Lead Balloon:
The “procedure” could work just the same if the mandated phrase were “Fluffy Puppy” or “Ford Prefect” or “Ethel The Aardvark Goes Quantity Surveying”.
Yep, but ICAO chose to use the term "Mayday", a word that gets everyone's attention, as intended. Get over it. They also chose to use fixed reserve as the trigger; a well known concept that is already defined in the regulations and which is supposed to be kept intact except in cases of emergency. What other quantity of fuel remaining would have been acceptable to the critics? Ten minutes, five minutes? Perhaps a pilot should wait until fuel exhaustion occurs before declaring an emergency? After all, the aircraft is flying perfectly well right up to the point where the noise stops, so no emergency exists before then, right? Sarcasm aside, at what point does a low fuel situation become an 'emergency'? History shows that leaving it up to a pilot to determine such a nebulous point can have catastrophic results. Tying it to a simple concept such as fixed reserve takes away that nebulosity.
A point that seems to have been lost in the argument is that this isn't some Australian oddity; it's an ICAO procedure recommended for use by around 190 different countries, including Australia. Many of those countries do not use English as their first language, with resultant communication difficulties that have been a factor in past accidents. The use of a simple term such as "Mayday fuel" and tying it to fixed reserve arguably takes away much of that problem, as intended.
The terminology makes a mountain out of a molehill.
Only in Australia do we get so uptight about such esoteric crap. It's little wonder that Australian pilots are known overseas as "oztronauts", for their habit of making simple tasks far more difficult than they need to be. If Australian media outlets get so anxious about the use of the term "Mayday", then perhaps they need to be educated.