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September 19, 2013
Pel-Air scandal. Will it sink Albanese’s bid to lead Labor?
by Ben Sandilands
air safety
Former Infrastructure and Transport Minister Anthony Albanese took his case to be chosen as the leader of the Labor Opposition to a town hall style meeting in Melbourne this afternoon.
It will be the first of many such meetings by Albanese and his ‘friendly’ alternative for the role Bill Shorten.
Albanese spoke convincingly and lucidly about his achievements in relation to roads and rail, and also spoke about fairness and social justice.
Yet Albanese’s words are under a dark cloud when his apparent contempt for the Australian Senate Committee inquiry into air accident investigations are taken into frame.
Albanese failed to respond within the set period of time to the unanimous multi party report issued by that inquiry, which found, in plain English, that it had no confidence in the testimony of the chief commissioner of the ATSB, Martin Dolan, and exposed the deliberate and admitted action of CASA in withholding from the safety investigator an internal document which was scathing of CASA’s performance in relation to the proper oversight of the Pel-Air operation and which might have prevented the crash of its Westwind air ambulance flight near Norfolk Island in 2009.
However Albanese let the head of the Infrastructure Department, Mike Mrdak, make protestations on his behalf as to how seriously he took these damning findings and how he would respond to them, all at a time when there were more than two and half months left before the Rudd Government entered caretaker mode.
There is a flight data recorder sitting at recoverable depth in the wreckage of the Pel-Air jet which will should determine whether the captain of the flight ever received due warning of deteriorating conditions at Norfolk Island at times when he would have had sufficient fuel to divert to alternative airports in Noumea or Fiji on a flight that began in Apia.
Yet the ATSB refused to recover the data recorder, and produced a report so compromised in its integrity and scope that it makes Australia look ridiculous in the field of air safety investigations.
(It isn’t a matter of the ATSB not producing outstanding reports, but it is a matter of the ATSB producing in this instance, a report that deflected blame from CASA and Pel-Air for failures in due process and standards and framed the captain, who like the others on board, was lucky to survive the ditching in the middle of the night. )
Mr Albanese, is it the Labor way to allow the crushing of individuals through the abuse of process by bureaucrats and agencies in order to deflect attention from their own failures to carry out their duties or obligations to the public?
Is it the Labor way to tolerate deficient performances in the country’s two air safety bodies, ignore parliamentary obligations, and allow Australia’s reputation as a first tier country in relation to air safety to be brought into disrepute?
This is not about what has been reported here, or even about what has been discussed in regulatory circles abroad.
It is about what Mr Albanese’s parliamentary colleagues found, unanimously, in a very detailed inquiry that uncovered a dangerous and unacceptable situation which requires changes in both the ATSB and CASA and the withdrawal of a wrong and unjust accident report in which the public expectations for air safety administration were not met.