Surely the people with the big ideas (some with even bigger mouths) will already have given Senator X their plain-English, industry-agreed amendments to the Civil Aviation Act?
My money’s on the Laborials whipping the Bill through the Senate before 1 July. After all, “CASA has always done an excellent job over the years”, and that’s presumably partly because of “the parliament's bipartisan approach to aviation safety”.
Those two extra Board positions will, finally and once and for all, ensure that red tape is reduced even faster, continuous improvement is embedded into processes and procedures even deeper, the regulatory reform program is completed even sooner, and CASA is the most accountablest and transparentest agency ever! (You should all be standing and saluting by now…).
It’s always difficult to know whether to be sickened by, instead of sad for, the Senate Laborials who conduct the inquiries, identify the problems, make the recommendations and then just acquiesce in the token effort in response, rather than exercise their powers to change things. (But it’s always compelling viewing. Do they feel unclean? What happens at the ‘Big Brother’ Party meetings?)
It’s also difficult to know whether to be sad for, or just contemptuous of, the people who keep putting their faith in the Laborials to make any substantial change to aviation regulation, despite decades of evidence to the contrary. Sooner or later, they have to accept or have forced upon them the consequences of credulous rapture in response vacuous motherhood statements.
My suggested amendments if I wanted good things for GA in Australia to happen quickly? I’d repeal section 8(1) of the Civil Aviation Act 1988 and substitute:
“The Aerial Agricultural Association of Australia is established, as an authority called the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, by this subsection.”
I reckon that if the guys and girls in the AAAA took charge, it would have the same effect on the some of the people, processes and procedures in CASA, in about the same timeframe, as some of the chemicals sprayed by the AAAA on bugs and crops in the real world. I’d pay folding money to see it.
But I’m just a wheelchair-bound, acne-stippled geek from Hicksville USA. Good luck Australia!
