What Lead Balloon said......
As far as I can tell, CASA has gone to town on this bloke for what I would call procedural matters that have nothing to do with the causation of the ditching.
Furthermore, there are, in my opinion, plenty of people who do insanely stupid acts who should be prosecuted but get away with it time and again. For example the idiot I watched trying to take off in a Cirrus SR? from a wet soft grass runway with a Twelve knot tailwind. He didn't make it, stalled, demolished a sign, dinged the wing and finished six feet from a power pole at the end of the strip.
The message this prosecution sends is that all aviation activity should be carried out away from prying eyes and accident, or near accident details should be suppressed where possible.
To put that another way; the " I learned about flying from that" type of article isn't going to be written much anymore.
Two I would have liked to write are: "Don't use rags or a wad of paper to temporarily block a duct during maintenance" and "Don't ever do touch and go" manoeuvres when practicing STOL".
To put that yet another way; the aircraft pilot should have been punished by being made to write an article about how he successfully ditched an aircraft in Banks Strait and lived to tell about it. Given the weather and water temperature in Bass Strait and the dearth of successful ditching in that area, I am intrigued to know how and why they survived. Guess we will never know now.