My week
04 Jun 2014
Doug Nancarrow
No prizes for correctly guessing what’s getting all the attention this week. The report from the Regulatory Review (Forsyth) panel hit the streets Tuesday and the reaction since then has been interesting, to say the least.
By now everyone will have digested at least the Executive Summary and the 37 recommendations.
But there’s a lot more in the Report itself.
It’s worth noting that we’ve already had the 2007 Hawke Report, the 2008 Senate Committee Inquiry and the 2009 Aviation White Paper dealing with issues with and within CASA – and some of that is repeated in this latest report; eg Industry dissatisfaction with, and alienation from, CASA.
What’s new are the specifics around the appointment of a new Director of Air Safety and governance of CASA going forward. A lot of that relates to producing a more accessible regulatory authority and it’s hard to argue against that.
It was interesting too to see that the Department of Infrastructure (Aviation) came in for a little bit of stick, with the recommendation that it should play a stronger policy role. But there was no take up of industry clamour for a separation of the rule-making and enforcement roles.
The suggestion that CASA should re-establish offices out there at the coal face (something worked exceptionally well back in the days of the CAA) is particularly welcome.
There’s no doubt this is a very good report and that the recommendations are constructive. No, they’re more than that, they are the recipe for a fully effective CASA , engaged productively with industry.
If the government fails to do anything less than drive full implementation of these recommendations then we could well be looking at yet another inquiry into our regulatory regime five years down the track.
This report provides an opportunity to restructure CASA and its relationships with the other associated entities in a way that will work better than anything we’ve had before.
Let’s not screw it up. 
The other DF's...
MEDIA RELEASE
"I encourage the aviation industry and others interested in this report to make their thoughts known to the Minister," Senator Fawcett said.