Dick, there weren’t 3000 FSO’s so clearly there were other areas of the operation where reductions were made.
Given it was unlikely that all 3000 were sitting there twiddling their thumbs, and just as unlikely that all 7000 of the then CAA staff members were completely under utilised, then someone else needed to do at least some of the work those “redundant” people were doing. So there is a fair chance that much of the non FSO work was farmed out to others, such as contractors etc, who were unlikely to be prepared to do it for nothing, so therefore had to be paid. Granted they were no longer employees and granted there looked to be savings, but how much of those savings were merely money being moved from one bucket to another?
It is a fairly common corporate strategy to “re-align” or “restructure” business units to make them “leaner and more efficient” - I can think of one airline that congratulated itself for reducing costs and complexity by removing a fleet from service (at great expense) only to subcontract the flying to a third party, who strangely, made more profit than the operator itself, on paper looks clever but at the end of the day someone needs to make a profit and if the work is being shopped to a third party so they can make a profit it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense.
A long winded parallel, but the fact is that it would be highly unlikely that the removal of 3000 people would not result in a reduction of the service provided (which it did). So those services which would no longer be provided by the CAA/ASA must be provided by someone else, at a cost and supposedly at a profit to the new provider.
So let’s not kid ourselves that there were hundreds of millions of dollars as a direct result of the changes, because I seriously doubt that there was, but what there was a significant reduction in the services provided to the aviation industry and more directly to the services provided to pilots in this country.
Finally, how many of the 3000 were employees transferred to CASA when it was devolved from the CAA, just after the AMATS changes? Because that sure as **** has not been a cost saving venture!