Opinion piece by former CASA Chairman Dick Smith in The Australian. Dec 28 TH 2018
“I don’t think you should ever regard Aviation safety as what is affordable “
- Transport Minister John Anderson Oct 5 th 2000
I welcome the appointment of Barnaby Joyce as Australia’s new Minister for Transport. He certainly has a challenge in front of him when it comes to Australia’s General Aviation industry, which is in a state of near collapse after years of failed government policy.
It will take someone as senior as the deputy Prime Minister to sort this mess out. As The Australian has reported, General Aviation – so vital in a big country like ours – is in serious trouble. Crippled by skyrocketing regulatory costs and pointless red tape, businesses are closing and much of the flying training industry is being sold off to Chinese buyers at bargain rates.
A federal government report last week showed the drastic decline brought on by the excessive costs: General Aviation flying hours ,which includes the vital flying training industry , have declined by 40 per cent in just five years.
But none of this is new. I have been warning that introducing regulations which ignore cost has been crippling the industry for years. 17 years ago I got into a very public disagreement with Mr Joyce’s predecessor as minister, John Anderson who introduced the polices that have resulted in today’s mess.
At the time I was chairman of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and I warned Mr Anderson that the substantial additional costs that had been placed on the industry by the sell-off of the airports and the “ user pays” air traffic control system would have to be balanced by a reduction in other costs.
Driven by bureaucrats with little understanding of business, he pursued a policy of regulations regardless of cost, with the inevitable result that ridiculous levels of regulation have made it impossible to maintain a viable industry . It seems that for the bureaucrats, the safest skies are empty skies similar to the “Yes Minister” episode of the hospital with no patients!
The Minister refused to meet with me to discuss the issue, releasing a public statement that showed how little he understood: “I don’t think that you should ever regard aviation safety as what is affordable,” he claimed. “Safety is something which has the highest priority – it is not a question of cost.”
In effect he was saying that with air safety there was no cost that was too high to pay, ignoring the fact that this would make the cost of air tickets un affordable to anyone other than the ultra wealthy.
Mr Anderson’s public statement was quickly embraced by the bureaucrats within the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and the denial that cost should be considered became an almost cult like belief which still exists in the organisation to this day .
Aviation is like anything else in life. The amount of money that you can spend on safety is always limited by what the marketplace can afford. If regulations are written which increase the cost of flying too much , people can’t afford to fly and businesses go broke.
The inevitable result of this stubborn insistence that there are no limits to the costs that could be imposed on the Aviation industry is a situation where operators simply can’t afford to meet the red-tape and expenses.
It has done nothing to improve safety, and will very likely lead to a situation where the majority of pilots in Australia will come from Asia. The losers are many of Mr Joyce’s constituents in rural and regional Australia who rely greatly on general aviation as a vital link in Australia’s transport system.
It means we will lose hundreds millions of dollars in export earnings from flight training and other operations that are no longer Australian owned
Before Mr Anderson became Minister, the CASA Service Charter directed that Australia should follow “ proven safe procedures and standards from leading aviation countries which best allocate finite safety resources, to protect fare paying passengers and encourage high participation levels in aviation.”
But this directive was removed from the charter in the Anderson years. I fought these changes while Chairman of CASA, but failed to overcome an entrenched public service and a minister in denial . I resigned rather than be held responsible for the slow death of an industry that I have been a part of for more than 40 years.
I hope now that under a new Minister, we can get back to a sensible policy that balances costs and regulation in a rational way. Mr Joyce will need to move quickly to reverse the disastrous “ ignore cost “ policies of the past. I will give him every support and I do hope he listens to the industry before it is too late.