Comment: Was going to work this in to a more general post but thought I couldn't do Ben's dot joining true justice..
So here is his article in full...
REX begs for Govt help, but what about Pel-Air victims?
Ben Sandilands Feb 11, 2014 11:53AM
There is something very rotten about the Pel-Air crash, the treatment of its victims, and the conduct of CASA and the ATSB in relation to their respective duties to the public and to air safety.
The
outbursts by REX in recent days claiming that the aviation sector could collapse without government assistance raises the question as to what Labor values it found so compelling in July 2012 as to cause it to donate $250,000 to the ALP.
It may well be of interest to the Coalition Government, too, since despite vocal support for its policies, both when in opposition, and
after its defeat of Labor last September, the parliamentary register of political donation doesn’t, so far, register commensurate generosity toward the government of tough love toward businesses in trouble, whether car makers or airlines.
The REX rhetoric was strongly anti-Labor. Yet the REX money was pro-Labor.
In the last year for which there is a public record Regional Express gave $70,000 to the Liberal cause, $95,700 to the National cause, and a quarter of a million dollars to support, one might assume, Labor causes.
Except that REX doesn’t support the carbon tax, and its chairman, Lim Kim Hai, has made no secret of his detestation for Labor in general.
After the end-of-the-world commentary from REX burst into full fury yesterday
Plane Talking sought in writing answers from the airline to a series of questions exploring the rural aviation crisis (which is not to be underestimated) and the company’s costly infatuation with Labor.
It was a pretty straightforward request, but it has gone unanswered.
Which raises the poor optics for REX of an over the top donation to Labor coincidentally when the ATSB was close to publishing its final report into the Pel-Air aerial ambulance charter crash of a Westwind corporate jet near Norfolk Island on November 2009.
Pel-Air is a subsidiary of REX. All six people on board the Westwind miraculously survived the ditching of the jet in the sea in the dark after it was unable to land at Norfolk Island for refueling on its way from Apia to Melbourne.
There may of course be absolutely no connection between the donation, and that report, which was so obviously deficient in integrity and diligence that it became the subject of a scathing Senate inquiry and report which the previous Transport Minister, Anthony Albanese, and his successor, Warren Truss, seem incapable of addressing.
The Senate inquiry’s report includes an entire chapter devoted to the committee’s unanimous lack of confidence in the testimony of the chief commissioner of the ATSB, Martin Dolan.
In an incredible development, in as far as Senate committee inquiries go, the Senators concerned uncovered a secret document that CASA the air safety regulator had withheld from the ATSB, the safety investigator, in which CASA was told of the unsafe state of the Pel-Air operation at the time of the crash, and a lack of regulatory oversight which could have prevented the crash happening.
It is now more than four years since the crash. None of those injured in the accident have been compensated. None of the regulations which CASA said would be changed concerning the fuel and diversion rules for charters like that being flown by Pel-Air at the time of the crash have been changed.
One of the victims, nurse Karen Casey, who has lost her capacity to work, and has been in pain since the crash, and has three children, has yet to receive any recompense from Pel-Air.
There is something very rotten about the Pel-Air crash, the treatment of its victims, and the conduct of CASA and the ATSB in relation to their respective duties to the public and to air safety.
When REX starts begging for financial assistance from government, perhaps it could consider those who are begging for it to address the damage done to the victims of its unsafe operation of the Pel-Air charter, an operation so unsafe it voluntarily grounded it in the aftermath of the crash.
REX needs to explain what was so admirable in the Labor government it so publicly despised yet so generously supported at the time the donation was registered.