Fingers crossed that everyone's hard work will mean some sensible rulings...
I am not going to hold my breath for that. If anything legislative comes out of this it will most likely be something similar to the US 1,500 hour requirement. That was a knee-jerk reaction to a specific crash and there is a very mixed reaction to its implementation. Please also remember that there are exemptions from the 1,500 hour requirement contained in that legislation for students from selected schools. There would be a similar clamour for such exemptions here and for precisely the wrong reasons.
One of the lessons that I learnt during a stint as Parliamentary Counsel (the people who actually draft legislation at the direction of the government) is that specific facts make poor law and this is what happened in the US. I would hate to see the same knee-jerk reaction here.
I am not saying there isn't a problem. There is, but I don't think mandating a minimum experience level and requiring an ATPL will fix it. Why not 3,000 hours, or 6,000 hours which were not unheard of as airline entry level required experience several decades ago? In the US 1,500 hours became the magic number as it is the minimum number of hours required for an ATPL. Not exactly an exact science but at least in the US an ATPL requires a flight test.
PPRuNe is littered with threads on the question of experience versus training, most of them written by people who have only been exposed to one side of the debate but they make interesting reading nonetheless. Those who have flown with the European trained cadets are mostly supportive of the concept, even some who themselves have come through the experience school. For an example, read
this link but please ignore the huge willy-waving contest contained therein.
The experienced GA pilot route has worked in the past only because the airline has trained out the bad habits that many have picked up along the way and I have seen some appalling examples of poor discipline and flying practices in the bush. The argument that "I would never do that in an airline" doesn't hold water for me. If you do it in GA then you should not be allowed near an aircraft of any type. This is not to say that everyone is like that but a sufficiently number are and that is a worry.
Based on what I have read and seen over the years I am coming to the conclusion that the cadet scheme is the way that airline training will go
BUT not the way that Australian airlines want to do it. Safety comes from rigorous training, that is the way the RAAF can put low-houred pilots into the pointy end of fast things, it is the way European airlines train their cadets and it is the way that flight training should be done. For airlines, the best way to ensure that the end product is at an acceptable standard is via the cadet route.