Mr Skidmore’s answer to this question will reveal whether he has the necessary mix of experience and integrity to do the job in the public interest:
When will the regulatory reform program be completed?
Mr Skidmore’s predecessor’s predecessor, Mr Byron, gave this answer in February 2005:
We have an action item to develop a plan to forward to the minister about when we plan to have them to the minister, and I assume that plan would be done in the next couple of months. I would be hopeful that it would not be long after early 2006 that most of the draft rules are delivered to the minister.
That statement was made
ten years ago.
Mr Skidmore’s predecessor, Mr McCormick, gave this answer in the "Aviation Safety Yearbook 2013":
[O]ur current schedule will see the remaining rules completed by the end of next year.
By my calculations, the next year after 2013 was 2014, and 2014 has ended.
The remaining rules have not been completed.
Here’s what I consider to be an objective assessment of the circumstances, by the then Chairman of the Regional Airline Association of Australia, Mr Jeff Boyd, at the Association’s 2013 conference:
I look and see what it has cost and taken our industry to implement the Part 66 licences, Part 145 and Part 42 and I wonder how much more it will cost and take to actually get these three parts to an amended mature set of regulations. I then contemplate what a small section of the overall regulatory reform process these regulations are. How much more time and money will it take to finish writing and then implement the massive suite of flying ops and non-RPT maintenance regulations and what toll will that have on our industry? How many decades of amendments will it take to iron out all of these new rules and achieve a mature set of regulations? Then at the end of the day we will be sitting in the middle of the Pacific with a brand new set of Australian specific regulations.
Anyone who says the current trainwreck is anything other than a regulatory equivalent of the Spruce Goose is, in my opinion, either dangerously naïve, delusional or a paid apologist.
Mr Skidmore was at least smart enough not to mention “regulatory reform” in his January 2015 missive. However, he won’t be able to avoid confronting the issue for very long.