Regulatory arrangements based on cost-benefit and risk analyses? There's a novel proposition.
Proponents for change must provide the cost-benefit and risk analysis to justify the change? There's a political proposition. The status quo is treated as an objective truth - an approach that is, in effect, merely an appeal to authority. "Someone in authority made the rules, so the rules must be OK because why else would that someone have been given authority to make the rules?"
I'd be interested in your thoughts, Howabout, about how pilots with CVD would go about changing CASA's return to the Middle Ages. Given that there is no material risk to which the regulator's approach to CVD is a rational response, there is no cost-benefit data to support the regulator's approach. How does one have a risk and cost/benefit based argument with an authority that simply sticks its fingers in its ears and chants: "lah lah lah lah lah lah lah"?
How is it that the arrangements in first world aviation countries, facilitating movements of traffic at volumes that would cause most of the staff of the government alphabet aviation agencies in Australia to adopt the foetal position, are not evidence of the efficacy of those arrangements?
It may be that those arrangements would require more tarmac and more resources to work equally effectively in Australia. If that's true, let's hear that as a response to Dick's arguments.
We all know Dick's off with the fairies with some of his arguments. (My favourite is his assertion that millions were "saved" by "the industry" as a consequence of the reforms that have occurred over the last couple of decades. What actually happened was that the consolidated revenue that was otherwise paying for aviation infrastructure as a public good is now being p*ssed up against the wall by profligate governments.) But let's not join him at the bottom of the garden. Let's instead identify the objective increases in risk or the objective increases in costs that are not justified by what he's advocating.
For instance, any objection to making the RFFS at Ballina a CAGRO is merely a demarcation issue. A mere relic of Australia's 1970s industrial relations arrangements. There is no objective risk or cost/benefit objection. It's just politics, plain and simple.