Electrical work can be pretty dangerous...
The reasoning is often “people might contaminate the water supply for a whole street!” Which just points to poor provision of one way valves at the property line.
But yeah, illegal.
I agree there are limits with what you want to do on electricity, but turning the breaker off and replacing a light fitting or light switch is pretty trivial. And I know people do just get on with it and do some of this stuff themselves anyway.
Was particularly pissed off that in January this year the plumbing “protections” were extended to rural residents who aren’t even connected to mains water or sewage, to protect us from substandard work by … making it illegal for us to do it ourselves. Highly annoying.
A lot of laws can be interpreted as reccomendations :)
Total rort.
I assume that in your post "WA" means Western Australia -- as I can't imagine this kind of absurd protectionism law flying in Washington state, even though it's a little more paternalistic than average for the US.
And of course not! As mentioned - the rule has even recently been extended to 'protect' people like us who live semi off-grid, with rainwater capture for drinking and a septic system.
Australians really seem to loooooove rules.
And of course, for the most part, nobody's actually checking this stuff and people pay varying levels of attention to the rules. Seems like a waste of time all round.
As others have said, that's the case already and not just in Australia. Same in lots of other places like the UK and the whole EU. Less so in the US (though they can demand any data the ISP has, and require ISPs to collect data on individuals)
> Australia is quietly extremely authoritarian.
It is weird, as a recent-ish migrant I do agree, there are rules for absolutely bloody everything here and the population seems in general to be very keen on "Ban it!" as a solution to everything.
It's also rife with regulatory capture - Ah, no mate, you can't change that light fitting yourself, gotta get a registered sparky in for that or you can cop a huge fine. New tap? You have to be kidding me, no, you need a registered plumber to do anything more than plunger your toilet, and we only just legalised that in Western Australia last year.
It's been said before, but at some point the great Aussie Larrikin just died. The Wowsers won and most of them don't even know they're wowsers.