Defenestrator:
Has it occurred to you that they may have been getting away with it for 20 years? That will certainly account for the companies longevity.
and Horatio Leafblower:
That's absolutely outrageous.
At what then point are operators responsible for their own conduct?
If operators conduct themselves as Kendrick did, flagrantly allowing a culture of non-compliance to fester, what other outcome could result?
Shutting down an operator is surely the Big Stick of last resort? Your assertion is like saying if the police did their job properly no driver would ever lose their licence.
But Brian Abraham understands the issue here:
That's the issue. If CASA were doing an adequate job on the surveillance front it would never get to the stage of closing an operation down. Problems would be found by audit and action demanded. If subsequent audit found no action made in addressing problems raised, that's time the big stick comes out. An operation should not be able to run for years and years with entrenched non compliance.
The fact that CASA has taken apart a business with Twenty years of allegedly safe operation reflects very very badly on CASA and its entire regulatory approach!
Let's take Leafblowers point first;
Your assertion is like saying if the police did their job properly no driver would ever lose their licence
Which is the preferred Safety state? Thousands of speeding tickets issued or no speeding tickets issued? The second case, assuming the Police are doing a perfect job, implies that no driver is breaking the law, and that is actually the policy position of the Police. If no tickets are issued then they have succeeded in their objective of obtaining full compliance with the law.
The actual issue of speeding tickets implies that other methods of obtaining compliance eg: through encouragement of safe driving, or other forms of deterrence, etc have failed. This is what the Police themselves are saying when they opine about serious accidents.
But it is Defenestrators point that really destroys CASA's position. How come an allegedly dodgy operation can survive for Twenty years without CASA detecting fault? What does that say about the efficiency and competence of CASA as regulator?
So here is Barrier deliberately and flagrantly breaking the rules if the allegations are true, and it takes CASA twenty years to find out? Not only that, CASA's own audits don't discover the alleged non compliance, it takes a whisper from an allegedly disgruntled employee to tell them exactly where to look. How stupid does that make CASA seem?
To put that another way, and as Brian Abraham might put it; if CASA was doing its job perfectly, there would be no groundings - no speeding tickets and no non compliance. The correct policy position for CASA is that each and every grounding, court case or accident is a failure by CASA to encourage, deter or otherwise procure a perfect safety outcome.
To put that yet another way, perhaps if CASA was constantly engaging with the industry in a constructive and equitable way, there would be no need for them to pull out the blunt and rusty knife and try and kill industry participants - their alleged "clients"
all the time.
Twenty years to detect non compliance by Barrier? All those billions of taxpayers money spent on CASA? For what exactly? Pull the other one!