Sticker Overload: When Safety Theatre Kills Productivity

A battery covered in stickers.

Last month, the Government hosted a Productivity Summit. Tristan Edis summed it up in one brutal line:

“If introducing a road user charge for electric vehicles is the best we can do out of the Productivity Summit, then God help this country.”

He’s right. If Australia wants productivity, we don’t need to tax the most efficient cars on the roads – we need to start by asking good tradies and engineers which regulations and standards could quietly disappear without making anyone less safe.

Australia has some of the best electrical standards in the world. They’ve saved lives – I know from experience.

Some Regulations Are Necessary

Back in 2011, I was renting a home in Adelaide while building SolarQuotes. I went to change a halogen downlight and found the insulation above it blackened from heat. I knew halogen downlights and poorly installed insulation were a leading cause of house fires.

I called the property manager and explained the house had been built without the mandatory downlight covers required by Australian electrical installation standards. A few days later, he called back:

“I’ve spoken with the owner – he doesn’t think we need to do anything.”

So I paid $1,000 out of my own pocket to have a local sparkie fit covers on every downlight. Then I turned up at the renters’ tribunal with a copy of The Australian Wiring Rules under my arm. I showed the standard, proved it was mandatory, and got my $1,000 back.

That’s a standard working exactly as intended: clear, necessary, life-saving and money-saving.

But here’s where we’ve lost the plot.

The Sticker Avalanche

Take Solar Victoria’s excellent Battery Audit Checklist. To be clear – Solar Vic doesn’t write the standards, they just audit against them. But if you read through it, you’ll see the problem.

I went through the checklist line by line and sorted it into three buckets:

a) Labelling/stickers (40%)
Apart from the big ES sticker for emergency crews and other sparkies, most of this is compliance theatre.

b) Location rules (30%)
Clearances from windows, air conditioners, hot water services, pathways and more. Some of these are genuine fire/explosion issues, but most should be guidance only.

c) Genuine safety (30%)
The important stuff: correct breaker sizing, earth continuity, segregation of AC/DC cabling, no exposed live parts, proper isolation, structural adequacy of mounting surfaces. These are the things that stop electrocution, fire, or catastrophic failure.

So over two-thirds of the checklist is labelling and location rules, not genuine safety.

And when inspectors are bogged down in counting labels and measuring centimetres from windows, the risk is obvious: the critical safety issues get less attention. If you make the haystack bigger, it’s harder to see the needles.

Case in point.

From ‘Shall’ to ‘Should’

The fix doesn’t need a Productivity Commission report. It can be as simple as swapping one word in a few paragraphs.

If a rule is best practice but not critical, then say so. Replace “shall” with “should” in the relevant Australian Standard. That small shift frees installers to focus on what matters. What’s the ROI on changing one word? Astronomical.

Instead of drowning in labels, we’d have tradies focused on the breakers, earths, and isolation switches that save lives and prevent fires.

Back to Renting

But it’s not just safety. Let’s return to where I started: renters. Portable, plug-and-play batteries paired with cheap daytime tariffs could slash renters’ bills tomorrow.

But you guessed it – current standards don’t allow it.

If the Productivity Summit really wants to improve Australia’s performance, it should stop fiddling with EV taxes and start pruning the regulatory undergrowth.

The best tradies and engineers already know which regulations matter and which are just bureaucratic barnacles. Time to listen to them.

Phase Shift is a weekly opinion column by SolarQuotes founder Finn Peacock. Subscribe to SolarQuotes’ free newsletter to get it emailed to your inbox each week along with our other home electrification coverage.