On the subject of recreational flying, GA has been in decline for years. Micro/Ultralight flying has snapped up a lot of the would be weekend warriors as they offer a far cheaper pathway into the skies and not a lot of those people decide to fly GA later.
And the compliance and fuel costs are strangling those of us who fly GA casually into grounding ourselves because we can barely afford to stay legal let alone current in anything.
That's the situation on this side of the ditch, and on reading other threads on the subject it seems to be the same in the land of Oz as well, except your regulator is even more hostile than ours.