THere needs to be a disconnection of "rule writing" and "enforcing". There needs to be a physical disconnect and an intelllectual or logical as well as statutory disconnect.
Correct.
Apart from anything else, CASA does not have the corporate competence to write rules. That’s one of the reasons – not the only reason – for Australia now having 1,541 pages of (uncompleted) civil aviation regulations, laughingly proffered as the output of a process of ‘simplification’ of 155 pages of regulations.
While it is true that if you give a thousand monkeys a thousand typewriters they’ll eventually produce a literary masterpiece like ‘War And Peace’, you have to wait a loooooong time. Further, in CASA there’s a bunch of monkeys with a bunch of personally held policies that they want to ‘regularise’.
One of the other key reasons has been noted by blackhand in another thread: CASA has been trying to listen to and reconcile the irreconcilable preferences of every interest group.
The policy of the rules should be decided by the portfolio agency with responsibility for the legislation CASA administers. That’s the Transport Department. That Department should take responsibility for managing the legislative process to ensure rules are made to give effect to the policy of the government. CASA should then regulate by reference to the rules it is given, using the tools it is given, by government, rather than CASA being itself the driver of policy and the rulemaking process.
However, that Department clearly had enough smarts to suck CASA into to doing it, as well as to fool most of the industry into shifting the blame to CASA.
Evidently successive Ministers aren’t responsible for anything.