Ultralight said:
yet another smack in the face for aviation!
And I agree with you!
But what is your next step? Have a beer, or write a letter?
Having the beer will calm you down, but writing the letter may actually change something.
But what to write?
You are not going to convince the Minister that the checks are unnecessary... he has had too many people tell him that they are necessary. They will have arrived with a whole raft of security initiatives and agreements that Australia would have difficulty arguing itself out of, if it wanted to.
My two beefs with the legislation are
(1) the security checking has already been done on me, and will continue to be done on me via my ASIC, so why repeat the exercise? and
(2) if it is in the national interest that i be checked, and the whole of the nation benefits from the increased security, then why should I be the one that pays for the security that everyone will enjoy?
So there is a perfectly legitimate question to ask in a letter to the Minister of Transport and all the other pollies involved.
I won't win an argument on whether or not pilots should be security checked. Too many other parties want to see it. But I do have a point if I complain about a piece of legislation that duplicates the procedure already in place for ASIC.
And the basis for 'cost recovery' via the individual pilot is worth arguing as well.
The 'user pays' philosophy that was the darling of the economic rationalists of the 1980's and 1990's has had such a hold that it has become an article of faith for many bureaucrats, and enables a lot of government inefficiencies to be hidden in fees for 'services.'
However, a new philosophy, probably equally shallow, is on the rise in administrative circles and it is known as 'shared inconvenience.'
This is at work in AirServices right now. If you wanted to have some airspace reclassified, maybe to extend some C or D airspace into class E to protect an ILS approach for the Singapore Flying College, f'rinstance, then the user pays principle is not applied.... the new concept of 'shared inconvenience' has the ascendancy, so that the loss of some class E around that aerodrome to the sport and recreational aviation people, is seen as a shared inconvenience for the increased safety of a Lear doing his/her ILS in Class C.
If the Minister and DOTARS could be persuaded to see that this is not a situation that fits a user pays model, but is more appropriately a situation where the new 'shared inconvenience' principle applies, well, could save me $200.
And that's what I will be putting forward in my next letter.