Mr McCormick: I cannot speak for what happened in 2000. I only got here in 2009. …
Senator FAWCETT: Mr Boyd, were you around?
Mr Boyd: Yes, but not in that position.
Senator NASH: Anybody else? Mr Farquharson? Dr Aleck?
Dr Aleck: I was in Montreal. [CP note: Apart from the stint in Montreal, Dr Aleck has occupied various senior management positions within CASA for an accumulated period of about 10 years to the present.]
The technical name I was taught in organizational behaviour at business school is "diffusion of responsibility".
The best historical example I know was the debacle of the treatment of the British sick and wounded in the Crimean war - over which Florence Nightingale made such a fuss.
The eventual royal commission found that the entire mess was caused by the non arrival of a shipment of hay, due to stress of weather. So no one was to blame, it was an act of God.
But lets cut to the chase. Is it not "troubling", perhaps even hypocritical, that an organisation like CASA, which preaches and administers criminal sanctions for aviation offences of strict liability, and which sheeted home the entire blame for the Norfolk Island crash on the pilot while allegedly deflecting and concealing any criticism of its own role, should opine that "no one is to blame" for its own administrative shortcomings????? Are not its own administrative mistakes, when they occasionally happen, offences of strict liability? Does it apply the same standards to itself as it demands we apply to our own operations?
To put that another way: Perhaps if CASA could issue itself with a "request for corrective action" (RCA) as it does to any participant in the rest of the industry whose performance it judges as less than stellar, its own alleged problems would be speedily fixed.
Physician heal thyself.