Who Sets the Sustainability Rules for a New Home

What the library is, and what a subject means in it

The APN Regulatory Instrument Library is a corpus of the legislation, regulations, planning instruments and codes that govern property in Australia. As at 20 September 2026 it holds 637 instruments recorded in force, across the Commonwealth and all eight states and territories. Each is filed under one or more subjects, and an instrument may carry several.

The subjects are the library’s own, derived from what the instruments do. They are worth listing in full, because the list is the first part of the finding.

Planning dominates at 336, which is unsurprising: it is the subject that reaches every parcel of land and is written at every level of government down to the council. Building follows at 73, then environment at 65, conveyancing at 58, strata, tenancy, heritage, land tax, hazard. There is no subject for sustainability, none for energy, none for emissions.

Three instruments name it

Searching the titles rather than the subjects returns three instruments in the whole corpus, and one of those turns out to be about energy as a resource to be extracted rather than a quantity a building consumes.

So the entire visible footprint of sustainability in this corpus, measured by what instruments call themselves, is a Commonwealth disclosure Act and a New South Wales planning policy. Set against 637 instruments, that is under half of one per cent.

The conclusion to resist is that the requirements therefore do not exist. They do. They are simply not filed under that name, and finding them means looking at how the statute book divides the problem.

The land and the building are governed differently

Two layers of this corpus bind a new dwelling. One governs the site: what may be done to a piece of land, what is protected on it, what hazard it is exposed to. That is the environment and hazard subjects together, 65 and 28 tags across 85 distinct instruments, since eight carry both. The other governs the building: how the thing placed on the land must be put together and how it must perform. That is the building subject, 73 instruments. Eleven instruments sit in both.

Both layers reach all nine jurisdictions. There the resemblance ends. Of the 85 site instruments, 83 are made at state or territory level and two are Commonwealth. The building layer holds six Commonwealth instruments, three times as many in a smaller set.

One property of the library has to be dealt with before those columns can be read across jurisdictions. Its coverage below state level is uneven, from 7 instruments in one jurisdiction to 58 in another, which would make a raw total per jurisdiction a measure of the corpus rather than of the statute book. It does not affect what is compared here: all 226 of the library’s local instruments carry the planning subject, exactly one of them also carries building, and none carries a site subject. The building and site layers sit at state level or above almost entirely, so the final column above is drawn on the same basis.

The states write the Acts; the code is written nationally

The headline count understates the difference, because it treats a licensing Act and a construction code as one instrument each. Splitting the building subject by instrument type separates them.

The division is almost complete. Of the 29 Acts in the building subject, one is Commonwealth. Of the 29 regulations, none is. Of the six codes, five are. The states and territories write the statutes and the regulations that create permits, certifiers, licences, warranties and enforcement; the technical content those instruments point at is written once, nationally, by the Australian Building Codes Board on behalf of the Commonwealth and the states and territories together. The library files those codes at Commonwealth level.

Those five Commonwealth codes, and the one Commonwealth Act beside them, are the whole of the Commonwealth’s presence in this subject.

That is six of the 14 Commonwealth instruments the library holds across every subject. Building is the largest single block of instruments the library records at Commonwealth level, at double the next: planning and conveyancing carry three Commonwealth instruments each, and no other subject carries more than two.

How each jurisdiction carries it

Six of the eight states and territories carry building control in a dedicated Building Act with its own regulations. New South Wales and South Australia do not: both route it through their planning statutes instead.

Where the library carries a summary of what these instruments do, the relationship to the national code is explicit in the wording. The Northern Territory’s regulations are described as “adopting the Building Code of Australia as the building standard”, and its Act as “supporting national uniform standards and product accreditation”. Tasmania’s Act carries the object “that such work meets or exceeds national construction standards”. Western Australia’s regulations include “modifications to the Building Code, including for bush fire prone areas” — which is the other half of the arrangement, since adopting a national code does not mean adopting it unchanged.

That wording is illustrative and not a count. The library’s summaries are incomplete: it names the code for seven of the 67 building instruments outside the Commonwealth, and eleven Victorian building instruments carry no summary at all. A count built on them would measure the summaries rather than the statute book, so none is offered here.

The one state instrument of its kind

State Environmental Planning Policy (Sustainable Buildings) 2022 is the single standalone sustainability instrument at state or territory level anywhere in the corpus. The library describes it as promoting the design and delivery of sustainable buildings through consistent sustainability assessment and the recording of building performance data, targeting lower energy and mains water use, reduced greenhouse gas emissions, monitoring of embodied emissions in construction materials, and thermal performance.

Every other jurisdiction reaches the same ground, so far as this corpus shows it, through the national code and its own adoption of it. Queensland, Tasmania and the Northern Territory are partial exceptions in wording: the library’s summaries of their Building Acts name sustainable buildings, efficiency in the use of energy and water, and environmentally efficient buildings respectively, but each does so inside a general building statute rather than in an instrument of its own.

What this does not settle

The library is a corpus, not the statute book entire. Its coverage below state level is uneven between jurisdictions, which is why every comparison here is drawn at state level or above; that the local layer is entirely planning material is what makes the building and site layers safe to compare. Counts in this article are of what the library holds, and a jurisdiction holding fewer instruments in a subject is not the same as that jurisdiction regulating it less.

The subjects are the library’s classification, not a legal taxonomy. That sustainability has no subject tag is a fact about how this corpus divides the material, and it is offered as evidence of how the instruments are written rather than as a claim about what the law requires.

Nothing here measures stringency. A count of instruments is not a measure of how demanding they are, and the fact that energy performance is set nationally says nothing about the level at which it is set. Nor does this article date anything: the library’s version dates mark when the currently published consolidation took effect, not when an instrument was made or when its requirements last changed, so no date is quoted and no change is inferred.

The companion piece on heritage and environment in the statute book covers the site layer in its own right, including the heritage instruments left aside here.

Findings are presented on the basis of data and evidence alone.