Othello:
"...'twas strange, 'twas passing strange, 'twas pitiful, 'twas wondrous pitiful..."
Hansard -
Aviation Safety Regulation Review
Actually the rhetoric recorded in the Hansard will not make it any clearer "K", so your summary IMO is spot on.
To put it in context it was just an official tabling and recognition of the Minister's statement (14/11/13) on the ASRR, kind of like a tick-a-box routine.
Besides the
vomitus maximus 
blurb by Sterle on Albo's performance as the previous Minister and the great Labor government initiative of the GWEP, the scene was set at the start by Sterle's statement:
I can say as chair of the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport Legislation Committee for the last six years, and now as chair of the references committee, that when we do address aviation safety it is bipartisan, and done very closely in association with the Greens and the minor parties as well. I acknowledge that the new government did not make this matter a political football in opposition, and we do not intend to make it one either.
The wind was officially out of the sails of anyone that had any intention of attacking the previous government's oversight performance of aviation safety after that. So then we were left with the political posturing, empty worded rhetoric and the age old barrier of the '
mystique of aviation safety' (i.e leave it to the experts
)
.
Senator Sterle:
As Shadow Minister Albanese recently said, this balancing is best done by experts, not by politicians. Hear, hear! I could not agree more.
All of the Senators present were ill prepared and all seemed to be tip toeing around the elephant in the room
. Senator MacDonald was the only one that went remotely close :
There was also a very great concern about Australia apparently following a European model, if I can say that broadly, of civil aviation regulation and safety when perhaps we would have been better off following the New Zealand experience and regulations of recent times. I must confess I did not fully understand all of the elements of what is obviously a detailed area of learning and expertise of operations but it was clear to me that the administration of the Civil Aviation Safety Authority did need some looking at.
Wishy washy, going through the motions and tentative at best, stark contrast to Senator X in the PelAir report where he takes the elephant head on
:
1.23 It is my view that CASA, under Mr McCormick, has become a regulatory bully that appears to take any action available to ensure its own shortcomings are not made public. This poses great risks to aviation safety, and the safety of the travelling public. Equally, the ATSB—which should fearlessly expose any shortcomings on the part of CASA and other organisations to improve aviation safety—has become institutionally timid and appears to lack the strength to perform its role adequately. Both agencies require a complete overhaul, and I believe it is only luck that their ineptness has not resulted in further deaths so far. There is an urgent need for an Inspector-General of Aviation Safety, entirely independent of the Minister and his department, to be a watchdog for these agencies.
Oh well it seems we are reliant on a small contingent of good Senators, ably backed by expert IOS advice, to answer the question of...
'Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?' (
Who will keep the keepers themselves)?