Joseph,
I am afraid the "Crime and Punishment" approach that underpins everything aviation in Australia just promotes hiding things. Why would it be otherwise??
The so called CASA "Just Culture" really means the "Just" culture, "Just get the bastard".
The way the system works, in practice, is to only encourage non-reporting, a system that is not really interested in what produces the best air safety outcomes, only "compliance and enforcement", said "compliance and enforcement" based on a highly variable interpretation, by multiple individuals, of our internationally acknowledged complex, convoluted and contradictory regulation --- which are world leading by weight of word or page count, but otherwise a complete failure at achieving the best possible air safety outcomes.
The amazing thing is the resilience of what has become know as the "iron ring".
There have been more Royal Commissions, Parliamentary inquiries, and other forms of investigation, into the formation of and administration of air law in Australia, than any other Commonwealth department or instrumentality, all to no avail. Including the longest inquiry since Federation, Morris.
Those of us who have been around a while know the commercial damage that has been done, as "aviation" has languished compared with other Australian industry, or the aviation sectors of comparable countries.
In an economy that has had unprecedented growth since the Hawke/Keating era, aviation has significantly contracted, because it simply cannot cope, let alone prosper, under such a regressive and punitive set of administrative (not really "safety" at all) laws.
Quite apart from the more obvious, former export industries have been destroyed in the MRO sector, those that survive, only survive because they have EASA/FAA/ other OS approvals, rendering CASA irrelevant.
No industry could cope and prosper under the regime of ultra micro-management that is visited on the aviation community by such a both aggressive and regressive "public service" bureaucracy.
And, it not as if you can say: "Well, at least we have the world's safety aviation", because we simply do not.
As a result, it is quite predictable, in theory and practice, that the Australian approach cannot produce the best air safety outcomes.
We fall far short of the US in all recognized categories of air safety outcomes, but CASA, the politicians, the bureaucracy, and sadly too much of the aviation community, is willfully blind to the real situation.
Tootle pip!!