Just a note to let you know about something coming up that will affect all of us in the engineering profession in Victoria.

Last year the Labor State Government passed the Professional Engineer Registration Act. The Department of Justice and Community Services has been tasked with implementing a scheme to bring the Act into force. The Department is intending to release a public consultation paper on the 26th of August.

The effect of the Act will make it mandatory for all affected engineers who want to provide professional engineering services to either register or be directly supervised by a registered Professional Engineer. There is a heavy emphasis on building and construction engineering but the operation of the Act appears to cover engineers in the broad electro-technical area. Providing professional engineering services with a connection to Victoria by unsupervised non-registered practitioners will be prohibited. Also, the Act sets out a requirement for each registered engineer to undertake Continued Professional Development.

Given that we don’t know how this will affect all of us, the consultation is worthy of your attention and comment. The Act itself is somewhat of a skeleton with detail to be added by the scheme being developed by Consumer Affairs Victoria. What we will do is provide a summary of the Act and Scheme when the Scheme is released for comment by Consumer Affairs Victoria.

If you wanted to explore some background beforehand, refer to https://www.consumer.vic.gov.au/resources-and-tools/legislation/public-consultations-and-reviews/professional-engineers-registration-act-2019-information-forum and https://engage.vic.gov.au/engineers-registration.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

Regards,
Les and Enn
Les Davey ([email protected]) & Enn Vinnal ([email protected])
for IEEE Vic. Section