Originally Posted by Sunfish
Since Australia no longer manufactures much of anything, I fail to see why we maintain most Australian Standards at all. Safety helmets of all sorts are a prime example.Why not simply adopt European or American standards?
Why indeed.
The simple answer to that is like CASA, ACMA suffers from a strong culture of "not invented here" syndrome when it comes to their regulatory functions. It's how a whole bunch of people in Belconnen keep themselves employed.
There is no reason at all for ACMA to maintain its own set of standards; in fact, ACMA's standards are copied mostly from ETSI (Europe) standards, and to a lesser extent FCC (U.S.) standards. Compliance with ETSI or FCC standards is sufficient in most other countries in the world, but not here.
The ACMA standards introduce just enough incompatibility with the rest of the world to keep all but the largest manufacturers of radio equipment out of our tiny and insignificant market, and even then they'll only bother at all with high volume product lines such as land mobile radios.
Manufacturers will sometimes jump through the silly and superfluous regulatory hoops for VHF/UHF land mobile or UHF CB radios, but they aren't going to bother for more obscure products such as airband handhelds.