UITA – the Geoff Edwards – 2009 article linked to post #189 (above) is a full on 26 page reading event. For those contemplating making a submission to the Truss review it is worth taking the time to read at least the first 15 or 20 pages; there is some very good research and 'interesting' facts tucked away in the missive. You may not agree with some (or all) of the conclusions drawn, it is 'academic'. But if you are stuck for a phrase, or an idea to help frame a submission, you may just find some inspiration.
The thing that troubles is despite the many millions of dollars spent, thousands of pages published, numerous reviews, inquiries, commissions etc. etc. nothing seems to have changed much. It's a little like watching the desert, the ever shifting surface sands move to present an altered landscape, the core remains as ever, unchanged.
Heigh Ho - FWIW – I cherry picked some appetisers:-
P5 It is widely agreed that by the mid-1980s the Australian regulations had become too complex and anachronistic. But that does not give any hint as to whether the remedy lay in more government action or less: Yeend claimed that by 1985 there was a first class team within the regulator “already tackling a major up-date” (1994:402) but pilots’ lobby group AOPA claimed that the rules were a product of empire building petty bureaucrats: “...voluminous and disorganised sets of orders, rules, regulations, standards and sundry publications... [drafted by] twenty odd legal buffoons” (2000).
P6-“At its core, safety isn’t cost-effective” said Schiavo, former US Inspector-General of Transportation (1997:48). The marginal cost of preventing fatalities in aviation is very high. In Nader & Smith’s words (1994:317) “Safety always extracts a cost, whether in money, time, convenience or all of these.” That society places a limit on safety expenditure or, more bluntly, that human life has a price, is manifest in the fact that the budgets for road improvements are always contestable and always limited. One has only to visit a public hospital to learn that life is not sacrosanct, that there is a continual trade-off with financial expense. To Ramsden (1976:76), the fact that no airlines offer all rear-facing seats or full-body webbing restraints was evidence that safety can take second place to convenience or profit.
P6-Broderick (2001) found a remarkable correlation between accident rates and effective
governmental implementation of ICAO’s standards. He credited part of the global improvement to ICAO’s move in the mid-1990s to mandatory audits. “...good government aviation safety oversight results in airlines having good safety records. It’s that simple!” If it really is that simple, the converse conclusion also follows: if things go wrong, the government can be blamed.
P7-The James Reason model of safety preparedness portrays accidents simply as occupying the apex of a pyramid of causation that fails at several levels. Reason’s model is now internationally mainstream within aviation circles, though Young & Faulkner (2005) have argued that the pendulum has swung too far toward blaming management for latent systems weaknesses. There is still such a thing as human error.
P9- Australian Transport Safety Bureau
The Bureau proudly proclaims itself as `independent’ because it is institutionally separate within the transport portfolio from the regulator, the service deliverer and the policy office. The Transport Safety Investigation Act 2003 provides that the Executive Director is “not subject to directions from the Minister or the Secretary” in exercising their powers under this Act (s.15). However, the depth of independence is contestable. Some claim that the body cannot be independent unless it is situated within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and so not accountable to the same minister as CASA; or even directly funded by the parliament so that it is `independent’ of all ministerial departments. On funding, an insider wrote anonymously: “The [US] NTSB gets its funding by a direct allocation by Congress. We do not. Our budget is determined by the Secretary of the Dept and is being steadily tightened.”
Seven years later, the 2009 amendments seem to address this long-standing issue. When ICAO in its February 2008 “Safety Oversight Audit” (AIG/01, 1-6-01) gently chided Australia because the performance indicators had been based on the budget allotted to ATSB, whereas ideally, the typical number of accidents and incidents should be used as a basis of determining the budget, this was one of the only 3 out of 48 findings that Australia declined to accept at least in part – because it was “impractical…within resources available.” Budget was driving safety, still.
P9- Civil Aviation Safety Authority
Before the reforms of 1988 and later, the staff had apparently been proud of their record: “...there was, over a period of 40 years [1948-1988], a complete body of safety regulations established... It was not perfect, but it was the foundation of the best safety record in the history of aviation” (Yeend, 1994a:2,5,6). Yet “Despite our record and experience, the industry clamoured for a new civil aviation authority, loudly supported by the aviation press in the late 1980s. I am one of those who was in that process labelled as part of the dead hand and the cement-headed bureaucracy of the 1980s” (1994:6). Yeend deplored the self-serving capture of the Authority in the early reforms by “some industry operators and adventurers” and the destruction of corporate expertise.
Either his was a rose-coloured perspective or relationships deteriorated rapidly in the wake of the restructure. By 1989 more than 61% of staff in a survey said they would not recommend CAA as an employer (John Walker, 1989). Worse was to come. According to witnesses Foley and Haines, within CASA there was instituted a “culture of fear, fiat and favouritism” (TQS, 1994) commencing in early 1991, when under Dick Smith the Authority was reviewed and
restructured.