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ACA Submission: Review of Mutual Recognition Schemes

The ACA was pleased to submit the following response to the National Competition Council’s independent evaluation of the operation and effectiveness of Australia’s mutual recognition regimes. We have recommended a reform path that removes duplication, harmonises administrative processes and improves national consistency, while retaining strong local oversight and clear regulatory accountability.

The National Competition Council’s independent evaluation will examine how schemes established under the Mutual Recognition Act 1992 promote labour mobility and workforce flexibility while maintaining high standards. Its findings will provide an important evidence base for an expert group of employers, unions and governments to identify solutions that strengthen, streamline or replace current arrangements.

OUR SUBMISSION

The ACA strongly supports reforms that enhance labour mobility, drive productivity gains, and eliminate the unnecessary administrative costs that burden architectural businesses operating across jurisdictions. As the national peak body for architectural practices, representing approximately 850 firms employing more than 7,000 technical staff across metropolitan and regional Australia, the ACA understands first-hand how regulatory duplication erodes business efficiency and competitiveness.

Our membership spans sole operators through to large multi-national practices, working across public and private sectors on projects of national significance: housing, health, education, infrastructure, defence, and civic development. A significant proportion of these practices routinely cross state and territory borders, and the cumulative cost of navigating inconsistent jurisdictional requirements – in time, compliance expenditure, and lost opportunity – represents a tangible drag on business performance and project delivery.

For example, a practice operating across three jurisdictions may be required to maintain separate registrations, comply with different CPD frameworks, and complete multiple renewal processes annually, resulting in duplicated administrative effort with no corresponding uplift in consumer protection.

The ACA strongly supports the ongoing work to streamline mutual recognition. There remains considerable opportunity to go further, reducing duplication to lower overheads, accelerating the mobilisation of skilled professionals, and strengthening Australia’s capacity to address its pressing infrastructure and housing challenges. The key is targeting the right things: administrative burden, inconsistent processes, and duplicated compliance costs.

However, productivity gains must not be achieved by weakening the safeguards that protect the public.

Architecture is a high-risk, public-interest profession. The buildings and spaces our members design shape how Australians live, work, learn, heal, and gather. Regulatory frameworks governing architectural practice are not red tape, but rather the foundation of consumer protection, built environment quality, and long-term economic value. A defective building or a failure of professional oversight carries consequences that far outweigh any short-term compliance savings. The ACA’s position is that mutual recognition reform should remove genuine administrative duplication without compromising professional standards, regulatory oversight, or public safety.

ACA RECOMMENDATIONS

1. Maintain and Strengthen National Consistency of Standards

As articulated in our recent submission to Treasury on Modernising the National Construction Code (NCC), regulatory fragmentation imposes measurable and avoidable costs on businesses operating across jurisdictions, and on the communities waiting for housing and infrastructure. The productivity case for genuine national consistency is compelling.

The ACA recommends minimising state and territory variations to restore the integrity of a genuinely national system and reduce the compliance burden on individuals and practices operating across borders.

Australia already has a strong foundation to build on. The Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA) has established broadly harmonised national professional standards that demonstrate what coherent, nationally consistent regulation looks like in practice. The NCC reform process should draw on this model.

2. Retain Independent State-Based Regulation

Architect registration in Australia is administered by independent state and territory boards, and this structure is fundamental to how regulation works. These boards provide the jurisdictional accountability, enforcement capability, and public transparency that a centralised or purely national model would struggle to replicate.

State-based regulators are the bodies that investigate complaints, impose conditions, suspend registrations, and protect consumers when things go wrong. Reform that streamlines mutual recognition must not, by design or by consequence, reduce the authority or resourcing of these boards.

The ACA’s position is that state-based regulators must remain independent, visible, and fully empowered. Local oversight is not redundant; it is the enforcement layer that gives national registration standards their practical effect.

3. Preserve Accountability within Mutual Recognition Framework

The Mutual Recognition Act 1992 provides a valuable foundation for labour mobility, and the ACA supports its intent. Enabling qualified architects to work across jurisdictions without unnecessary duplication of registration processes is a legitimate productivity objective. However, automatic mutual recognition (AMR) creates structural risks that must be addressed. The core problem is visibility: a practitioner operating under AMR in a jurisdiction where they are not locally registered may fall outside the practical reach of the regulator responsible for protecting consumers in that place.

