Ledsled,
Quite frankly, your continual assertions about "C must be safer than E", in risk analysis terms, are meaningless, if for no other reason than "Safe/Safer" are dimensionless terms, and to use an overworked expression, "if you can't measure it, you can't manage it". It's not as simple as that, of course, but that will do for a start.
"Dimensionless terms"? Rubbish! It
was measured, in the three months after NAS 2b was introduced, with two airproxs. Why do you continue to refuse to acknowledge the statistics?
How many aircraft/lives have we lost, in Australia, during departure or approach phases of flight??
Interesting piece of psychology, that those of you with a window seat happily accept this (much higher) risk, but become as unhinged as the media about a midair.
Why am I not surprised that you don't want to take that one up??
What on earth are you on about? No losses (or concern) during App/Dep due robust procedures (which, for NPAs, I might add, we regionals have forgotten more than you and your international experts will ever know; some of us Australians were decades ahead of the rest of the world when it came to CDA NPAs).
On the other hand, I'm worried about a midair in E because THERE ARE NO DEFENCES OR PROCEDURES, only the big sky theory.
Once you have achieved a 5E-9 probability of collision, no additional resources/higher class of airspace is going to make the slightest difference to the likelihood of a collision.
Show me ONE post on Prune where somebody is suggesting we go higher than C. IMO, you and others get a gee-whizz feeling out of C>B>A, when in fact practically speaking there is no difference. YOU mob are the ones who don't have a handle on practicality or reality. It's either CTA or OCTA with the half-pregnant E jammed in the middle. Get rid of it.
One thing Mick Toller (former CASA DAS/CEO) was right about, was his description of Australia as: "An aviation Galapagos, where all sorts of strange mutation have developed in splendid isolation".
Typical Septic Tank attitude. Following on from my comments above, without the help of anybody, we developed a first-class airspace system that both protected and facilitated development. Fair enough, the need for mandatory VFR full-reporting had passed it's use-by date, but on virtually all other aspects of aviation in the last 15 years, most of the changes have been unnecessary and costly, and have turned pilots off aviation. Yes, you and your ICAO "nuts" have done the job, as well as unnecessarily endangering fare-paying pax with your Free In G (I'm glad that failed) and now Free in E campaigns.