Additionally CASA plays a key role in developing new regulations and amending existing regulations to take account of industry changes, emerging safety issues and meeting international standards and practices.
This is the chronic structural problem in aviation regulation. I will try to explain the problem by analogy.
Imagine that the police are made responsible for the road toll and are given power to set the speed limit and the criteria to obtain a driver's licence, a car mechanic's licence and a roadworthy certificate. And the police get to charge money for the "service" of getting the necessary licences and certificates.
The police also have the power to revoke those licences and certificates.
However, the police do not have the expertise or the budget or the power to repair roads, build better roads or divided highways, install traffic lights or roundabouts etc.
(We could add to this (purely hypothetical) scenario some (purely hypothetical) trucking empires with influence in high places.)
In this scenario, what would we expect the police to do in response to road accidents? Simple really: Reduce the speed limit and make the criteria for obtaining a licence more stringent. Local councils not repairing the roads or the traffic lights, resulting in more accidents? Simple: Reduce the speed limit and make the criteria for obtaining a licence more stringent - lots more interactions with the regulator ($$ to the 'regulator') and lots more regulatory micro-management ($$ to the 'regulator'). Beef up the construction standards and inspection regimes of vehicles ($$ to the 'regulator'). All in the name of 'road safety'.
Note that the police don't do any analysis to find out the overall cost to society of all these responses, and whether the cost of, for example, repairing the pot holes and fixing the traffic lights, or building a dual, divided highway to replace the old road, is far outweighed by the benefit of having roads that can be used more efficiently by more people. That's not the job of the police.
This is precisely the place in which CASA has been put by successive governments. The current example,
par exellance, is CASA's response to the Angel Flight accident, which is merely a subset of the classification of operations mess that has been dragging on for decades.
What would we expect CASA to do in response to Angel Flight accident? Simple really: Set increasingly higher standards for Angel Flights.
The fundamental structural problem is that CASA does not - because it cannot - weigh up all of the opportunity costs of setting standards. In the case of Angel Flights, for example, setting higher standards will reduce the number of pilots and aircraft that would otherwise have carried out thousands of Angel Flights without accident or incident. What is the cost of that to the community? CASA does not know and, more importantly,
CASA doesn't care, because if some of those people die of their condition or in a road accident, that's not something for which CASA is responsible.
This is one of the many costs of the 'deal' done between governments and CASA. If CASA is going to be the patsy for anything that goes wrong in aviation, governments have to have plausible deniability of control over the 'independent' regulator. That's why Laborial Senators wave rhetorical fists rather than vote to make real changes to aviation-related legislation, and Ministers sing the praises of and reward whovever is prepared to be the chief patsy from time-to-time.