A fair go ?? I wonder.
Quote – Sunfish: "If these regulations were from a flea bitten African or Middle Eastern Country I think I could be forgiven for thinking that their deliberately opaque and imprecise wording was designed to allow officials to extract the maximum possible bribes from operators".
Quote – Sunfish: However since I wouldn't accuse CASA of such motivation, all I can think of is that the regulations are written to maximize the "psychic income' of officials be giving them unfettered powers to extract the maximum of suffering and fear out of operators.
This is a fair comparison to the system in Oz. Systemic corruption, writ large. Just not paid out in shekels or camels.
The 'Safety' catch cry allows the Administrative Authority to extract all manner of compromises, bully operators and tailor make operational 'standards' to suit the individual FOI who dreamed them up. This new system of interpretation will simply be subjected to further corruption. If it wasn't so, we wouldn't be getting it.
This will further allow individual officials to decide what is 'acceptable' to the administrator, no matter how well the reg's are written. Unless the department becomes responsible to the industry for enforced changes, provide written directives which can be supported by legislation and are required to justify and be responsible for increased costs, we remain doomed.
I am very much a supporter of clearly defined outcome based legislation and competency based qualification, but, the Administrator needs to be limited to compliance only, not operational management. Discussion, sure, every time BUT If the operator carries the can, the operator can make the decisions. The aged and venerable "think safety is expensive, try having an accident" always made good sense to me.
Until we (the industry) remove the latitude for personal preferences to be enforced, vendettas to be continued, proxy, arbitrary decisions to be made against the personal interpretation, or the preference of one person, or achieve a measure of control over the department administering the industry, regulatory abuse will continue on it's merry way, with the industry paying for it.
Selah.