Hear! Hear!
In order to fix a problem, you have to understand and deal with the causes of the problem.
CASA is not the cause of most of the problems in aviation regulation. CASA is a symptom, as are the ATSB and Airservices.
The aviation regulatory reform program and the plight of GA are just manifestations - albeit very stark ones - of the degradation and decay in the fabric of government generally.
The degradation and decay in the fabric of government is caused mainly by the major political party duopoly. The major political parties now comprise mainly career politicians, whose staff members are mainly aspiring career politicians, whose main aim is to obtain and retain the government benches. But having done so, they don't have much of a clue what to do next.
Not "say" next, but "do" next.
Here's how governments now run, and why the chronic mess that is the aviation regulatory reform program, which is one of many chronic messes, will never be cleaned up while ever the major party duopoly prevails, no matter who happens to be the talking head at the top of CASA.
The day-to-day activities of government are managed by Ministerial staffers. (There are exceptions: The Abbott government was run by one staffer, singular - Ms Peta Credlin. The Rudd government was run by Mr Kevin Rudd. Alone.)
The Ministerial staffer's job is to protect and promote the interests of their Minister. Whether those interests happen to be consistent with the public interest, or even those of the Minister's colleagues, is generally of secondary relevance.
Ministerial staffers are not public servants. And neither 'side' of politics will call the other side's staffers to account in front of parliamentary committees, because that would be MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction. You question ours? We'll question yours. And we both know that we have very, very dirty laundry that none of us has any interest in being aired in public.
This has created a symbiosis between the major parties. While ever they continue to take turns in government, they'll continue to control and nurture the system that gives them and their friends a continuous and very lucrative share of the body politic's treasure. Although each of them would prefer the other to be in opposition, it is in neither of their interests to put the cosy duopoly at risk.
(If you want to get a warm inner glow from seeing the major parties reaching out to each other in the spirit of bi-partisanship, watch how quickly amendments to parliamentary entitlements legislation whoosh through the Parliament if the amendments result in an increase in entitlements. Daily allowance of $275 to stay in a unit in Canberra owned and negatively geared by your wife? Sure! Here you go. There will never be real reform to the political donations rules, while ever the duopoly prevails. All in the public interest, of course.)
To protect and promote the Minister's interests, the staffer needs good news stories and no bad news stories, or at least none for which the Minister will be blamed. That's where the people who run the government agencies come in. Their job is to supply the good news stories and make sure the Minister is never embarrassed. (This is why Ben Morgan was black-banned by Minister Chester's staffer.) The people who survive and thrive in the government agencies are very good at making themselves useful in this regard. Anyone who's been around aviation for a while would be able to name a couple of these people.
(The debacle that is the Census is just one more manifestation of the facade that much of government is. All of the smooth rhetoric about how it would all be fine, then reality hits, followed by more smooth rhetoric. I heard an ABS representative asked, the day after Census night, whether he "guaranteed" that the information that been successfully submitted would be secure. He said "yes". That man is either a fool or a charlatan. You don't have to think hard to guess which is more likely. Meanwhile, the NDIS Portal is an abject failure. And, naturally, the 'responsible' Ministers have no responsibility. Meanwhile, everything's fine at all those privatised airports. A Ministerial spokesperson said so.)
And the more power the agencies are given, the easier it is to do this job. Whether doing that job happens to be consistent with the public interest is generally of secondary relevance.
This has created a symbiosis between the major parties and the people who run the government agencies. While ever the agencies bring good news for the Minister and no bad news for which the Minister is blamed or embarrassed, the government agencies are doing their job and will be protected by the Minister. Accordingly, for instance, when there's a change in government, the new Minister will defend his or her agency against accusations about which he or she was criticising the agency from opposition. It's just a Punch and Judy show where the party that plays Punch and the party that plays Judy happen to swap roles occasionally. (A current example of this is the NBN.)
It is true that most ordinary parliamentarians are very hard working, have the best of intentions and want to make the world a better place. (Ditto CASA.) But the major parties are a machine, and the machine runs the parliamentarians. The machine is designed and fine-tuned for one purpose only: To attain and retain the government benches.
