By Chris Sheedy

A man who stole another person’s identification to fake his engineering credentials was referred to the Australian Federal Police in 2012 when Engineers Australia (EA) discovered his ruse.

Until then, 66-year-old Gerald Shirtcliffe had enjoyed what EA described as a “lengthy and prolific engineering career”.

In 2014 Shirtcliffe pled guilty to 146 charges related to performing engineering works in Australia and New Zealand without qualifications. The safety of projects on which he worked, including the CTV building that collapsed during the 2011 Christchurch earthquake, killing 115 people, were brought into question.

A magistrate said the impostor carried out “significant and complicated professional engineering services with respect to large coal projects, mining projects and civil infrastructure projects. Any deficiency in the engineering calculations could have very serious consequences in terms of injury to persons, damage to property and failure of the projects concerned.”

The case flagged the importance of a national engineering registration program, one that is strictly policed and enforced. Currently, Queensland is the only Australian state that boasts such as system. The system was implemented almost two decades ago but amazingly, other states and territories are only now coming around to developing their own.

“The purpose of the legislation is to ensure the health and safety of the public,” says Leigh Cunningham, CEO of IPWEA Queensland. “It ensures that only those deemed competent can provide professional engineering services. There is a high level or risk involved in the delivery of engineering services which arise throughout the project lifecycle from construction, operation through to maintenance. It’s important therefore to ensure the competence of those in positions to sign off on the engineering of these projects.”

The Queensland system, overseen by the Board of Professional Engineers of Queensland, requires for registration a minimum of a four-year Bachelor of Engineering degree from an Australian university. Engineers from other parts of the world will also have their qualifications considered with reference to the Washington Accord.

The next element required for qualification as a Registered Professional Engineer of Queensland (RPEQ) is a minimum of five, but preferably eight, years of experience delivering engineering services under another RPEQ.

Finally, for qualification a minimum of 150 hours of CPD collectively over the past three years, and the same ongoing every three years of registration, is also a requirement.

Registration costs $400 plus GST for IPWEA members and members of several other peak bodies, or $700 plus GST for non-members.

“When you become registered, you are only registered for specific competencies,” Cunningham explains. “It means you can then sign off on projects within those competency areas. It doesn’t give you carte blanche to sign off on a structural engineering project when you haven’t been certified or registered in that particular area.”

What about the other states?

All eyes are on Victoria right now as it is closer than all other states to joining Queensland with its own registration system.

In Victoria a draft bill for engineer registration was released prior to Christmas 2017 for targeted confidential stakeholder consultation. Deadline for feedback was mid-January, 2018.

“The bill has now been put to Parliament,” says David Hallett, CEO of IPWEA Victoria. “The timeline, we’ve been told, could mean the bill could come into effect around the middle of 2019.”

Peter Pikor, Executive Manager of IPWEA Western Australia, says in WA bodies such as IPWEA, Professionals Australia and EA are watching developments in Victoria with the intention of providing a brief to their State Minister, likely in the second or third quarter of 2018.

“The Minister has called for a brief from the industry,” Pikor says. “ We have prepared a draft that has taken learning from the experiences of Queensland and Victoria. Once Victoria is further along the line, we will use that information to help us tidy up our brief.”

Does registration protect the word ‘engineer’? 

One of the important issues around new legislation is the protection of the term ‘engineer’, says Glen Crawley, Registrar Professional Standards for Engineers Australia.

“The term ‘engineer’ is not title-protected,” Crawley says. “This means anyone can call themselves an engineer and the public at large has no idea of their qualifications or experience.”

The problem is that the current bills, including in Queensland and the draft bill in Victoria, do not say anything about protecting the title. It does, however, protect the title ‘Registered Professional Engineer’.

Hallett agrees that there should be an inclusion protecting the title. “My background is in architecture, which has title protection,” he says. “You can’t call yourself an architect unless you’re registered. You can’t use the term ‘architectural design’ or ‘architectural service’, etc. There’s a very strong policing mechanism that prevents unregistered people using this sort of terminology. But in the recent draft bill for registration of engineers there was no title protection. That was one of our comments in the submission.”

Cunningham, whose state has long had engineer registration but never had title protection, is more concerned about easy access to online public records that confirm an engineer’s registration, disciplinary record if any, assessment entity and area of engineering. The BPEQ offers such an online searchable register of engineers.

With or without title protection, Crawley says EA expects the engineer registration system to become a national one, as opposed to a state-based one, in the long term. While EA has been building a National Engineering Register, it previously failed to gain traction with the idea so has instead thrown its support behind state-based plans.

Why has even state-based registration taken so long to become a reality anywhere but Queensland? Crawley says it is because engineers have done such a good job.

“Engineers in Australia are very well thought of and are very thorough,” he says. “As a result we don’t tend to have the high-profile engineering failures that occur elsewhere in the world.

Despite that positive fact, we’re about being proactive and ensuring that the people calling themselves engineers have the skills, experience and competencies to work in that capacity.”

Geoff Barrow, IPWEA member and Senior Assessor at Professionals Australia, says the real benefit of the registration system is twofold – it protects the public and it enhances the profession.

“Registration is a part of Professional Australia’s ‘Recognition, Respect, Reward’ campaign promoting the engineering profession,” Barrow says. “Currently, outside Queensland, if people are engaging engineer services they don’t know what they’re getting. If there are engineering failures or poor design or budget overruns or jobs completed that are proven to be poor value for money etc, those things reflect badly on the industry. A registration system can protect against that.”

What about non-engineers?

What happens to a project manager who works on engineering projects but whose background is perhaps in accounting? How can they be registered when an Engineering degree is one of the minimum requirements?

“Our membership is fairly broad across the public works sector,” Pikor says. “Of course we do have professional engineers, but we also have some personnel working in the industry who have a lot of experience but don’t necessarily have the engineering qualifications. I think we will be saying to the government in WA that we’re keen for there to be a potential pathway for, say, technical officers with appropriate supervised experience to obtain engineering qualifications to then be able to be considered for registration. It may come later, but it’s something to be mindful of. A key is what engineering services need to be signed off by a professional registered engineer.”

“In Queensland, there is no pathway for non-engineers to be registered because the intention is to restrict who can sign off on engineering projects that are being delivered for the public benefit,” Cunningham says. “Just as a shareholder would not want an engineer signing off on the audit of their annual report, I would not want anyone other than a competent engineer to sign off on a major piece of infrastructure which, if it failed, would have serious consequences.”

“It doesn’t mean that non-engineers can’t supervise certain aspects of a project and it doesn’t stop them from doing their job. It simply means that they must be under the supervision of an RPEQ who then signs off on the project. I’m not sure we’d want it any other way.”

This story was first published as 'A question of registration' in IPWEA's April inspire member magazine.