This post raises many issues.
The first is, why is Aviation singled out for cost recovery? Guys with boats of similar passenger carrying capability, complexity and value as my aircraft don't pay for marine forecasts. Farmers don't pay for agricultural forecasts. Why isn't this considered part of our country's basic infrastructure?
Secondly, Fundamentally the BOM has been given a budget based (at least in part) on the fees that we collectively give them to deliver a level of service. How is it that they can unilaterally change the level of service because it suits them?
Thirdly, I think we should be seeing more benefit from new technology and more benefit from productivity improvements. If we could get the same sort of radio / internet based weather services as the US we would care less about reduction in TAF's. How long has the US had NEXRAD? How long has the US had satellite weather services? Can't we at least get a trial somewhere in the J curve?
Fourthly (and a little off topic) is that, in my opinion, our weather forecasts have deteriorated and become "political". The consumer forecasts have always had a bias toward not admitting they got it wrong by changing forecasts, but the aviation forecasts were immune from this. That no longer seems to be so. More and more, I find that my judgement applied to the predictive MSL charts gets a better result. It also used to be that there seemed to be a more accurate forecast issues at 6am than the late night forecasts from the day before. I presume as the day staff came on-board. Now that seems to be slipping until 9am.
and the final rant is back on TAF's. I think the broader value of TAF's beyond landing is not fully recognised. They can be pretty useful to check en-route to fine tune the area forecast, although I seem to see TAF's that are in stark contrast to the AWS or METAR's more and more regularly.
I don't hugely mind the move to AWS, but predominantly they are accessible by phone. We seem to be slowly but steadily moving a lot of aviation services to the mobile phone network, which gets AsA off the hook from providing proper VHF based services.
When are we going to arrest the slide toward 3rd world levels of government services & infrastructure?