Regulations & Codes - Preface

Regulations & Codes Search - Fields of Engineering

In preparing IPENZ's Business Plan for 2009/2010 the governing Board has required particular emphasis to be given to "establishing a clear strategy around knowledge codification, including a collection of regulations & codes across the range of engineering disciplines."

These web pages present the collection of regulations & codes.

The engineering disciplines have been taken to be the 17 fields of engineering recognised by the signatories to the APEC Engineers' Register for use on the IntPE register. The term "practice field" is not defined in regulation, but IPENZ adopts the working description that a practice field is deemed to exist when the profession recognises a unique and substantive body of engineering knowledge. It may be more specialised than an engineering discipline as recognised in engineering education and cited by the governing Board in the Business Plan.

The recognised practice fields are aerospace, bio, building services, chemical, civil, electrical, environmental, fire, geotechnical, industrial, information, management, mechanical, mining, petroleum, structural, and transportation.

In addition, a separate category has been allocated to ethics, thus recognising the great importance of the Code of Ethical Conduct in the Chartered Professional Engineers of New Zealand Act and the Code of Ethics in the IPENZ Rules.

Sometimes we have chosen the practice field in an arbitrary manner. For example, entries related to stationary tanks appear on the Petroleum sheet, but those related to road tankers appear on the Mechanical sheet.

The purpose of this collection is to give guidance to those engineers who are expanding their practice area to encompass a greater area of their field, or part of a new field, or are returning to engineering work after a period away, and need something that will start the process of familiarisation with the regulatory territory.

Each item has generally been divided into a number of sections, headed Act, Regulation, Code of Practice, Standard, Design Guide or Practice Note, Author, and Publisher. Thus a legal hierarchy has been presented. Where possible, we have provided the URL for the document, or to a place which makes it available.

We have noted several instances where the hierarchy does not exist. For example, the Building Act 2004 section 119 cites the Standard NZS 4121 Disabled access directly without going through the usual hierarchy of reguation and code. For another example, Rules made under the Land Transport Act are delegated legislation, with a similar status to that of regulations.

We have added comments to many items. Sometimes they are comments from users, indicating an opinion on the usefulness or otherwise of that particular document.

Disclaimer
This collection offers guidance to practising engineers by exploring issues of importance to the profession and indicating where good-practice guidance may be found. It has been compiled by practitioners and subjected to informal peer review.  While every care has been taken in its preparation, this document is not offered as formal advice.  In particular it does not claim to include every piece of codified knowledge that may be required for an engineering project, and nor does it claim that every reference is up to date.