Seriously? Don't you mean an operations spec? The logic of this is that an airline would need an new AOC to fly into every other foreign country. That could be 100 + for some airlines. I know you folks have a high opinion of your system down there but that's not how the world works.
Australia is not the world, it's a country that has to make every dam thing harder for everyone when it comes to governance. Not for some tyrannical maniac, just because the civil service wants to keep itself relevant and employed shuffling vast amounts of paper (now emails) between irrelevant parties.
WRT to the Pitot covers, this is a very easy fix if aircraft maintenance was anywhere near 21st century standards. Simple NFT data buttons on the pitot covers or any other vital storage covers, a data logger linked to the CMMS program, then the engineer who signs off the item has to physically log it into the system, rather than make a mark saying they did it, when they could easily have not. Red tags/flags and memory system from the 1950s only work if the tags are obvious and the memory 100% reliable. Eventually a tag/flag falls off or the memory forgets and errs with 'done' rather than 'not done'. If the engineers are as lax as the report suggests its most likely that the extra walk to put a placard in the flight deck would get omitted anyway.
The other 'fail safe' is that the crew should have noticed the airspeed failure well before they got airborne or anywhere near the point they had to continue.
One extra point I can see here, is why is there no Sound alert for airspeed failure? On something as smart as the airbus it really should tell you if the primary airspeed indicator has failed on take-off...