Stink
Thank you for making my point.
If we want to cite the AAT’s comments about CASA as evidence of impropriety (a reasonable thing to do, in my view) we need to review everything the AAT has said about CASA in order to make an objective assessment of the extent of the impropriety. Otherwise, we’re being a little selective and prejudiced, don’t you think?
For every AAT hearing in which CASA has been criticised, there are 2 dozen where the AAT has decided that CASA has made the correct and preferable decision. Crunch those numbers for me, and let me know how you interpret them.
That outcome is a little inconvenient for CASA’s accusers. So they take the logical next step and say that the AAT runs scared every time CASA says “safety”. But the duplicity of that position is exposed when, upon sober reflection, one releases that CASA always says “safety”, and yet, as you have pointed out, the AAT occasionally disagrees with CASA and even gives it a caning now and then. That’s why the AAT was created.
And then there’s the line about the AAT not being “a real court”. If we look at superior court decisions, the success rate is not as high for CASA, but it still ‘wins’ more often than not. However, I note that the side which ‘wins’ battles in administrative law sometimes doesn’t win the war, so it’s difficult to extrapolate from the decisions. Except to say I haven’t seen a judgement in which a Federal Court judge describes any action of CASA as corrupt or malicious. In the only Federal Court matter of which I am aware that those accusations were levelled against CASA, the judge was so unimpressed with the case that he awarded costs against the accusing counsel personally.
Torres didn’t receive any “special treatment”, at least not in a negative sense. The organisation for which he worked broke the rules, regulatory action was taken, and when the regulator was satisfied the organisation was capable of complying with the rules, the regulatory action ended. While Torres and any journalist around are of course free selectively to quote whatever facts they like about the circumstances, and to put whatever spin on them they like, they’re more than a little naïve if they think no one’s going to tell the other side of the story, on the first and only occasion the accusations were investigated.
Torres’ legitimate complaint relates not to corruption, but to the complete policy vacuum and progress on classification of operations “reform”. The government doesn’t know what it wants for GA and, in case you haven’t worked it out by now, it doesn’t care.