I may be wrong in some details and happy to stand corrected but my memory was CASA started a rewrite of the CAO/ANOs and CARs in the mid 1990s to simplify the regulatory framework.
The end result would reduce the then CARs, CAOs into a simple 2 tiered structure by rewriting it, so existing CAOs would be either turned into actual regulations (CARs) or advisory documents describing procedures that would acceptably comply with the CARs (CAAPs).
It sounded pretty sensible, would reduce the complexity and spaghetti nature of existing regulation making it all easier to understand, easier to comply with and verify compliance with and consequently make things safer and more efficient.
Again, as I recall the process was going to take some time as it was a big job - not a year or so but probably a few years but would progressively replace and simplify the existing regulations as it proceeded.
Again I may be wrong here but I understood NZ decided on a similar rewrite of their legislation but they started a few years earlier in the early 1990s.
It is now over 20 years later. NZ have had their rewritten model pretty much all in operation for nearly 20 years? (is that the case? I am not familiar with their history).
Meanwhile in Oz, the rewrite is still actively happening and progressively replacing the old system and is apparently close to being finished, the time-frame, much as it has been for 20 years - is in a year or two...
Now there are also CASRs as well as CARs and CAOs so instead of streamlining the regulations into a single document with an additional advisory document, we now have 3 sets of regulation documents and an advisory document and the new "simplified regulations" are more complicated, less consistent, more spaghetti like and more difficult to comply with than the system they were simplifying.
So the current state of play:
* A 2 decade time blowout.
* The apparent accomplishment of exactly the opposite of what was proposed.
* What must be an enormous amount of money and resources expended.
* A regulator that is deeply distrusted and disliked and mocked by the industry.
* A general aviation industry that is struggling to survive and is snowed under a growing mountain of regulations that they feel do little to enhance safety but find add significant costs and impose inappropriate and silly restrictions.
* The apparent loss of a safety culture that actively sought to understand the factors behind incidents and why safety might be compromised, replaced instead by a regulatory system that looks at ways of pursuing and attaching liability rather than identifying and mitigating systemic failures and weaknesses.
That successive ministers, (of all persuasions), for 2 decades have failed to address this other than by allowing the process to roll on directionless is a classic failure of leadership.
Surely such an ongoing, long standing debacle and such a failure to get the situation in hand would make great fodder for someone who wanted to embarrass a pollie or a government?