One substantial but largely unheralded recent victory for GA was a result of the community's response to CASA's knee-jerk after the tragic accident that occurred during an Angel Flight near Bendigo a while ago.
The community worked out that the amount of good done by Angel Flight and other "community service" activities far outweighed the very rare accidents. The community grasped the concept that no activity is risk free, and going to hospital by road or not at all may be riskier than going by light aircraft.
This filtered upwards to the people who actually make the decisions in aviation regulation. And that's not CASA.
GA has to remind the community of the value to the community of GA away from the big cities.
The major parties and the public service in Canberra are now 'the protected'. Almost none of the mess they create for GA has any substantial effects on them. They don't care. Literally: they don't care. Because they don't have to. Individually and personally some of them may, but they're part of a machine that's evolved for only one reason, and it isn't to promote the public interest. They want to keep their job? They do what the machine demands.
Ask yourself: How did Bill Heffernan, or David Fawcett, or Fiona Nash, or Jan McLucas, or Ian MacDonald, or Glen Sterle - or any other of the people who've expressed strong opinions in senate inquiries - actually vote on the floor of the Senate to change anything about what they'd heard or found.
It's a machine that's evolved to protect itself. At your expense. And it's fine tuned to take advantage of the false dichotomy between "one side" - Labour - and "the other side" - the Coalition.
So far as GA is concerned (at least) everyone needs to understand this: The major parties are the same side.
Another inquiry is always welcome. More activity, more crumbs for the chooks in industry to pick at, more excuses for inaction, more hard-hitting recommendations, more questions at Estimates, more credulous fools thinking: "Finally, this time"...
More ... pantomime.
The more Members of Parliament there are who represent their community, the less remote the chances that decisions will be made in the interests of the community.
I don't particularly care whether a candidate's green, red, blue, pink, gay, straight, vegan, omnivore, carnivore, left, right, centre, illiterate, educated, male, female, any one or more of the letters in LGTBI, religious, agnostic or whatever. I just want to know that they're not wearing a party straightjacket. Then I have a remote chance of working out whether what they say has any potential connection to how they may vote on the floor of the Parliament.