Professional Standards Council (SA)
A short factsheet on South Australia's Professional Standards Council: its establishing Act and its role approving professional standards schemes that cap members' civil liability.
Learning outcomes
- State the SA Professional Standards Council's establishing Act and its role approving schemes that cap the civil liability of participating professionals.
Act: Professional Standards Act 2004 (SA).1
Established: Established and expressly incorporated, with the capacity to litigate spelled out. Section 42(1) establishes the Professional Standards Council, and s 42(2) makes it a body corporate with perpetual succession, a common seal, and — stated in terms — the capacity to "sue and be sued in its corporate name". That last limb is worth noticing against the ACT Gambling and Racing Commission, whose Act establishes the body and says nothing about incorporation at all. Whether a statutory body can be sued in its own name is a question to answer from its Act, not from the fact that it exists.
Purpose: The Council approves and monitors professional standards schemes submitted by occupational associations (such as accounting, engineering or legal professional bodies). A scheme, once approved, caps the civil liability of participating members in exchange for the association maintaining risk-management, continuing education and complaint-handling standards. This is one part of a nationally harmonised model adopted across most Australian jurisdictions.
Where the authority sits
The Council sits above occupational associations rather than beside them. An occupational association may refer to the Council any complaint or evidence that a member or former member has committed an offence against s 35 or the regulations (s 48(1)). The referral is the association's choice, which shapes how a fact pattern reaches the Council at all.
What it is not
The Council does not itself discipline individual practitioners for misconduct — that remains the function of each profession's own regulator (for lawyers, the Legal Profession Conduct Commissioner). The Council's role is scheme approval and oversight, not individual complaint adjudication.
Is it a prosecuting authority?
No. The Council receives referrals about alleged offences (s 48); it does not prosecute them. The Act's offences are prosecuted by the ordinary South Australian prosecuting authority, and the Council's role in a scheme is approval and oversight of the scheme rather than enforcement against an individual.
How it relates to the other SA bodies
Because a capped-liability scheme changes the civil remedies available to a person who sues a scheme member, this body sits closer to the civil-liability/remedies side of administrative law than to the complaints-and-integrity bodies (the Ombudsman, ICAC, or the Office for Public Integrity) already covered in the SA hub article.
Self-check
- Have I described the Council's function as scheme approval, not individual professional discipline?
- Have I recognised the liability-cap effect a scheme creates for a would-be claimant?