brianh
A couple of points in your response again demonstrate what I consider to be a cause of AOPA’s malaise.
On the strict liability issue, you state that:
AOPA had a politician ready to go to bat for a positive change. Two things happened thanks to Gary's intervention. First, the situation did not change for the positive. Second, and worse, a certain politician will be very unlikely to come to the aid of AOPA again in a hurry.
Your position is therefore that:
- Mr Gaunt
caused the outcome;
- the outcome wasn’t a positive one;
- Senator Alison is, as a consequence of this issue, unlikely to help AOPA again.
I think none of those points is true. The notice of motion was doomed to failure as soon as AOPA got the written concession from the Minister. I can prove it was doomed.
When a Senator wants to move a notice of motion of disallowance, s/he must give notice that the motion will be moved. Once notice has been given, a whole lot of other rules kick in. One of those rules is that if the Senator wants to
withdraw the motion, s/he must give notice that s/he intends to move the notice of
withdrawal. The purpose of the rule is obvious: there might be
other Senators who want to keep the notice of motion alive.
When Senator Alison moved her motion of withdrawal, having warned the Senate she was going to do so, how many Senators objected to the motion? Not one.
The reason there was no objection is explained in my post above – among other things, AOPA had that letter from the Minister.
If AOPA really wanted to get Senator Alison off side, all it needed to do was ask her to make a goose out of herself by pressing the motion. The government would have waved the letter and the AG’s opinion around, and the motion would have failed.
And of course you never deal with the substance of the issue – that is, identify which rules weren’t already strict liability, which shouldn’t be strict liability now, then write to the Minister to get him to do what he said he would do. No, that wouldn’t do at all.
If the issue’s so important, so crucial to the interests of GA, if your overriding concern is for AOPA and GA, why haven’t you done that?
You also state that:
We all have our biases. Mine is success for AOPA and GA. I don't know yours but from reading your posts I detect a strong pro-CASA bias therefore I suspect you and I are going to see both AOPA issues and Gary's actions with different benchmarks.
I think you have more biases than the one you claim. If you had
objectively analysed all of my posts on pprune, you would have seen that I criticise CASA when I think it deserves criticism, and support it when I think it deserves support. That’s called
objectivity. You equate the merits of an issue to your perceptions of the people involved. That’s called
prejudice.