"Suitably equiped aircraft"... Aircraft mounted ELTs (EPIRB) have been around fer years.
Folks,
And they
are a complete waste of money, with a better than 90% failure rate in practice, in real world bingles as was demonstrated in studies that resulted in the current regulations allowing portable ELTs.
The effectiveness and cost/benefit studies that resulted in the current regulations were confirmed in the post implementation review, required by the legislation, and carried out by CASA.
Nothing has changed since then!!
Likewise, the proposition that we have some form of "ADS-B for all" completely fails even the most generousness (biased in favour) studies of the cost of having low level coverage of ADS-B of sufficient geographical magnitude to cover most of Australia.
I can't remember the numbers now, but the Airservice study to provide ADS-B coverage to 5000' AMSL was something like 350 stations, about ten time the present planned coverage. There isn't even enough planned satellite capacity planned to handle a fraction of that number of ground stations, let alone all the other costs involved.
Aviation in Australia is already drowning in a red tape sea of regulatory costs, please don't advocate more.
Tootle pip!!