hi guys, this says it all!!
An interim report submitted to the Board in September this year by an external assessor paid for by the Board,(US) had this to say about CPD under the 1976 Act:
“In this instance, the regulation-making power has been avoided”.
“The Board has delegated to itself the power to make and implement prescriptive conditions for licensing, which were contrary to the legislative intention. The regulatory authority resided in the Governor-General. The Board substituted regulations with a policy, which makes it mandatory for any applicant to complete the CPD points before an application can be considered”.
“The subsequent statutory reference in s 32(a) of the 2006 Act to competence-based conditions of registration does not provide statutory validation for the Board's CBL system or policies. The policies were adopted without regulatory authority in 2003; the policies conflict with the provisions of the 1976 Act; the 2006 Act requires the Board to prescribe registration requirements including competence programmes, by Gazette Notice under s 30; and s 32(b) provides a guiding principle that licensing requirements may not necessarily restrict the registration of licensing”.
The report went on to say this about the 2006 Act:
“Even under the 2006 Act, the Board may only prescribe requirements relating to the completion of competence programmes by notice in the Gazette. It was not open to the Board, in my opinion, for it to impose a mandatory system on applicants, when those mandatory requirements infringed the statutory rights and opportunities of
the applicants and was implemented without the relevant considerations of the regulation-making process”.
In essence the independent external assessor in her preliminary report believed the CPD scheme, under both Acts, was implemented without statutory authority. The
Board have ignored this eminent Queens Counsel’s advice and have continued on pushing the CPD scheme.