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Australian Building Codes Board chief executive Adrian Piani says the regulatory system is still being adapted to suit repeat factory production, with the proposed national certification scheme intended to make prefab approvals better fit the way offsite manufacturers actually operate.
Australia’s building regulatory system remains largely structured around onsite construction and needs to better accommodate repeat manufacturing if modern methods of construction are to operate at scale, according to Australian Building Codes Board chief executive Adrian Piani. (main image: 5North’s automated housing production facility in Edinburgh, South Australia, uses robotic systems as part of its factory-based manufacturing process.
Speaking at the prefabAUS conference last week, Piani said the ABCB’s proposed National Voluntary Certification Scheme for Manufacturers of Prefabricated Construction is intended to address a regulatory framework that was not originally designed around factory production.
“This regulatory framework and certification of the housing sector is based on on-site construction … it’s not based on the idea of off-site,” Piani said.
“That’s what we’ll fix hopefully through our voluntary certification scheme. Make the pathway for certification, for prefab, fit for purpose. It matches your style of doing work.”
The proposed scheme would operate around a quality-assurance system more suited to mechanised manufacturing than repeated inspection of essentially identical products at individual sites.
Manufacturers entering the voluntary scheme would be subject to ongoing audit and surveillance and, within the scope of their certification, could issue declarations that their products conform with National Construction Code requirements.
Piani said the aim was to allow repetition to become an advantage rather than a regulatory burden.
“Volume will be rewarded in that, get approval once, do it right many times, and you don’t need to get hundreds of thousands of approvals on site even though it’s the same product being delivered,” he said.
States and territories still hold the key
The ABCB expects to complete much of its work before the scheme becomes fully operational nationally.
Piani said the Board hoped to finalise the scheme towards the end of 2026 and obtain approval during 2027.
But implementation ultimately depends on individual states and territories changing their own legislation and regulatory systems.
“It doesn’t work unless the states and territories can adopt and use it, and they will need to change their legislation to use our scheme,” Piani said.
“Hence why we are putting out the date as 2028. It’s not us. It requires the states and territories to change the legislation, perhaps change their regulatory environments.”
Mandatory recognition of certified manufacturing output will be central to whether the scheme actually reduces duplicated assessment.
Piani said a manufacturer’s declaration of conformity would provide little practical benefit unless it was consistently accepted at the final approval stage.
“It’s of little value if it’s not accepted by the building surveyor at the end of the process. It’s gotta be accepted every time.”
He added that regulatory burden should fall where performance warrants it.
“If you’re doing a good job, if you’re providing quality over and over and over again, proven quality, then the regulatory burden I believe should be less.”
Momentum around MMC
Piani said the broader Australian environment for MMC was nevertheless changing, with activity now coming from both government and the private sector.
“There’s real momentum around MMC. A lot of activity, government activity, private sector activity. It really is coalescing,” he said.
“All those things that make it the square peg in the round hole are being smoothed out in different places. We’re playing our part and others are playing their part.”
That description captures both the opportunity and the remaining challenge.
Commonwealth, state and territory governments are increasingly using funding, housing programs, regulation and procurement to support modern methods of construction, but many of those measures still operate separately.
The ABCB’s certification scheme addresses one of the central regulatory issues: how to recognise repeated factory production without requiring the same product to pass through effectively the same approval process again and again.
Piani also stressed that the scheme is not intended to replace existing state regulatory regimes, licensing requirements, warranty arrangements or defect and rectification systems.
Instead, the aim is to make the existing framework work more effectively for manufactured construction.
The distinction is important.
Factory production depends on repeatability.
If a manufacturer produces the same compliant wall system, module or building component hundreds of times under an audited quality system, requiring each output to be treated as though it were an entirely new site-built product removes part of the productivity benefit.
The proposed scheme attempts to recognise that difference.
The bigger issue is whether the states and territories can align their own legislation and approval processes closely enough for that recognition to work consistently across jurisdictions.
Piani made clear that the ABCB expects to be ready before the system can be used nationally.
The next phase therefore shifts some of the responsibility back to the states and territories.
If they can make the legislative and regulatory changes required, the scheme could give manufacturers a more predictable pathway for repeating compliant products across multiple projects.
If they cannot, Australia risks retaining a national code alongside fragmented approval pathways for industrialised construction.
For manufacturers, that distinction may ultimately determine whether national scale becomes practical or remains largely theoretical.
