“We have come to a point in time where using common sense, speaking factual truths and asking honest questions have been deemed radical behavior. While in turn, manipulation, thoughtlessness and dishonesty is often rewarded and rules the day.” - G Hopkins
Kharon:
Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) seems an unlikely candidate for this form delivery; their report with the mundane title 200501977 appears to be the least likely candidate to tell a story which has all the ingredients of a first class thriller. But it has; in spades. Properly read, it provides all the essential elements of a classic; although the purist would decry the lack of a love interest, this is the only element missing.
And from the archives of Crikey (2008) a small inconsequential passage of text written by Richard Farmer (no not that Richard Farmer..
) :
Richard Farmer’s political bite-sized meaty chunks
Government and business are not the same. Public administration has gone through a period when governments, Labor as well as Liberal-National, were keen to flick a lot of responsibilities from ordinary departmental administration to what was believed to be a more efficient form based on a private enterprise model. Nowhere was this change more pronounced than in aviation where the once omnipotent Department of Civil Aviation was first merged into an overall Transport Department and then had most of its functions split off into separate corporations. Where once there was a Minister and a Departmental Secretary looking after everything from airports to air traffic control licensing of operators and setting and administering safety standards there are now privately owned airports, Air Services Australia with an eye to its profitability and failing to provide adequate numbers of air traffic controllers, a Civil Aviations Safety Authority setting the rules and regulations and an Air Traffic Safety Bureau still in the Transport Department headed by a chief executive with considerable independent powers. That there is a downside to all this deregulation and private enterprise methods is wonderfully (or should that be horribly?) illustrated in the recent report by Mr Russell Miller into the relationship between CASA and ATSB. The Miller inquiry followed critical comments made by the Coroner in his consideration of the Lockhart River aircraft crash and the report released by the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Anthony Albanese is quite an indictment of how badly the split system actually works in practice. A sensible Minister would put the whole system back under his own departmental control.
Sarcs quote: "Err...no comment!"