And to just address a point made earlier by cjam when he questioned whether paying a pilot more money makes them technically safer.
You did tend to harp on just a bit much in your post about pulling a double split 16 hour duty time and then getting home to find you are getting evicted so you pack up and sleep in the medical clinic and pay for your own medicals and charts and so on and so on and so on..... that all very sad. A bit dramatic I thought, but sad.
The point is that young pilots, when they slip on that uniform and load up their passengers MUST have a zero tolerance for deliberately breaching safety regulations, regardless how petty. It is that simple. If they choose to pay for their own endorsements or work for free then that is up to them. On the real issue of taking peoples lives for granted by flying beyond the law, there has to be a zero tolerance. The problem is that there is a culture out there that accept the routine flaunting of CASA regulations as a part of the job. Pilots all get together and laugh about it at the pub.
"Jacko had 16 POB in his 206 coming out of WoopWoop community last week, four adults and the rest were all kids ha ha ha!" We all know it goes on. It's really funny until half-wit Jacko drills his overloaded plane into a tree taking off.
It's that attitude that has to stop. The operators are not going to stop it so it's time we, as pilots, took the job a bit more seriously and stopped bleating like babies that we were bullied into it by the big bad boss.
My two cents anyway.