Landscaping Industry Advocacy Update | August 2026

LV NEWS BRIEF

Landscaping Victoria is strengthening the industry’s voice across regulation, housing, green infrastructure and workforce policy. From Home Warranty and Minimum Financial Requirements to housing approvals, skills reform and national career pathways, LV is working to ensure policy decisions reflect the practical realities of landscape businesses—while supporting consumer protection, industry growth, and more liveable communities.

Ritchie Hinton | 31 August 2026 | 8 min read

Putting the Landscape Industry at the Table

How Landscaping Victoria is advocating on regulation, housing, green infrastructure and skills.

Policy decisions can feel a long way from the job site—until they affect an insurance premium, a builder’s construction capacity, a council approval, the availability of skilled workers, or the training pipeline.

Landscaping Victoria (LV) is working across state and national forums to ensure these decisions reflect how professional landscape businesses actually operate, and that our industry has a voice in the policies shaping its future.

Advocacy That Connects Policy With Practice

Landscaping Victoria’s advocacy program is becoming broader because the issues affecting our industry are increasingly interconnected.

Building regulations influence the costs and capacity of structural landscape businesses. Housing policy affects how quickly projects can move through the approval process and whether green infrastructure is treated as essential or optional. Skills policy shapes the workforce available to deliver the work. Occupational definitions and licensing settings affect how landscaping is recognised and regulated.

Across these areas, LV’s role is the same: to bring practical industry experience to policy discussions, identify unintended consequences before they become entrenched, and advocate for settings that protect consumers and communities without imposing unnecessary costs or complexity on compliant businesses.

Home Warranty and Minimum Financial Requirements: Seeking a Fairer Approach

One of LV’s most immediate advocacy priorities is an anomaly in Victoria’s new Statutory Insurance Scheme (SIS) and its interaction with the Minimum Financial Requirements (MFR) framework for registered builders.

Structural landscape projects are not conventional building projects. A single landscape contract can combine permitted structural works—such as retaining walls, decks or other structures—with paving, irrigation, drainage, soil preparation, planting, turf, and other horticultural or non-built works.

Following a request for clarification from LV, the Building and Plumbing Commission (BPC) confirmed on 27 July 2026 that standalone soft landscaping works that do not require a building permit and are not integral to the construction of a building can be excluded from the SIS.

The problem is that the current Regulations do not provide a mechanism to carve those non-permitted works out of the value of a single integrated contract.

In practice, where a single contract includes both insurable structural building work and non-permitted landscape work, the total contract price can govern the project’s treatment for SIS purposes.

That means the insurance premium can be calculated against a value substantially higher than the value of the work that carries the insured structural risk.

Why LV is concerned

The issue is not whether legitimate structural work should be insured. LV supports appropriate Home Warranty protection.

The concern is proportionality: the work being insured, the risk being covered, and the value used to calculate the premium should have a reasonable relationship.

Two real projects included in LV’s briefing to Government demonstrate the scale of the problem:

Premium figures are those used in LV’s August 2026 briefing, based on the BPC Home Warranty premium schedule from 1 July 2026.

In the Strath Creek example, structural works represented just 4.15% of a project worth more than $1 million. In the Red Hill example, structural works represented 13.64% of the overall contract.

Yet the premium was calculated on the total project value, while failure of the soft landscaping component would not itself be claimable under the scheme.

LV has described this as having the characteristics of “junk insurance”: a consumer can effectively be required to pay a premium calculated against components of a project that do not represent the corresponding insured structural risk.

The MFR problem compounds the impact

The issue no longer stops at the insurance premium.

Under the new Minimum Financial Requirements, project values can influence a builder’s Maximum Construction Capacity (MCC) and the financial capacity the business must demonstrate.

If the full value of an integrated landscape contract is attributed to the builder rather than the value of the relevant structural component, non-built works can consume more MCC, increase the financial threshold a business must meet and constrain the number or value of projects it can carry at one time.

For small and medium landscape businesses operating with project-based cash flow and significant upfront material costs, that matters.

What LV is asking government to change

LV is advocating for three practical changes:

• Allow the SIS value of an integrated landscape contract to be apportioned so it reflects the permitted structural building work, supported by auditable documentation such as itemised contracts, schedules of works, permit documents or cost schedules.
• Alternatively, expressly allow built and non-built components of a landscape project to be separated for SIS valuation purposes, with safeguards against artificial contract splitting or deliberate undervaluation.
• Apply the same appropriately apportioned value when considering work in progress, Maximum Construction Capacity and associated Minimum Financial Requirements.

LV raised concerns about disproportionate MFR settings during consultation in March 2026, sought formal clarification from the BPC, and has now escalated the issue to Government.

The objective is a targeted fix that retains strong consumer protection while removing a cost and capacity burden that does not reflect the actual structural risk.

Housing Supply Regulation: Making Reform Work Beyond the Planning Permit

In June 2026, LV made a submission to the Productivity Commission’s Inquiry into Housing Supply Regulation.

The submission argued that professional landscaping and green infrastructure need to be considered as part of the housing-delivery system—not simply as finishing works added at the end of a project.

LV highlighted the practical barriers landscape businesses encounter across planning conditions, council requirements, subdivision processes, drainage and stormwater approvals, public asset interfaces, vegetation controls and open-space requirements.

Many of these requirements are legitimate in isolation. The problem arises when they are duplicated, inconsistently interpreted or assessed sequentially by different authorities.

LV called for:

• Clearer and more consistent approval pathways
• Reduced duplication between planning, building, infrastructure and post-approval processes
• Better coordination between councils and referral authorities
• Greater consistency in the treatment of canopy cover, stormwater, permeability, tree protection and public open space.

Importantly, LV also argued that faster housing delivery should not come at the expense of long-term liveability.