The ACA identifies three specific risks that any AMR framework must address:

  • Reduced visibility of practitioners to local regulators: boards cannot regulate practitioners they cannot see. AMR must not create a class of practitioners who are technically permitted to operate in a jurisdiction but effectively invisible to its regulatory infrastructure.
  • Diminished enforcement pathways: when a complaint arises, jurisdictional ambiguity about who investigates and under which framework creates delay and potential consumer harm. Enforcement responsibility must be unambiguous.
  • Insufficient knowledge of local regulatory systems: building codes, approval pathways, and compliance requirements vary across jurisdictions. A practitioner unfamiliar with local systems presents a risk to project quality and public safety that registration alone does not resolve.

While the National Construction Code (NCC) establishes a national baseline, it operates alongside state-based variations and jurisdiction-specific requirements. State and territory boards play a critical role in ensuring that architects understand and can competently navigate these local conditions.

4. Harmonise Architects Registration

The ACA’s support for reform is genuine; however, the reform agenda must not deliver productivity gains that trade risk for administrative convenience. Productivity gains should come from harmonisation, not deregulation.

The genuine sources of administrative burden regarding regulation on architectural practitioners and practices include Continuing Professional Development (CPD) requirements that differ by jurisdiction, repetitive registration and renewal form-filling across multiple boards, inconsistent fee structures and payment processes, and separate notification and approval pathways for cross-border work. These inefficiencies cost businesses real time and money, yet can be addressed without compromising consumer protection.

The ACA supports:

  • A national digital register of architects and architectural businesses: providing regulators, employers and consumers with a single, real-time source of practitioner registration status across all jurisdictions.
  • Harmonised CPD requirements: a nationally consistent CPD framework would eliminate the cost and confusion of practitioners having to satisfy different requirements in each jurisdiction in which they are registered.
  • Streamlined, standardised notification and renewal processes: reducing the time and cost burden of repetitive form-filling and inconsistent fee structures across jurisdictions, while preserving the visibility that local regulators require.
  • Alignment of regulatory frameworks and improved system clarity: harmonising the structure of state and territory systems so that consistency is built in and ensuring that the rules governing cross-jurisdictional practice are transparent and consistently applied.

5. Reject National Licensing for Architects

A single national licence for architects would consolidate registration but fragment accountability. The ACA does not support this model because it risks weakening jurisdictional enforcement, reducing regulatory responsiveness to local conditions and complaints, and eroding the public accountability that independent state-based boards currently provide.

National consistency should be delivered through aligned standards and interoperable systems, not centralised licensing that dilutes regulatory control. The goal is a national profession that operates coherently across jurisdictions, supported by regulators that remain empowered to act within them.

The ACA seeks reform that eliminates genuine administrative burden for businesses, but maintains the standards that protect the general public.

6. Commit to Ongoing Consultation and Evidence-Based Reform

The ACA considers that the next phase of reform should be supported by a stronger evidence base and ongoing engagement with industry. The impacts of duplicated registration, inconsistent administrative processes and varying compliance settings are real, but are often cumulative and not readily captured in a single submission.

As the national peak body for architectural practices, the ACA is well placed to assist the National Competition Council in strengthening this evidence base. This includes providing practice-level case studies, examples of duplicated compliance across jurisdictions, and further insight into the time, cost and mobilisation impacts experienced by practices operating across state and territory borders.

The administrative burden associated with cross-jurisdiction practice does not fall evenly across the profession. While larger practices may be better equipped to absorb duplicated compliance processes, smaller, regional and sole practitioners are often disproportionately affected.

This is particularly evident in regional and cross-border contexts, where practices must operate across jurisdictions to service nearby communities and project opportunities. In these circumstances, regulatory inconsistency can constrain service availability, workforce mobility and competition, even where practitioners are fully qualified and competent.

Further targeted consultation with practices of different scales would help identify where duplication creates measurable cost without delivering corresponding public benefit.

CONCLUSION

The ACA supports a more efficient, more mobile, and more productive national architectural labour market. The administrative burden currently imposed on practices operating across jurisdictions – duplicated CPD requirements, inconsistent registration processes, repetitive form-filling, and divergent fee structures – is real, measurable, and unnecessary.

However, the safeguards that protect consumers, uphold professional standards, and maintain accountability when things go wrong are not an administrative burden; they are fundamental to public confidence in the profession.

The appropriate reform path is therefore one that removes duplication, harmonises administrative processes and improves national consistency, while retaining strong local oversight and clear regulatory accountability.