The Future of Professional Registration
In June 2025, the independent review of the Victorian Public Service - the Silver Review, led by Helen Silver AO - recommended consolidating the Architects Registration Board of Victoria (ARBV) into a new Built Environment Regulator, alongside the Building and Plumbing Commission, the Surveyors Registration Board and Energy Safety Victoria.
That is not what the Government announced. Its December 2025 response instead placed the ARBV inside the Business Licensing Authority, forming a Business and Professions Regulator with the Surveyors Registration Board and the Veterinary Practitioners Registration Board.
The distinction matters. One model keeps architect registration inside the built environment regulatory chain. The other moves it into a general licensing body that also registers veterinarians. Victoria has just stood up the Building and Plumbing Commission as a consolidated construction regulator - and the profession most associated with designing buildings is proposed to sit outside it.
The stated rationale is efficiency. The ARBV has operated since 1923, is constituted under the Architects Act 1991, and is wholly self-funded through registration fees. It draws nothing from the state budget. On its own terms, the savings case does not hold.
The ACA’s campaign, and the accompanying Opinion article on the ACA website by Dr Kirsten Day, registered architect, ARBV examiner and Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne, makes a systemic argument rather than a professional one.
Buildings are produced by a chain: designers document, builders’ price and construct, engineers certify, surveyors assess compliance. The Shergold–Weir Building Confidence report exists because that chain of competence assurance and enforcement was not holding, and combustible cladding and structural defects followed. Registration, on this view, is a competence assurance function, not an administrative transfer.
Day also notes what the Silver Review did not contain: no performance assessment of the ARBV, no identified regulatory failure, no cost-benefit analysis, no consideration of downstream effects. The ARBV received about two sentences in a review covering hundreds of entities.
Responding publicly, former NSW Building Commissioner David Chandler AM pushed back, and his challenge deserves attention precisely because it is uncomfortable.
Chandler’s point is that graduate numbers and professional standing are not, by themselves, an entitlement to business as usual. Construction is being reorganised around off-site manufacture, integration, assembly and digital delivery. BIM and AI are absorbing work designers once held exclusively. His conclusion: if the accrediting bodies believe their academic programs need anything less than a full refresh, the outlook is poor - and modern professionals must face into procurement, delivery and assurance duties of care rather than traditional service contracts.
Both arguments can be right. Specialist oversight is worth defending and the competency frameworks it rests on need to earn their place continuously.
That second half is the Design Institute of Australia’s territory. Our National Interior Design Working Group competency framework and the DIA’s Accredited Designer™ assessor matrix exist because a credential is only as good as the competence it certifies. The question Chandler puts to architecture is one we should keep putting to ourselves.
The precedent still matters. If a self-funded, profession-specific regulator can be absorbed into a general licensing body without a stated public-interest case, the model of specialist oversight weakens generally, and DIA’s argument that design carries real consumer and safety consequences runs harder. So does national alignment: this lands while the National Competition Council reviews mutual recognition, the same terrain interior design registration has occupied for a decade.
After a June 2026 meeting with Minister for Housing and Building Nick Staikos, the ACA reported three undertakings: the proposal is at an early stage, legislative change is not expected this term of Parliament, and further consultation will occur. No model has been settled. That is not cause to relax, it is why the window is open.
Victorian residents who share the position can sign before it closes on 31 August 2026.
Sign the petition - Legislative Assembly Petition #202624.
Read the full essay by Kirsten Day Dismantling the ARBV: a system at risk, Association of Consulting Architects.
DIA is monitoring the proposal through the Policy and Advocacy Committee.