I received an email from Ms Spence in the following terms yesterday (13 October 2023):
I can confirm that we have received your requests and I understand the Guidance Delivery Centre (GDC) will be in touch with you soon with answers to your questions.
For future requests for advice from the GDC, you may wish to consider submitting your request through our web portal. This means you can track the status of your enquiry, noting the GDC generally tries to respond to requests within 10 working days.
Kind regards
My response today (14 October 2023):
Thank you for that.
I look forward to hearing from the Guidance Centre, to which I have already emailed the same one-sentence supplementary question – singular - on 1 August, 23 August and 21 September 2023. That question was in response to emails sent to me by the Guidance Centre arising from my original questions submitted through ‘the portal’.
It seems to me that the process ‘tail’ is wagging the ‘dog’ here. My three emails to the Guidance Centre asking the same supplementary question were evidently ignored - despite email being a ubiquitous means of communication these days – because CASA has built a ‘portal’ and if a person does not ask a question through ‘the portal’ the computer says: No!
There should at least be a response to any email that will not be actioned by the Guidance Centre for whatever reason, stating - first - that the email will not be actioned by the Guidance Centre and - secondly - that ‘the portal’ is the only path to action. But that would of course point up the ‘tail wagging the dog’ issue. If the Guidance Centre was established by CASA for purposes including assisting ‘the industry’ to understand CASA’s interpretations of the rules, CASA should have effective processes in place to receive and respond in a timely way to questions submitted through whatever ordinary means the questioner chooses.
On the general subject of responses to correspondence, I note that CASA is the only institution with which I have ever dealt that does not currently acknowledge – even automatically in the case of emails - the receipt of correspondence sent to the institution’s CEO. I have worked in organisations – government and private - in which the performance measure was personal acknowledgement – by someone – within 30 minutes of receipt of incoming correspondence to the CEO or other senior personnel. Given the ease with which CASA IT staff could arrange a system of automatic acknowledgement of receipt of emails, it seems to me that the current practice of you not acknowledging the receipt of emails is a deliberate choice.
From my perspective, a lack of acknowledgement of receipt leaves me in doubt whether my emails have actually been received at all or are being ignored if they have been received. I should not be left in that kind of doubt for 14 days by a government agency. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I have written to a CEO of CASA in the 28 years since its establishment, and I do not write on matters of trivia.
All of that said, my views and experience could be unusual. I anticipate that the results of the questions about flexibility, efficiency and bureaucracy in the recent survey about aviation safety information and education will shed light on general views about those issues.
I now look forward to receiving a substantive (and hopefully convincing) answer to my one-sentence question, the answer to which should also be one sentence, within three months of my having first asked it of CASA on 1 August 2023.
Regards