The source
The Master Electricians Australia report to the Treasury.
In December 2019, Master Electricians Australia (the peak body representing more than 4,500 Australian electrical contracting businesses) submitted a Federal Budget Submission titled Safety Switches save lives! to the Australian Government Treasury. [1] The submission aggregates inspection data from licensed electricians across Australia, framed by independent homeowner research commissioned for the report.
The same report estimates a deficit of around 30 million safety switches across Australian homes, and notes that more than 80% of homeowners believe they are well or very well protected against electrical injury, a gap the report calls a “fundamental disconnect between perception and reality.”
The transfer
Why the figure travels to New Zealand.
Australia and New Zealand share AS/NZS 3000 [2], the joint Wiring Rules every electrician in either country works to. The Rules took the same approach to RCD coverage on both sides of the Tasman, mandating residual-current protection on residential lighting and socket circuits, and tightening over time. Homes wired before the relevant amendments do not automatically meet the current threshold.
The housing-stock age profile is also similar: a large share of NZ housing predates the 2007 amendment that broadened RCD requirements, and there is no rolling regulatory mechanism that retrofits older boards to the current rule. NZ has not published an inspectorate-grade equivalent of the MEA audit, so the Australian figure is the most rigorous published approximation of the NZ population.
The consequence
What a circuit with no RCD actually means.
An RCD (residual current device, the “safety switch” in the MEA report) trips when current leaks to earth, typically at the 30 mA threshold defined by IEC 60479[3] as the boundary above which sustained current through a human body can stop the heart. Without an RCD on a circuit, that protection chain is absent. A faulty appliance, a damaged cable, or a wet contact does not automatically disconnect.
In NZ the Electricity (Safety) Regulations 2010[4]treat a missing or failed RCD as an “electrically unsafe” condition. The regulations require remediation when discovered, but they do not require anyone to go looking.
The Basis answer
Advanced shock protection on every circuit.
Every Basis circuit module includes a 30 mA Type-A RCD function as standard, applied to every circuit on the board, not just lighting and sockets. That includes the dedicated circuits (oven, hot water, EV charger, heat pump) that have historically been outside the RCD-required set under AS/NZS 3000.
EV charging changes the protection picture. A Type-A RCD can miss the smooth DC leakage an on-board EV charger can produce, which is why Basis offers Type-B RCD function on EV-charging circuits where the connected charger does not already provide its own DC residual-current detection. More on the Type-A vs Type-B distinction at /standards/rcd-types.
Each circuit also runs a continuous self-test, so a silently failed protection device surfaces in the Basis app rather than at the moment it was meant to act. Pair that with the arc-fault detection covered separately at /standards/arc-fault-risk and the silent-failure rate covered at /standards/rcd-thresholds, and the Basis Board closes all three of the protection gaps the published evidence identifies in a typical NZ home.