Originally Posted by
Mr Approach
I can only, with exasperation, say again that it all boils down to what the Minister considers to be a safe air traffic control system.
If the system is to be run as a cost recovery exercise, then it will never be As Safe As Reasonably Practicable (ALARP). It will only be as safe as what money can be recovered from the users to fill Government coffers.
A national disgrace, but what other conclusion can be reached?
Dicks later post about his letter to the Airservice Board and article in the Australian, prove me correct.
The Board of Airservices, the Board of CASA and their CEOs simply do not care! Why becuase their boss does not care.
We can argue all we like in the columns of PPrune, it will not make one jot of difference.
Frankly I do not know what it takes to get a Government to take notice, for goodness sake let's close this interminable trail of argumentative emails.
There is a common misconception that the Minister is the boss of the heads of independent statutory agencies like CASA and Airservices. One needs merely to read the legislation that establishes them to work out it’s not true.
The heads of these agencies are not supposed to care what the Minister thinks. That’s precisely the Parliament’s aim in setting up independent agencies. If the Minister has a strong opinion about some specific issue, the Minister can try to get the Parliament to change the legislation or get a binding general policy order made. There’s a bunch of flim flam about high-sounding plans and policies and other stuff, none of which overrides the specific regulatory powers and their exercise. (The airspace regulation legislation is a work of art that makes the Minister look important but, when you scratch the surface - by reading it - you realise it’s a facade.)
(In any event, successive Ministers ‘responsible’ for aviation regulation over the last couple of decades seem to me to have been little more than meat puppets. For a while there it looked like Barnaby Joyce had the temerity to think and decide stuff for himself, but the machine sorted him out. Senator Susan McDonald will be cured of her case of independent thought, too.)
The Parliament is the boss of the independent agencies. The Parliament makes and changes the laws that establish and fund the independent agencies and confer functions and powers on them.
The constituency of the Parliament is in my view the problem. The major party abdication of responsibility to the ‘professionals’ in the agencies is the problem. As I’ve said many times, while ever a majority of voters vote either for Labor or the Coalition, they
both win. I’ll bet the majority of people who whinge about the state of aviation in Australia vote for either Labor or the Coalition. (As HL Mencken said: “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”)
The solution is not another inquiry or commission. (And I note the pathetically small number of submissions made to the Senate inquiry into GA. There are more submission to the Senate inquiry into “the opportunities for strengthening Australia’s relations with the Republic of France”, FFS. It’s as if almost everyone in GA has no time on their hands at the moment to express a view, even if it is to provide glowing support for the efforts of CASA, ATSB and Airservices. Must be all that increased aviation activity out there.)
A smoking hole that used to be an RPT jet full of fare paying passengers flying in stone age G airspace will merely result in MORE power and MORE funding for the cabal of bureaucrats that have been in a symbiosis with major party governments for decades. That cabal is now effectively a mutual protection racket.
The solution lies in ending the duopoly. And the chances of that are somewhere between Buckley’s and none while ever people dedicate their finite energy to trying to change a meat puppet’s mind.