To CASA, the Government and the airlines: The game is up! hire experienced, well trained pilots or risk having one of your very own disasters in an Aussie registered aircraft, and God knows we've been close already.
Along with that you need a quality regulator. Currently we have an antiquated regulator run by geriatrics, it is poorly managed, dysfunctional, disconnected, and it's sole purpose is to protect it's Minister and protect the fat remuneration of it's executives.
These fools have even gone on another 'cost cutting exercise' and sliced almost 5 million dollars from it's travel budget for 2012/2013. Hooray did you holler, no more Montreal trips or legal conventions in New Zealand or Asia? Don't get too excited, they are cutting a lot of those funds from op surveillance tasks. Surveillance is the best method of gauging what industry is up to and sitting in an office reviewing Poohtube footage is not how you achieve safety improvements.
A tough regulator is not afraid to take the big boys on, head on, and not willing to allow its testicles to be squeezed by the Minister, Board and other lines of protection. This is your starting point to achieve a higher standard of safety in the industry. Every time one of the 'big guys' f*cks up CASA should be throwing a rope around the accountable persons neck in that airline and punish them in accordance with the civil aviation act. You only have to do it once and the indsutry CEO/COO rogues will quickly take their money and run for safer grounds. Until that starts to happen there will be absolutely no improvement in safety or minimisation of risk. It's time for CASA to stop playing hand puppets with farmhand chopper pilots and chasing operators who forget to tuck in their uniforms while on duty, it is time to asctually oversight safety.
If only James Reason realised that what he wrote was a crystal ball prediction of what will happen in Australia.
TICK TOCK