Budgie, Australian Helicopters wasn't the golden-haired boy you make them out to be. At least on Horn Island. They were the forgotten cousins, very rarely did a trainer go up there (who wants to stay in the Resort or the Wongai??? ) and when he did, he didn't do it over the hand-over days of Monday and Tuesday. I was on the alternate 2-week shift that saw Ando once in 8 months. We wanted to be trained on RNAV approaches (this was in 2008) but "didn't have the time, you don't need it", so when the Wx was below mins for the Horn NDB, we stayed on the ground, couldn't go anywhere, whereas with the RNAV training we could fly approaches to the fuel dump at York and get back into Horn.
Accommodation was poor, and they never had enough to cover us all - every shift, I was plonked in the Wongai's rubbish little room, not even a proper chair to sit in, wifi was $10 for half an hour and so on. The houses had 3 bedrooms, but "the award" limited it to 2 people in each house.
The transit up there took from a 6am pickup for the 2-hour drive to BNE, wait, hop the jet to Cairns, wait, hop the Q400 to Horn, and straight away at 5pm you are on the night shift, hoping like crazy there isn't a callout as the fatigue from sitting around for 11 hours sets in.
And the crewroom coffee at the hangar was mud.......
Perhaps the situation has improved with time, but it sounds like Babcock are Babcocking it up.