Victor Two. Not necessarily so. Mate of mine with a bare 200 hours got his first job in NT and was immediately thrown into the shonky world of badly maintained aircraft and a well known chief pilot who has made the pages of Pprune countless times. Maintenance release entries were sackable. He once flew a C210 to Darwin for scheduled servicing and pointed out to the maintenance organisation that one tyre was badly worn and needed changing. LAME disagreed saying it had a few more landings in it. On first flight after this event, the tyre burst at completion of landing run. The chief pilot proceeded to extract the price of the new tyre out of the pilots meagre wages.
There were many more operations where regulations were ignored or the pilot(s) were sacked on some pretense. This was Northern Territory GA justice at it's worst. It will never change in Australia.
The same pilot (and doubtless several hundred others now in Qantas and Virgin) is now very relieved and happy to be a first officer with with a major airline. . He feels safe and secure in the knowledge that it is a professional operation with an excellent safety record. There is no way that he would ever consider breaking the Regs because the airline ethos does not require the safety rules to be broken in order for the pilots to keep their jobs. As a former airline pilot I have the greatest sympathy for pilots who are forced to stretch the rules to live in GA. I have yet to meet a single airline pilot who would happily go back to flying GA - and it's not just the money, either. There is no shortage of highly principled but unemployed pilots. It is called the real world.