Kharon at post #1062 of Truss thread said:
There are three (in total) Matters of Privilege before the committee. No one knows who or what is involved, clues are hard to find, information even harder. This is unfair of course, the public service has a duty to leak, but, alas, not this time. There are a few well founded speculative arguments, my personal choice is the tricky business with the Pel Air inquiry, which drags White and Chambers into the funny coloured light of the MoU, unsigned NCN, the gross insults to Ben Cook and Mal Christie which led to resignation. Couple of bright, highly qualified, skilled, dedicated honourable men cannot tolerate or be associated with an aberration such as CAIR 09/3 and other 'manipulated' documents. If the Senate have uncovered any sort of skulduggery, there'll be hell to pay and ferry fares to find.
Three MoPs on the Senators APH dining room table, I can only count two “K”, but then (after reading on) the penny dropped. Although I am not sure if it counts as a contempt of the Senate but could be significant in the running of the ‘MoP stakes’...
Backtracking a little: Before the RRAT committee finally handed down its report and even before FF discretely made their 01 March 2013 sup submission, I was happily trolling through the Senate Submissions webpage when I came across an interesting discrepancy. However due the late hour of the AAI inquiry proceedings, I was otherwise distracted and was unable to return to scratch the itch. It wasn’t till I read the late FF sup submission that I experienced a déjà vu moment.
To begin with here is an extract from the 2004 MoU & 2010 MoU that is of significance:
It can be seen that besides the addition of para 9.3 the two MoUs basically remain in effect for the same period of time, with the same conditions for varying, extending or terminating. From that one has to question how it was possible for the PelAir parallel investigation to have been conducted under the guidance of the 2010 MoU, when it was yet to be officially executed. Maybe there had been an ‘exchange of letters’ between Beaker & McComic which had terminated the ’04 MoU. However that would have meant that such agreement between parties would have necessitated bringing forward the official execution of the ’10 MoU and we know that didn’t happen. We also now know that FF were at least operating to the DRAFT version of the ’10 MoU in conducting their PelAir parallel investigation...
From the infamous (previously hidden) CAIR 09/3 report:
The veracity of which was backed up by the 01 March 2013 FF sup submission:
Now I know that there is ample political/legal wriggle room in all this and that the MoUs are not in fact legally binding, but it does bring me to my déjà vu moment i.e. the mysterious 3rd MoP.
Here is the original FF PelAir submission attachment (B, C & D): Original
Which you can see had 102 pages & contained the 1996, 2001, 2004, 2010 MoUs & the infamous CAIR 09/3 report.
Now here is what is supposed to be the same document that continues to be readily available off the Senate PelAir inquiry webpage: Current (B, C & D i.e. Attachment 5). Except the attachment has shrunk and is now only 82 pages?? Some may think that this is merely the RRAT committee Secretariat cleaning up the files (i.e. getting rid of blank pages or double ups). However I seriously don’t think that any officer of the Secretariat, no matter how OCD they may be, would even contemplate altering a published & protected under Parliamentary privilege document, it would be akin to career suicide.
So what pages are now missing??
Ok page one still lists the contents of attachment B – CHECK
Then we have the 1996 MoU till page 20 – CHECK
However then the ‘current’ doc jumps to attachment C, completely omitting the 2001 & 2004 MoU...
So there you go, has a person or persons unknown (& for reasons unknown) deliberately altered a Parliamentary document ?(i.e. a possible third MoP??)...
Q/ The next question is why?? After all the MoU is not a legally binding document.
Q/ Does it matter?? Probably not but considering the timeframe for this deliberate act (between the dates 15 February ‘13 to 01 March ‘13) and some of the references contained within the FF sup submission, I have some strong suspicions on motive…
Moving along on to the other part of the “K” quote (plus his above post) on the matter of Ben Cook. In the above extract from the FF sup submission at subpara 2.12 it mentions that there were 4 CAsA officers tasked with conducting the PelAir accident investigation. What the submission failed to mention was that one of those officers was in fact Ben Cook (reference page 3 of CAIR 09/3). Which is quite interesting given the obvious antagonism towards BC on display in subpara 2.5 – 2.10 (see HERE)
Extract subpara 2.9 – 2.10
Presumably (as stated in 2.10) BC was afforded the same courtesy to comment on the DRAFT version of CAIR 09/3, which made the following cursory statement in reference to the comprehensive & rather damning findings of the PelAir FRMS that were published in the FRMS Special Audit report (authored by BC & MC):
Put yourself in the shoes of BC at the time & you were the FF Manager of Human Factors and resident guru on FRMS, who was currently sitting on the ICAO Fatigue Risk Management Systems Task Force (FRMSTF) (see his CV here). And you were faced with the prospect of having to sign off on that report, what would you do?? Personally I’d jump ship and that is exactly what BC did and as they say the rest is history:Observation: All woads seem to lead to that wascily, wabbit Wodger’s wabbit hole, therefore I am now leaning towards Wodger’s Wocket as my personal favourite for the ‘MoP Stakes’..
MTF…