Uncommon Sense
I completely understand where you stand on fatigue. When I was in New York we were flying scheduled reg's and we were all told, "legal to start, legal to finish".
We actually had a crew that had been on duty 19 hours during the blizzard of 1996, where they found themselves deiced twice before each take-off and nine hours behind schedule!
Simply put, we had to have a "safety day". Some crews were admitting to falling asleep on taxiways and others in flight. We found rooms at an airport hotel and sent most of them packing and cancelled a bunch of flights. The chief pilot privately thanked me, believing his position might have been in jeopardy by initiating such a move.
This is the way of the industry right now and the only way to prevent these happenings is a strong cohesive union that sets it's own safety standards above the minimums required by law.
By our own contract, we can't be scheduled over twelve hours in a twenty-four, but we can elect to extend to fourteen. We purposely left the two hours to anticipate delays, so that the company could arrange a backup. Again, this is better than the FAR minimums, but it would not have been achieved without solidarity.
To answer your questions about the aims of the meeting, you need only look at the above areas of the thread to find out that it's a discussion about airspace, pure and simple.
It has no regulatory ties. It's purpose is merely to hear what various representatives have to say about what Australia needs to do in order to represent the highest levels of airspace safety.
You do not need to be defensive about ATC salaries. If the scales recently sent to me are representative of the true scales, I think that it's reprehensible that they should be so low, when management is making so much .
I worked with the pilot controller liaison for NATCO quite a lot back in the 90's...this may surprise you, but most controllers I deal with actually like me! I drink beer with them in Atlantic City all the time.