Compliance overview

AMSA monitors compliance through a range of activities designed to help us better understand compliance behaviour, encourage, and support voluntary compliance, deter non-compliance, and inform initiatives to support our compliance partners.

Activities include:

• Inspections: Marine inspectors perform both scheduled and unscheduled inspections of vessels to ensure compliance with maritime laws for the safety of persons, vessels and protection of the environment. Vessel inspections also seek to detect systemic performance issues within the accredited surveyor scheme and other associated entities.
• Campaigns: Based on safety data analysis that identify safety and compliance trends across industries using data from search and rescue incidents, marine incident reports, incident investigations, inspections, and audits. The ongoing collection, recording and analysis of data underpins our understanding of maritime safety risks and informs how we best target compliance activities. AMSA’s compliance campaigns will be one of the following: 

1. Educational campaigns: Focus is on education and may include a combination of communication activities, guidance materials and facilitated workshops. Educational campaigns do not include focused inspections or audit activities.
2. Safety compliance campaigns: A combination of education, focused inspections and audits. In all cases we will commence with an education campaign followed by focused inspections to identify and measure the level of compliance.

• Compliance checks: For vessels of 7.5 metres or less, compliance checks and monitoring activities are combined with education programs. We have compliance partner arrangements with marine safety, parks, and fisheries organisations, and police agencies across Australia. Monitoring activities are undertaken with our compliance partner organisations.