Originally Posted by
Dick Smith
So here we have a Deputy Prime Minister basically stating a lie and getting away with it.
Have a look at Mr Anderson’s
Wikipedia entry.
It raves on about what a fantastic Deputy Prime Minister he was and how he was praised when he eventually retired. There is not one mention in the entry of him actually doing anything for the aviation side of the Transport portfolio.
As we know, he propagated these “lies” that you don’t need to have affordable aviation regulations. He got away with that and by the look of it, the next Minister has been advised (by bureaucrats earning $600,000 or $700,000 per year) to do the same thing.
It is almost as if our democracy is not working any more.
By degrees and by definition it is not working as it should because Ministers have been giving up their responsibilities by creating independent Commonwealth corporations to govern in their stead. The great ‘independent umpire’ idea so fancied by politicians and it seems the sports loving populace.
It is also a much beloved and coveted prize for a bureaucracy moving out of the more salary restricted mainstream Public Service into the wider Pubilic Sector and where ‘commercial corporate’ rates of pay are the norm.
When CASA was set loose from direct Ministerial control, some thirty years ago, none of us foresaw the looming disaster, death by a thousand cuts for GA.
As for John Anderson, dishing up the notion that affordability has no place regarding safety was always mindless and completely illogical. That the notion was made into law shows how, for all our supposed educated sophistication, our democracy is far from perfect and the old saying “eternal vigilance,” to keep our freedoms, remains just as true as anytime in the past.
Inroads into our freedom of speech have occurred and the whole apparatus of government has become extremely top heavy thanks in no small part to the handout mentality. In consequence there’s as many voting for a living as working for same making it very difficult for governments to move.
GA has got a battle on it’s hands.