What a load of waffle, every pilot has to focus on safety otherwise every flight would finish with a smoking hole in the ground.
If I can quote the RAAF "Mission First, Safety Always"
What can be difficult is when the Chief Pilot has to cover for any inadequacies in the SMS/Safety Manager. I am not saying this is the case with Hardy Aviation. What is also difficult in a place like Darwin is keeping not only himself but all of his IFR crew IF proficient and this can be a real problem if you don't have access to a decent synthetic trainer or aircraft hours for training and recurrency. That may be the problem in Darwin.
What a load of waffle.
Taking junior pilots from other operators where they've actively been trained to break the rules "if you write it up, you'll have to leave the aircraft parked there and make your own way back to civilisation, just keep flying with the missing window and we'll fix it at the 100 hourly" ... "everyone up here flies through cloud VFR, this is Territory VFR"
Giving those junior pilots all the stick time when in the aircraft - they don't know what they don't know about flying IFR, and while they came with a valid CIR/ME, very few if any of them would be IFR current or have any experience flying IFR.
Having 32 aircraft fly well over 1000 hours/year, and a lot of the pilots sitting around the 800 hrs/year mark.
Competing against other operators that do bend the rules and cut corners to save money and the only advantage you have in your corner is scale of economies.
It would be very hard as a Chief Pilot of such a large organisation to not only keep yourself current, but keep an eye on the 50 or so other pilots some of whom have come with some very interesting ideas about how to comply with the legislation. It would also be hard to ensure all 50 are getting in to the synthetic trainer regularly over the dry season.
The organisation hasn't shrunk recently either. CASA have gone about this completely the wrong way and blatantly obvious they haven't done a risk analysis to determine the possible outcomes of CASA's actions. From a safety and a financial perspective I would say it's time to think about splitting the AOC in two - have a separate chief pilot for the smaller aircraft with more junior pilots, and one for the more experienced guys on the turbine. A little bit of pain involved with separate Ops manuals, 20.11's, CAR217 systems, etc. But a second (or third and fourth if you include HOTAC) set eyes of to keep an eye on the operation and ensure everything is by the book wouldn't go astray with such a large, busy organisation with a diverse fleet. Also may limit the damage if CASA takes an interest in a particular AOC.