I attended a very convivial (as usual) family get together on the weekend. During a discussion with a mature and intelligent family friend about my partner’s flight to the city where the get together was happening, the family friend made a statement about the sick leave entitlements of air traffic controllers. In context, the family friend was expressing a view about the cause of delays in flights in and out of the capital city in which the get together was happening.
It became clear that the family friend considered the belligerent behaviour of air traffic controllers to be the cause of the problem. The controllers were milking an “unlimited sick leave” entitlement, the family friend said.
That perception was the product of a carefully managed media campaign. A bit like Robodebt and all those bludgers making fraudulent dole claims. Robodebt was merely clawing back money that lazy good-for-nothing nobodies weren’t entitled to and had scammed from honest, hard-working regular Australians.
This kind of nasty
PR path is well-trodden by nasty people, for a reason: It works. Scotty From Marketing knew that.
It may be that some - or, improbably, all - air traffic controllers are defrauding their employer by taking unjustified sick leave. But even if that’s true, that’s a personnel management issue which, if chronic, is a failure of personnel management by Airservices. If most of the air traffic control personnel employed by Airservices are defrauding their sick leave system, those personnel should be investigated, exposed and called to account.
An alternative explanation is that - as with Robodebt - we are witnessing a government agency spreading bull**** so as to cover up its own inadequacies, and other government agencies whose job it is to see through the first agency’s bull**** would prefer not to confront and expose that reality.
Robodebt is not an unfortunate, random event. It’s the natural consequence of what Australia’s public sector has become. Airservices is part of the public sector. So are CASA and ATSB.
Fingers crossed that the diameter of the airspace management roulette wheel remains ‘big enough’.