2025

Professional engineers legislation

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (17:32): (1737) When the Professional Engineers Registration Act 2019 was introduced back in 2019, I was opposed to the idea. In fact I used several colourful metaphors to describe how bad I thought the legislation was. My view then, which has not changed, is that this legislation would offer no tangible benefit and simply create a tangle of red tape and drive up costs without any improvement in quality, efficiency or outcome. At the time, the Parliamentary Budget Office produced some costings for the Libertarian Party. This suggested that the cost of professional development could cost around $6000 per year, with the cumulative cost of the scheme to the sector in the hundreds of millions of dollars per year. There were other issues that I anticipated, such as senior experts requiring their work to be overseen by people that are junior and less experienced simply because they have a particular qualification. These kinds of decisions should always have been covered by businesses and existing oversight arrangements.

This legislation is now up for review, and unsurprisingly many of the concerns that I had back in 2019 have actually come to pass. I have heard from professionals in the sector that compliance with this legislation is a headache, particularly for smaller firms. There are apparently issues with hydrologists, engineering geologists and other experts in their fields. The simple answer is to clearly repeal this legislation, but sadly I expect that this is unlikely to be the approach of the government. The next best solution will be to fix many problems that will no doubt be identified by people working on submissions in the coming weeks.

One small aspect of the legislation that could be amended to improve its function would be to make allowances for engineering geologists to be included. The Australian Institute of Geoscientists is well positioned to manage accreditation as they already have an accreditation scheme for registered professional geoscientists, which includes a category for geologists. My team has spoken with people in the sector that have told us that their non-inclusion had led to situations where experienced engineering geologists are required to be supervised by other engineers with less technical experience simply to comply with the law, with no other benefit. There is apparently a skills shortage in this area, and the imposition is slowing down projects and making them more expensive. The minister at the time did suggest that the intention of the scheme was to broaden the scope to include more people, but this does not seem to have happened. While my preference would be to simply repeal the legislation and remove some of the red tape tangle of this state, I will, on occasion, request the pragmatic compromise, and I request that the minister ensure that any submissions from the geotechnical field are given due consideration around how they could be incorporated into the scheme.