Professional landscaping, public open space, and green infrastructure contribute to stormwater management, urban heat reduction, biodiversity, usable outdoor space, erosion control, pedestrian comfort, and community well-being.

Housing reform works best when these elements are planned early and delivered efficiently—not removed from the equation.

Green Infrastructure: Strengthening the Industry’s Voice Through AGIN

LV’s advocacy is also extending through the Australasian Green Infrastructure Network (AGIN), with LV contributing to future Advocacy & Policy activities.

This provides another avenue to ensure the practical experience of the landscape industry is represented in national conversations about resilient and liveable cities.

AGIN’s Urban Green Infrastructure position statement describes green infrastructure as the living infrastructure of our cities: the network of natural, designed and cultivated landscapes that can include everything from private gardens and streetscapes to parklands, corridors, wetlands and vegetated stormwater systems.

The network’s policy priorities include recognising urban green infrastructure as an asset class, embedding it in planning and infrastructure frameworks, establishing national performance standards, securing long-term funding and expanding training opportunities.

Those priorities align strongly with LV’s position that green infrastructure should be valued as essential infrastructure that supports climate resilience, health, biodiversity and liveability.

Victorian Skills Authority: Representing Landscaping in Two Advisory Groups

Workforce and training remain major advocacy priorities for Landscaping Victoria.

LV continues to participate in two Industry Advisory Groups coordinated by the Victorian Skills Authority—one covering Primary Industries and another covering Construction, Property and Mining.

Primary Industries Industry Advisory Group

Recent Primary Industries discussions have focused on equitable access to training, career information, attraction and retention, qualification reform and more responsive delivery models.

The group has also considered the role of shorter qualifications, skill sets and stackable micro-credentials, as well as the use of modern technology to make training more relevant and accessible, particularly in regional areas.

Recent work included discussion of industry-led, short-form programs and the proposed Green Essentials pre-accredited course, designed to introduce participants to green-space industries, landscaping and horticulture.

The broader objective is to create entry points that are practical, understandable and connected to real employment opportunities.

Construction, Property and Mining Industry Advisory Group

Through the built-environment advisory group, LV is contributing to discussions about how apprenticeships, occupational licensing and vocational education and training can keep pace with a rapidly changing industry.

Recent papers considered the shift towards a “layered skills ecosystem”, in which strong core trade skills are complemented by enabling skills such as digital literacy, data capability, leadership and adaptability, as well as technology-specific platform skills.

Potential reform pathways being considered include modernising apprenticeships, recognising high-quality stackable credentials, expanding structured continuing professional development and ensuring licensing systems can preserve safety while responding to changing technologies and work practices.

For landscaping—an industry that spans horticulture, construction, design, and increasingly digital project delivery—these discussions are highly relevant.

Skills Insight: A National Review of Landscaping Skills and Career Pathways

LV is also contributing to the federal Skills Insight Landscaping Skills Review, a national project examining critical skills shortages, qualification misalignment and regulatory fragmentation across the Australian landscaping industry.

Skills Insight is a Jobs and Skills Council funded by the Australian Government Department of Employment and Workplace Relations.

The project was initially scoped around landscape design but expanded following consultation with peak industry associations to encompass design, construction, maintenance and green infrastructure across jurisdictions. Landscaping Victoria is listed among the peak associations engaged in the project.

The May 2026 interim report identified a strikingly consistent set of themes across the country:

• Workforce and skills shortages
• Unclear occupational definitions
• Qualification misalignment
• Changing technology and work practices
• Inconsistent state licensing and regulatory settings
• Weak visibility of career pathways

For Victoria specifically, consultation highlighted the importance of preserving standalone landscape design qualifications, improving alignment between qualifications and regulatory boundaries, and addressing variability in funding and regulatory requirements.

Across the national consultation, stakeholders also identified plants and horticulture, soils, water management, set-out and plan interpretation, compliance, business and project management, and digital tools as fundamental capabilities that need to be properly reflected in training.

What happens next

The next phase is expected to focus on three areas:

• Detailed qualification mapping and skills-gap analysis
• Development of a nationally coherent landscaping career pathway from entry level through to advanced and supervisory roles
• Coordinated work to improve Occupational Standard Classification for Australia (OSCA) titles so workforce data and occupational definitions better reflect contemporary landscaping work.

The final report is due in December 2026.

Why These Landscaping Advocacy Workstreams Belong Together

At first glance, Home Warranty insurance, housing approvals, green infrastructure policy, and vocational education reform may appear to be separate issues.

For landscape businesses, they are not.

They all influence the cost of doing business, the availability of skilled people, the way landscape work is recognised, the capacity of registered contractors to grow, and the quality of the environments our industry is asked to deliver.

That is why LV is working across multiple forums rather than treating advocacy as a series of isolated submissions.

The goal is to build a stronger, more consistent industry voice—one that can explain both the economic realities of running a landscape business and the broader public value created by professional landscaping.

What Landscaping Victoria Members Can Do

The experiences of our members are one of LV’s strongest advocacy tools.

Practical examples show policymakers where rules create unintended outcomes and help turn an abstract policy issue into something that can be understood and fixed.

• Home Warranty: If premiums are being calculated on large non-built components of your projects, share the project values and impact with LV.
• MFR and MCC: If these requirements are affecting your ability to tender, maintain your pipeline or grow, tell us what is happening in practice.
• Skills and training: If you are seeing persistent skills gaps, training barriers, qualification issues or workforce challenges, share those examples with us.

LV will continue to press for a practical solution on Home Warranty and MFRs while contributing to wider housing, green infrastructure, and workforce policy.

As these initiatives progress, we will keep members informed—and keep bringing the landscape industry’s practical experience to the tables where decisions are made.