Mach
But for those Liberian ships and masters and their equivalents from other countries, Australia would be in a deep economic depression. Extreme fuel shortages; almost nothing exported; and - disastrously - almost no flat-screen TVs or flat-pack furniture.
It's great that Australia considers it knows better and is safer than the rest of the world. Minor consequential problem is that Australian-flagged international trading ships and crews have been driven to the brink of extinction through lack of competitiveness, with the ironic outcome being that almost the entirety of the activity in the sector involves all those "less safe" ships and crews from places that aren't as "smart" as Australia.
Aviation in Australia is being driven the same way.
(Interestingly, in the USA, only American-built, -owned and -crewed ships are permitted to trade between US ports (including non-CONUS ports). That's because the USA recognises the importance of maintaining an indigenous merchant navy capability. That is, of course, a political decision, not a decision of the regulator in the USA. As Senator Heffernan and others have pointed out, the single biggest threat to Australia's security is its fuel supply lines. Those lines could be switched off/cut off at any time, and Australia would grind to a halt about 2 weeks later.)
Surely Australia's competitive advantage is that the population is generally healthy, generally well-educated and generally tech-savvy. In the aviation sector, Australia's competitive advantages also include the relatively benign weather and lack of tall rocks. Australia shouldn't need a regulatory regime that seems to be based on the assumption that the pilot and engineer population comprises generally stupid, unhealthy, risk-taking criminals operating in the heart of darkness, and who therefore need the straight-jacket of thousands of pages of regulations and tens of thousands of pages of manuals of standards to keep them from inflicting aviation anarchy on an unsuspecting populace.