It's fun to play with a few numbers related to the CASA budget. 180m works out to approximately:
$5,800 per pilot per year
or
$12,000 per aircraft per year
or
$210,000 per AOC per year
or
$1.80 per passenger movement, i.e. about $300 for a full 737 from Melbourne to Sydney.
No wonder cost recovery is so damaging for Australian aviation.
Of course CASA would argue that the costs are spread around between pilots, aircraft owners, AOC holders etc. so the numbers are not that large but the reality is that whichever way you spread it, the costs fall on the same participants.
The only one that is semi-independent is passenger movements - people wouldn't notice a couple of dollars on a ticket. Unfortunately the airlines do notice $300 on a 737 load, and they are the ones with the lobbying budget to shift costs to somebody else.
For comparison, if the car registration and licensing authorities cost $12,000 per car, their budget would be about 160 billion per year.
This does not include any Airservices figures.