Hear, hear Dick, a complete cockup much like the so called
"regulatory reform" program, hundreds of millions of dollars expended
for NO result except an industry bought to its knees. Add in the loss of PAYE taxes and company taxes lost to GDP over the past thirty years and CAsA and Air services are responsible for quite possibly billions of dollars that should have been accrued by government.
My thoughts are this is as big a scandal as the money wasted on the "Building the Education Revolution", "Pink Batts", and more recently the rorting of child care, the NDIS, the ATO scam, the privatisation of airports scam etc etc. This all leads one to conclude that either the public service is completely and utterly incompetent, or corrupt or both.