ACA’s Treasury Submission: Modernising the NCC

The ACA welcomed the opportunity to contribute to the Treasury’s Discussion Paper, Streamlining and Modernising the National Construction Code (NCC), a core productivity instrument within Australia’s built environment, with direct influence over housing supply, compliance costs, insurance exposure, construction innovation and investment certainty.

The following summary of the ACA’s submission highlights nine key recommendations.

If modernisation is to meaningfully support housing delivery and economic performance, reform must address structural inefficiencies in how the NCC operates, not merely its technical content. The ACA supports targeted reform that reduces regulatory friction while maintaining the safety, durability and public confidence that Australians rightly expect from their built environment.

Our recommendations are as follows:

1. National Consistency

Regulatory fragmentation imposes measurable costs on businesses operating across jurisdictions, and on communities waiting for housing that those businesses could otherwise be delivering. A national code must operate nationally in practice. The ACA recommends:

• Minimising state and territory variations to restore the integrity of a genuinely national code.
• Aligning adoption timelines to reduce transition risk and duplication.
• Strengthening governance clarity to ensure technical decisions are nationally consistent in application as well as publication.

2. Free Access to Australian Standards

A significant systemic issue is that compliance with the NCC often depends on Australian Standards that are not freely accessible. Regulatory compliance should not depend on the ability to pay to access the law.

• Many referenced standards are effectively mandatory for compliance.
• Access costs disproportionately affect small and medium practices.
• The downstream effect is inconsistent compliance and safety risk borne by the people who occupy the buildings.

The ACA strongly supports reform to ensure Australian Standards referenced in the NCC are made freely accessible, or otherwise publicly available at minimal cost.

3. Accessibility, Usability and Demonstrating Compliance

Industry feedback consistently highlights that the NCC has become increasingly difficult to navigate and apply. The key concerns we are hearing include:

• Growing structural complexity and cross-referencing between clauses.
• Heavy reliance on external standards to demonstrate compliance.
• Regulatory intent is not always clearly articulated within provisions.

As a result, demonstrating compliance, particularly via performance pathways, has become administratively burdensome and increasingly defensive.

The ACA recommends that any modernisation must prioritise:

• Clear articulation of regulatory intent.
• Simplified drafting and structure.
• Guidance supporting proportionate, risk-based compliance rather than excessive documentation.

A clearer, more usable NCC supports accurate compliance, supports productivity and improves consumer confidence in building quality and safety.

4. Tiered Performance Solution Processes

Not all performance solutions carry equal risk, and regulatory effort should be commensurate with that risk. The ACA recommends a tiered assessment framework based on risk level and evidence strength. Solutions supported by robust validation, including NCC Verification Methods, CodeMark certification, or nationally recognised technical certification, should be eligible for streamlined administrative pathways. Higher-risk solutions would continue to require full assessment. This would:

• Reduce duplication and delay
• Lower compliance costs for well-established systems
• Improve proportionality in regulatory oversight
• Maintain safety and technical integrity
• Focus regulatory effort where it matters most.

5. Rebalance Performance and Deemed-to-Satisfy Pathways

The NCC is performance-based in principle. However, insurance settings and liability exposure drive heavy reliance on Deemed-to-Satisfy (DTS) pathways. The ACA recommends:

• Establishing a formal mechanism to migrate widely accepted performance solutions into DTS provisions and provide additional DTS options for common construction techniques to reduce approval times and red tape.
• Improving clarity and national consistency in performance solution assessment.
• Reducing repeated re-documentation of compliance pathways that have already been demonstrated.

The Code should be adaptive, converting validated innovation into standardised certainty over time. Migrating proven performance solutions into DTS provisions improves consistency and auditability, reducing delays and costs while preserving verified safety and durability outcomes for occupants.

6. Establish a National NCC Issues Register

The ACA proposes a National NCC Issues Register, administered by the ABCB, to capture practitioner-identified problems with specific clauses in real time. Unlike the existing Proposal for Change process, this mechanism would enable proactive, evidence-based clarification and amendment before problems compound. The register would:

• Allow practitioners to flag concerns about specific NCC clauses.
• Capture recurring interpretive and technical problems as they emerge.
• Enable timely clarification or amendment based on evidence.
• Reduce reliance on the slower Proposal for Change process for systemic issues.
• Improve transparency and public trust in how ambiguities are resolved.

7. Digital Compliance Pathways – Integration with BIM

Embedding NCC compliance within Building Information Modelling workflows would shift the regulatory system from retrospective checking to proactive assurance – a meaningful structural improvement, not just an efficiency gain. The ACA supports government commissioning research into practical methods for integrating compliance assessment into digital design and construction environments. This would enable:

• Direct integration of NCC assessment into project workflows
• Earlier identification of compliance issues during design
• Fewer approval delays caused by late-stage documentation problems
• Improved transparency of changes during construction
• Whole-of-life digital records providing verifiable proof of compliance

Reform initiatives, such as those led by former NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler, demonstrate that this is achievable in practice. Scaled nationally, digital compliance integration would improve regulatory certainty, reduce rework and defects, and provide stronger lifetime assurance of building safety and performance.

8. Certification and Risk Allocation

Certifiers are bearing a disproportionate share of risk within the current framework. Conservative decision-making, reluctance to approve performance solutions, and a shrinking certification workforce are predictable consequences of unsustainable risk settings, not individual failures of judgment. Industry reports:

• Rising professional indemnity insurance costs
• Increased personal liability exposure
• Reluctance to approve performance solutions due to risk concentration

Left unaddressed, this dynamic will continue to constrain innovation, slow approvals, and erode the capable certification workforce essential to effective compliance oversight.

9. Risk Appropriate Approval Pathways

Current approval pathways apply near-identical professional oversight requirements regardless of project scale or risk. In practice, this means a simple carport or shed may require input from a designer, structural engineer and building surveyor – the same professionals in critically short supply, who are also needed on significant housing and infrastructure projects.

The ACA recommends the NCC modernisation review establish clearly defined, streamlined approval pathways for low-risk structure classes, such as carports, sheds and minor ancillary structures, that remove the requirement for full professional certification where risk does not warrant it. This would free constrained professional capacity for projects where independent oversight genuinely protects public safety, while reducing cost and delay for homeowners undertaking minor works.

Conclusion

The complexity, subjectivity and inconsistency described in this submission have a single cumulative effect – projects cost more and take longer than they should. At a time when housing supply, productivity and cost pressures dominate the national agenda, regulatory settings must support delivery rather than impede it. The reforms outlined in this submission would:

• Restore genuine national consistency
• Close the gap between BCR reform commitments and on-the-ground implementation
• Reduce compliance friction across the profession
• Enable digital compliance pathways fit for a modern construction industry

Incremental adjustment will not be sufficient; the NCC must be reformed as a system, with productivity and public outcomes as the measure of success.