Folks,
Missing in all this is the answer to the question: Is it the rules that are the problem?
There has always been a very authoritarian streak in Commonwealth regulation in Australia, not confined to aviation. However, because aviation is all about "aviation safety", which is right up there with "motherhood" as a No.1 GOOD THING in the eyes and opinions of something called "the general public", the "mystique of aviation safety" gives a little something special to those who work for "the regulator".
Indeed, adopting the expression "the regulator" is quite recent, and has a certain physiological power frisson about it.
The Menzies "two airline policy" of the 1950s on, until Hawke abandoned it, made "the regulator" in Australia, by world standards, incredibly intrusive in all matters aviation, a huge reinforcement to what was an already well developed above mentioned authoritarian streak.
Unlike the US, where aviation regulation has always been a civil institution (an original Department of Commerce branch), civil aviation regulation in Australia started of as a branch of the military, and as we know, has never broken free of that legacy, either, the successive organisations showing a distinct preference for ex-military "officers", where nil civil aviation experience, indeed often a distinct antipathy for and disdain of "civies" no impediment to recruitment, and the "necessary" micro management of civil aviation.
The style and content of the aviation regulations is a symptom of the problem, they are a matter of CASA choice, and not, as so often claimed, "government policy".
"Strict liability", as we see it in civil aviation regulation, is a symptom of the problem, not a core problem. A core problem is that much that should be civil law is, by CASA choice, not Government policy, criminal law. It is CASA choice, not Government policy, that much that is law, should not be law at all, whether civil or criminal.
There must be a complete change of culture in the organisation, without that, it doesn't matter a hoot what the words on paper are, there will be no real change.
Tootle pip!!