During the trial I sincerely hope that the background to the lights going off during the takeoff roll (if they did) comes floating to the top. If it were not for some individuals pushing "save dollars at every turn" and "affordable safety", and now having people in the industry who only understand economic rationalism and little of commonsense, then we probably wouldn't have the ridiculous situation where an RPT jet crew could be caught by the auto-off function of the PAL because airport operators will not allow airline staff to manually switch the lights on because it wastes power/globes.
While I am not saying categorically that is what happened in this case, this scenario is played out every night around Australia.
While some will immediately jump on CASA for not having rules in place to prevent this sort of thing happening, I counter that the safety of a system relies to a large extent on a commonsense approach by all in it, not a zealous desire by a few for affordable safety putting irresponsible pressure on people to save a buck and on regulators to keep up with people who do try to save a buck.