Dismantling the ARBV: a system at risk

Kirsten Day ,

The Victorian Government plans to fold the Architects Registration Board into a generalist licensing body. The stated rationale is efficiency – but the ARBV is already self-funded and receives no state budget allocation. What is at risk is not administrative tidiness but the integrity of a national training pathway, the building oversight chain that Shergold–Weir found was already failing, and the education pipeline that supplies 43% of Australia’s architecture graduates. Kirsten Day examines what the reform would disrupt, what questions the government has not yet answered, and why it matters for everyone who works in or depends on the building industry.

Every building you walk into – the hospital, school, apartment block, office tower – exists at the end of a production chain. Designers, engineers, builders, building surveyors and tradespeople all contribute, and the system that governs their competence is what stands to protect the public from structural failure, combustible cladding, or a building that cannot be occupied. When governments reform one link in that chain without understanding how the whole system links together, the consequences don’t appear on a budget spreadsheet. They appear as building failures.

This is what is at stake in the Victorian Government’s proposal to absorb the Architects Registration Board of Victoria (ARBV) into a broader licensing body. In June 2025, the Independent Review of the Victorian Public Service, led by Helen Silver AO, recommended consolidating the ARBV into a new Built Environment Regulator alongside the Building and Plumbing Commission, the Surveyors Registration Board, and Energy Safety Victoria¹. In December 2025, the government went further, confirming it would bring the Architects Registration Board, Surveyors Registration Board, and Veterinary Practitioners Registration Board into the Business Licensing Authority to form a new Business and Professions Regulator². The rationale is efficiency and cost savings. However, the ARBV is entirely self-funded through registration fees and receives no state budget funding. On its own terms, the efficiency case does not hold.

The deeper concern is not administrative. It is about what happens to the system of building oversight when specialist regulation is diluted. The Shergold–Weir Building Confidence report³ exists because fragmented oversight and inconsistent enforcement across the building chain led to real failures – combustible cladding on apartment towers, structural defects in new buildings, and a collapse of public confidence in the construction sector. The report’s core finding was not that Australia had too many regulators; it was that competence assurance, accountability and enforcement were not working as a chain. Architect registration sits within that ecosystem. It ensures that the people coordinating complex building outcomes – the people whose documentation builders and tradespeople rely on – meet defined competency and ethical standards. Weaken that assurance, and the downstream effects reach everyone in the building chain, from the engineer interpreting the drawings to the apprentice on site.

The building industry is not a collection of independent professions that can be regulated in isolation. Architects produce documentation that builders price, engineers certify, and building surveyors assess for compliance, enabling tradespeople to construct. When the quality of that documentation degrades – because the training pipeline or the oversight that governs it has been weakened – the costs are borne across the entire sector: in variations, disputes and defects, and ultimately in buildings that do not perform as intended. Reform debates that treat architect registration as merely an administrative task that can be transferred without impact misunderstand where it sits in the chain.

Architect training is not a short course that serves as a licence you renew by paying a fee. It requires at least five years of university study, a period of supervised practice, and the Architectural Practice Examination (APE) – a national exam with written and interview components, administered across all states and territories, with state boards directly involved. The pathway is rigorous because the consequences of incompetent design are serious, long-lasting, and often invisible until something fails. The ARBV’s role in maintaining the integrity of this pathway – through registration standards, professional conduct oversight, and its connection to the national examination system – is specialist work. It requires people who understand architectural practice, not generalist licensing administrators.

Victoria produces approximately 43% of Australia’s Master of Architecture graduates through accredited architecture schools.⁴ This is not a parochial statistic. It means that what Victoria does with its registration and oversight framework has national consequences for workforce supply and standards consistency. The architecture pathway in Australia operates as an integrated national system: accredited university education, a national exam, and state-based registration coordinated through the Architects Accreditation Council of Australia (AACA), which also maintains mutual recognition agreements with the UK, Singapore, Canada and the United States.⁵ If Victoria is perceived as stepping outside that national framework, graduates will train elsewhere – and so will international students, for whom pathway stability and credential portability are decisive factors in choosing where to study.

This is where the education and trade dimensions converge. Victoria’s architecture schools are a significant part of the state’s education economy. International students choosing architecture programs base their decisions on whether their qualifications will be recognised at home and abroad, and they require that the registration pathway in their state of study be stable, credible, and nationally integrated. A reform that creates uncertainty about Victoria’s alignment with the national system does not just affect architects – it affects university revenue, the broader education sector, and the pipeline of skilled graduates that the construction industry depends on. The students at risk are not only future architects; many go on to work across the built environment in roles that require the analytical and documentation skills that architectural education provides.

None of this is an argument against reform. Streamlining regulation can be beneficial, and there are legitimate reasons to revisit the structure and funding of professional oversight bodies. But the Silver Review devoted only about two sentences to the ARBV within a sweeping public sector consolidation covering hundreds of entities. The Review contains no evidence of a performance assessment of the ARBV, no identified regulatory failures, no cost-benefit analysis of the proposed merger, and no consideration of the downstream effects on the national training pathway or on building safety oversight. The government’s response similarly offers no explanation of what problem the merger solves or how specialist functions will be preserved.

If this reform is to proceed responsibly, the government should be able to answer a small set of questions clearly and publicly:

• What specific problem is being solved – service delays, performance gaps, regulatory duplication?
• What evidence supports that diagnosis?
• How will the accreditation cycle and national exam administration remain stable during and after the transition? How will Victoria’s place in the national and international mutual recognition pathway be protected?
• How will success be measured in terms that matter to the public – building safety, workforce competence, consumer protection – rather than simply in terms of fewer entities on an organisational chart?

The building industry cannot afford another round of reforms that look efficient on paper but undermine the systems that ensure dependable quality in buildings and workers’ competence. Victoria’s education pipeline, its construction workforce, and the public who live and work in the buildings all depend on specialist oversight remaining intact. The challenge is not to reduce the number of regulators for its own sake, but to ensure that every link in the chain – from the lecture theatre to the building site – is strong enough to uphold public safety and quality.

Those who share these concerns can add their voice to the petition initiated by the ACA and now before the Victorian Parliament’s Legislative Council, which opposes the abolishment of the ARBV and calls for the retention of independent, profession-specific oversight.⁶

The petition closes on 31 August 2026. Sign the petition today!

1. Helen Silver AO, Independent Review of the Victorian Public Service: Final Report (June 2025), Recommendation 6.1.3. [↩]
2. Victoria State Government, ‘Ensuring the Public Sector Is Focused on What Matters Most’ (December 2025), www.vic.gov.au/ensuring-public-sector-focused-what-matters-most. [↩]
3. Peter Shergold and Bronwyn Weir, Building Confidence: Improving the Effectiveness of Compliance and Enforcement Systems for the Building and Construction Industry across Australia (2018). [↩]
4. Victoria State Government, Framework for Reform: Modernising Victoria’s Building System (2021), 32, https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-2939204932. [↩]
5. AACA, ‘Mutual Recognition’, https://aaca.org.au/mutual-recognition/; Automatic Mutual Recognition (Australia) / JobPass, AACA, n.d., https://aaca.org.au/mutual-recognition/amr/ [↩]
6. Parliament of Victoria, Legislative Council Petition #711, ‘Opposition to Abolishment of the Architects Registration Board of Victoria’, www.parliament.vic.gov.au/get-involved/petitions/opposition-to-abolishment-of-the-architects-registration-board-of-victoria/. [↩]