The machine even drives the PM. That's why a PM who supports marriage equality is nonetheless putting the country through an expensive delaying tactic to avoid implementing marriage equality. Having scraped into power, Mr T now has to placate some powerful people in his own 'team' by pretending the plebiscite is a good idea and that the shambles he is nominally in charge of is united.
That's why David Fawcett is not the Minister for aviation. Cabinet and Ministerial structures and positions are now determined by favours owed and the wielding of factional power, not competence and expertise in the subject matter of a portfolio. And even if David Fawcett were to be made Minister for aviation, the machine of which he is a part would determine what he did and did not do about aviation.
Likewise, CASA and Airservices and ATSB and the portfolio department responsible for them are fine-tuned to the purpose of insulating the Minister from responsibility for anything to do with aviation. Most of the drones in the machine have the best of intentions and want to make the world a better place, but the machine isn't designed for that. And the machine is falling apart.
Aviation regulation, ATC, running airports as airports and aviation accident investigation are irrelevant to achieving the major parties' primary purpose. That's why, for example, all of the major party Senators who've identified appalling messes in the ATSB, Airservices and CASA during Committee inquiries have never put their vote where their mouth is. Not once. That's why Mr Dolan kept his job despite the sick expensive joke that the NGA 'investigation', and his defence of it, were. Mr Dolan was, in the context of how governments actually run, doing his job very, very well.
Lucky that most aviation activity can (and does) occur at reasonable and acceptable levels of safety without the 'help' of CASA, without any 'management' in Airservices Australia, without the 'benefit' of whatever it is that the ATSB does these days, and despite the 'responsible' portfolio department being MIA. These days, most people involved in the aviation industry are merely crying out for the government to just stop creating more and more complexity and mess and cost for no tangible safety or commercial benefit.
There used to be a time when, having attained government, the government had a thing called a "plan" and the government then went about "implementing" that "plan". That "plan" used to be formulated by people who knew the detail of what actually had to be done to have a chance of actually "implementing" the plan. These days, governments have "slogans" and surround themselves with people who are willing to do whatever it takes to create the facade that the slogans are being or have been implemented.
The outcome now is that the people who actually run the country - Ministerial staffers - are not publicly accountable, and if the activities of government agencies are in the public interest, it's usually through mere coincidence.
There is an Orwellian fiction utilised to justify this: The Minister's interests and the public interest are - it is argued - the same, because the government of which the Minister is a part was elected by the public. The fact that usually more than half of the population didn't vote for the incumbent government is neither here nor there, apparently.
This is why it can be so very, very confusing for outsiders who try to reason with governments using objective evidence and appeals to the public interest and what is 'right'. The brutal political reality is that trying to reason with governments and their agencies in this way is like telling the pilot in command of an aircraft the railway gauge in Ethiopia. It's an interesting but completely irrelevant piece of information in the context of the task being performed.
(The increasing number of votes for minor parties and independents, the most popular of whom is called "informal", shows that members of the public are ever-so-slowly realising what's going on.)
Unfortunately, nothing about the aviation regulatory reform program and the plight of GA is of relevance to the tasks being performed by governments and their agencies, in the sense that I have outlined above. There's too much political risk and too little potential political reward for a Minister to intervene to do anything. The symbiotic relationship would be terminated and the Minister would be exposed and responsible. Easier to just find another Skidmore, McCormick, Byron or Toller to draw the flack for another few years, in return for some pieces of silver.
So, when in Canberra, you have to do it the Canberra way. Unless you can buy one of the major parties, you're pretty much limited to lobbying the cross-bench Senators, because some of them take the quaint view that they are there to protect and promote the interests of their constituents, and some of them actually mean it.
If the cross-bench and opposition Senators are in the way of something a government wants badly enough, the government will give the cross-bench Senators just about anything they want. Note that in these circumstances the merits or otherwise of what the cross-bench Senators want will be of secondary relevance to the government's decision to give them what they want. The decision will be made primarily on the basis of how badly the government wants to get the blocked measure through.