So Creampuff I spent about 2 hours researching researching the "Waddington Effect" and honestly I didn't find much.
Hasheretc,
Must try harder.
The RAF discovered that continually fixing things that ain't broke quite severely reduced aircraft availability, and significantly, maintenance induced defects were a major contributor.
What the RAF discovered, refined and developed over the years, we would now call "on condition" maintenance.
The nearest Qantas ever came to losing an aircraft in flight (and I am thinking of two serious incidents, one a DC-4, the other a B707-338C) were maintenance error defects.
"Back in the day" I have taken quite a few aircraft on their first trip "out of the hangar". You expect to find defects, and are seldom disappointed. Some were really serious, ( keepers left off aileron pulleys, cable came off the pulley, as just one example, I could go on. Those of us with enough time under our belt all know that the first 10 hours "out of the shed" after a major inspection can be very interesting.
The whole point of what Dick and Creamie are saying is that much of the approach to GA maintenance in Australia allows little room for common sense, the framework of the law makes us all criminals, just some of us haven't been caught yet. And it maximizes cost, for no safety benefit, let alone a positive benefit/cost.
It is almost never "evidence based" maintenance.
Tootle pip!!
PS: Anybody remember the CASA rules for compass swinging about 2003, that were rapidly dropped? This was "how to do it", not "when to do it". The first "concession" was for the QF B747 and B767, a big enough compass base didn't exist, anywhere in the world, to do what CASA proposed to impose. The clown who wrote the CAO had never heard of a landing compass, and the order was substantially about building a compass base with brass plugs around the perimeter, surveyed to denote the cardinal points. Perhaps the most absurd, of many absurd things produced by CASA over the years.