If you think about it, the CASA has very, very few people that have any hands-on knowledge of GA left. There used to be a few in there that are almost legend, but they've all retired. Even the ex-military types that went to the regulator weren't all that far removed from GA in the types of aircraft they operated. But it's all gone and replaced by career public servants. There is precious little aviation know-how left. Anyone who did have a clue bailed out for the airlines. Even the pilots left in the CASA get very few flying hours. There isn't the same movement through regional areas as there used to be and there's very little time or allowances for beers and dinners with the operators anymore and the exchange of informal information that occurred. Now GA operators view CASA staff as a portend of a show cause notice and treat them accordingly.
It's not enough for an employee of the regulator to simply know the rules. That person has to know why the rule was implemented: the intent behind the rule, otherwise he'll continue to run into issues of inappropriate application, no matter how well the rule is written. That's the information that has disappeared with the retirements towards the end of the 1980's and 90's.
Nowadays, the problem is made worse because even the best intentioned public servant is at the mercy of a politician who has an almost immediate copy of the latest opinion poll or survey and is keen to express an opinion and show of confidence to a journalist following up on breaking news. The GA industry has to learn to cope with this. GA occupies such a small proportion of the transport minister's portfolio and such a large proportion of the attention if something goes wrong, that it's easy to see why a politician takes a knee-jerk reaction to the latest opinion poll and chooses the easy option of directing CASA to "improve" GA safety. There are very few votes lost if a GA operator goes out of business compared to the potential votes lost if a politician is portayed as not caring about the travelling public.
I would love to see the regs get addressed, but hold out little hope for any major change until the pollies set an agenda, make sure it's on the right track, tweak it occasionally, but generally get out of the way.
In the same vein, the CASA has to embrace technology more. Information is available real time with social media: Tw-itter (I guess if it's spelt correctly it gets asterisked out), Facebook, etc., and the organisation is still messing around with
PR on its website and face-to-face meetings, which are expensive and time consuming. Government departments are usually 10 years behind the leading edge of industry. The CASA has slipped to somewhere between 15 and 20.