Going back to Ausdoc's oost:
Actually, many of the GPs in the DAME community are going to have their delegations withdrawn as they have consistently failed to meet the currency requirements to be a DAME. Many of these are the same ones who do only a few medicals a year, make the most errors requiring the medical to be returned to them for correction, and don't use the electronic submission system.
Really??? These GP's are the same guys who do medicals for driving licences, insurance medicals, scuba medicals, fire service medicals, CAMS (car racing) licences and I'm sure many others. Exactly how different is an Aviation Class 2 medical from any of these (and why do they need to be at all different)? Under the current regime of General Practice certification, do you really think CASA has anything to offer in terms of quality assurance or certification? The CASA requirements are lightweight by comparison. If there are endemic mistakes filling out the bureaucratic forms, then maybe its the bureaucracy that requires the review more than the doctors. I'm not a doctor, but I'd make a large bet that the average IQ of a GP is well above the average IQ of the CASA CLARC department. And CASA wants to beat them up because they can't fill out a form properly that CASA designed?
Frankly, the new relaxation of the medical requirements shows that a) its not really that important and pilots aren't really that different from other mortals and b) CASA don't actually understand the critical importance of medicals. If CASA understood this they would have incorporated an altitude differential (eg valid below 8,000ft - note 8,000 not the artificial bureaucratic 5,000ft or 10,000ft thresholds) because low oxygen partial pressure makes many other physiological issues more critical. They might also understand that its energy that causes impact damage, not mass (ie MTOW). Energy has a squared relationship with velocity and a linear relationship with speed (1/2 mv2). So, restricting the speed of aircraft for the new medicals makes more sense than restricting mass. At cruise speed, 2 seat Lancair will make a bigger hole in the suburbs than a 4 seat Auster.