Issue 111 November - December 2015

Up until 2010 the electricity regulations encouraged innovation in the way they allowed electrical work to be carried out. Cited standards covering work were not mandatory but simply offered pathways to electrical safety that were approved by the government and were deemed to comply with the safety requirements set in regulation.

If an electrical worker opted to use a standard like AS/NZS 3000 to carry out prescribed electrical work (PEW) the government would treat the work that conformed to the standard as safe and compliant.

This was a performance-based approach where the result or outcome was mandatory, but there was flexibility in how a worker chose to do the work and did not have to use a particular standard, design or installation method so long as he arrived at a safe result.

Unfortunately much of the innovation opportunity afforded by this flexible approach was taken up by many workers as a means of avoiding compliance. The safety methodologies laid out in AS/NZS 3000 were ignored and no equivalent safety method was devised and utilised as an alternate pathway to the required safe outcome.

The dubious practice of semi-skilled taggers testing and tagging power leads has now caught the attention of the government’s Rules Reduction Taskforce.

Set up to identify what it called ‘loopy rules’, the taskforce released its findings in September of hundreds of legal requirements in many laws that are “out of date, inconsistent, petty, inefficient, pointless or onerous” and provided examples of where “inappropriate interpretation, over-zealous enforcement and lack of focus on the customer” needed to be fixed.

Subcontractors and trade sector organisations can chalk up as a major victory the passing of the Construction Contracts Amendment Act that creates a legal protection of all future retention payments.

The Act passed into law on October 22 and in a staggered implementation will begin to take effect in December with further provisions taking effect on September 1 next year. The provisions relating to retention payments will not, however, take effect until the end of March 2017.

The passing of the Amendment Act concludes a protracted three-year battle by trade sector organisations for a law change to protect subcontractor retention payments from creditors in the event of developers or lead contractors going broke during a construction project.